Farrington on a parliamentary press office

Question: You recently called for a parliamentary press office to be created. What was the thinking behind that?

Colin Farrington: At the moment we don’t think parliament is doing enough as an institution. Parliament is important to all of us, you may have a poor view of politicians and a distrust of politicians and to some extent that is a healthy thing to have, but parliament as an institution is enormously important to our democracy.

At the moment there is no objective organisation within parliament to explain the workings of parliament to the public, to interact with the public, to encourage young and other people to participate and understand what the democratic process is about. People have to rely on politicians almost entirely for their view of parliament.

That is inevitably subjective and more concerned with promoting self-image rather than with institutional image. That is weakening the image of parliament and thus weakening democracy.

Question: Is there a danger that such a move could be interpreted as creating a new army of spin doctors when they have been the source of a lot of the mistrust of politics?

Colin Farrington: No, I think that any new arrangement would obviously absorb existing arrangements and might not be particularly costly. I don't see it as a great army.

It would have to be set up under very agreed and supervised lines. It would probably be subject to some form of advisory committee controls. There are existing institutions within parliament that actually run parliament that are cross-party.

It would have to be very carefully established to ensure its objectivity and be careful to understand that it has a very long term strategic function.

It is not concerned with any short term gossip and issues of party political debate. It is concerned with a long term projection of the values of parliament and why parliament is important to us.

It will also advise parliament itself on how it can make its functions more accessible, more understood. A lot of excellent work is done by parliamentarians.

Politicians I think would themselves benefit in the long term by having an institution that sets out to project a more positive long term image.

Question: What have you made of the work of the Electoral Commission, which is partly charged with setting out a more positive image of politics?

Colin Farrington: I think that is very good. For example years ago it was always the Home Office policy not actually ever to encourage people to vote because it was thought to be too party political and a matter of individual responsibility which is true to an extent that is true.

But I think the Electoral Commission, which is outside government, not directly under Home Office control, has shown that you can begin to stimulate interest in the mechanics of our democracy, whether it is encouraging people to vote, whether it is providing alternative types of polling station, whether it is postal voting and so forth.

All those things being taken out of this sort of party political debate, which is inevitable if this sort of thing is run by government department, is very important. I think something similar needs to be done in relation to the way parliament operates.

It needs to be taken out of the party political debate. It is almost as if parliament is too important to be left to the politicians.

Question: Isn’t part of the problem with parliament and its image that it is a very arcane institution and uses very old fashioned language and procedures.

Colin Farrington: I think that that is an image issue actually. Because as somebody who has engaged in parliament and policy for most of my life, the great majority of work that MPs do, particularly since the establishment of select committees 20 years ago, is far from the sort of bear baiting atmosphere that you get in the parliamentary chamber.

Much of it is done behind the scenes, in discussion in select committees, with ministers and officials, with stakeholder and lobbying groups. I am not in any way an unbiased fan of everything politicians do.

But I think we have to get a balance on that. And actually I think the public is given a misleading image of what parliament does because inevitably the reporting of it focuses the chamber and focuses high profile activities, focuses on prime minister’s question time.

The great majority of the work that is done in parliament is research, is quiet, is behind the scenes, is contemplative almost. That is the image that needs to get across which is not getting across at the moment.

Question: Have you had any indications that this is an idea that might be taken forward?

Colin Farrington: I have certainly spoken to a number of people who work in and around parliament, people who are members of parliament, the House of Lords and the House of Commons, people who are lobbyists, I have discussed some of the issues with various officials in parliament. I think there is a great deal of interest in all of this.

I think they are worried that because of inevitable security concerns there is a danger that parliament is going to be even more closed to the public.

There is a worry about the way that parliament is reported and there is a worry that parliament is becoming rather indrawn.

I think they are struggling to find ways of tackling this. I think their concern is that if they as parliamentarians promote the sort of ideas that we promote, they will be seen as self-serving.

It is very important for us to stand back as a professional institute and suggest ways of helping them in this process.

Farrington on the civil service

Question: Do you think from a communications point of view that the government is making a good job of managing change in the civil service? Is it not telling the public on the one hand that it is going to cut so many thousand jobs and reassuring staff on the other that they have not got an anti-civil service agenda.

Colin Farrington: We are in a pre-election period and things always go slightly haywire in a pre-election period. Politicians inevitably have to stake out their ground and I think that the Labour government has decided to do this.

Bashing civil servants and claiming that there are huge administrative cost savings to be made in government that won't affect frontline services has a long tradition in British politics.

You can go back to the 1950s and '60s, Edward Heath in the 1970s was saying exactly the same thing when in opposition.

Governments themselves are always commissioning reviews of where civil servants are located and what they do and building up huge expectations of huge changes on the basis of inevitable technological changes.

When computers were first introduced obviously there were hundreds of thousands of civil servants in parts of the country who were redeployed on to new work.

New technology now has the same effect and unfortunately the politicisation of our system in a pre-election year means that things are greatly exaggerated and over-stated.

Figures are produced which make very good copy but may not have much real impact and if they do they are things that are going to happen anyway.

It is all a bit of a political smokescreen. There is all that on one side. I would be more concerned if I were in government not so much on the effect on the morale of existing members of staff, although that is extremely important, clearly there has to be negotiations and proper internal communications strategies, but on the effect on recruitment into the civil service and the public sector.

There is a tendency throughout our society to devalue public service and the sense that you can simply swing an axe and knock x per cent of people off and that you are not valuing the work that you are doing is one that affects medium and long term recruitment.

If anything comes through from what has happened in the last five or 10 years in the public services is that you do need very skilled people to manage and to deliver public services.

You are constantly searching to make things more efficient, constantly searching for high quality delivery of services. You can’t on the other hand then pooh-pooh the importance of recruitment. That is a thing that both Labour and the Conservatives have got to face.

Question: Is the government having problems recruiting high quality communications professionals?

Colin Farrington: It is a long term issue. There has been a long term issue of retaining good people.

I don’t think they have had too much difficulty recruiting good people because I think it is widely accepted in the private sector that somebody who has been trained by the government information service, who has the experience of having worked in a government press office, brings very special qualities.

One often sees in the government information service that they lose people after two or three years because they cannot match salaries and opportunities in the private sector. The problem has been one more of retention than recruitment.

Question: Should the government then be putting more investment, rather than less, into their staff?

Colin Farrington: Two things have been lacking in the government information service, both of which came out of the Phillis report last year. The first is a sense of long term career development.

That is partly due to the fact that the government information service has been a very mixed service with some specialists and some drawn from the wider civil service.

Secondly a simple lack of opportunity for promotion that is earned by development and training and developing strategic communication skills. I know the government information service under its new director Howell James is working very hard to find a way through that.

Question: Do you fear that this civil service axe is going to bite into the government information service?

Colin Farrington: Any organisation has to look at its own efficiency and its own structure. But again one of the messages that comes through about the way public services are delivered, in the health service for example, is that so many of the issues that arise are issues of communication.

They are issues of explaining to the public what they can reasonably expect in terms of booking appointments or turning up to hospitals, what their expectations of their treatment should be. These are all communications issues.

The education profession, in the same way, you can see a lot of issues there which are about people's expectations. Much of that depends of effective communications.

So I think it would certainly be a false economy if people didn’t recognise that communication has to be at the heart of the delivery of those services and that you have to have communication professionals available to advise and to implement those strategies.

Farrington on the Butler report

Question: Do you think that the Butler report and the still-missing Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have diminished a lot of the work that has been done in restoring trust in government communications through the Phillis review?

Colin Farrington: I tend to think that war and the aftermath of war and the analysis of war is almost a self-standing area in the sense that this is a very unique set of circumstances and will be seen by the public generally as not necessarily affecting the way that they see the whole of government.

I’m not sure that that is the case. I think that is one way of looking at it, that they will see the whole sequence of events around Iraq and the Hutton report and the Butler report as something sort of ring-fenced in the public mind.

The issue of whether the issue is a lack of trust and whether people have lost confidence in government as a whole is probably more that people have lost a degree of trust in Mr Blair.

I think he is widely seen to have shown poor judgement in the way that intelligence reports were received and handled.

Some sections of the public, not myself but some sections of the public, believe that he lied over the issue. So it is probably going to have a direct impact on the public’s perception of Mr Blair rather than of government as a whole?

Question: How much of a hit do you think government communications, rather than Mr Blair personally, have taken over issues such as the intelligence dossiers and Iraq?

Colin Farrington: I think it is a problem that has arisen, and Iraq and the Blair issues are symptoms of it, that it has become more difficult and that there has been a breakdown of the barrier between government presenting information factually, straightforwardly, in the public interest, advising people what to do but in way that people recognise as objective and information that has been used and represented for persuasive ends that are political.

That barrier was crossed in the Iraq case. I suspect that, as I said, there are particular circumstances around, in a war situation there are always certain barriers that are crossed, one has to be realistic about that.

But also I doubt myself whether it is an issue that is really fundamentally going to affect the way that government communications is operated. I think it probably will be ring-fenced in the public mind.

Question: Do you think Mr Blair personally will ever be able to lose his reputation for being an addict of spin?

Colin Farrington: I think Mr Blair is a brilliant advocate. He is a barrister. Like many barristers he takes up cases and presents them very brilliantly.

I think there is always going to be doubt in people's minds as to how far he really goes to the heart of the matter, he clearly isn’t a policy wonk like Gordon Brown who thinks very deeply about the effect of policy. He runs the risk I think, Tony Blair, of being seen as rather superficial.

But against that, that can have certain advantages as a politician, not to become too deeply involved in political detail but to be able to marshal a very good persuasive case for change, whether it is in the public sector or in Europe. That is a considerable skill and he clearly has got that.

What I think he needs to be very careful of is that people don’t see him as just a superficial master of those policies.

I don’t think, even after all these years in government, he has established in the public mind what he sees his premiership for and what is the fundamental basis for his policies as opposed to the day-to-day barrister who picks up and argues the case.

Question: Do you think Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, was right when he told the public administration committee that the departure of Alastair Campbell had drained the "poison" from government-media relations?

Colin Farrington: Yes I think that is right. I did say last year that we thought he should go. Although I think he did a great job in the early years of being New Labour into being alongside others and, possibly, in some of the early initiatives in government communication, I think the whole thing had just become too personalised and regressive.

I’m not sure the word poison is correct but there had been a certain atmosphere created which meant it was very difficult to keep that important dividing line between political spin and factual presentation.

Farrington on Peter Mandelson

Question: Now that another one of New Labour’s most famous spin doctors, Peter Mandelson, is going to be based in Brussels, do you think that he is going to be able to break the Eurosceptic stranglehold of the British press?

Colin Farrington: No, I think that he should stick to the job he has been given with the European Commission. It would be very unwise for him to be seen or try to act as some sort of communication bridge in that way.

He will have a very big and important job to do and he should leave the management of the relationships between Britain and Europe to the foreign secretary and the Foreign Office. He is going to be sorely tempted to interfere in things that are not part of his remit.

A European commissioner is an extremely important job that is meant to be completely objective and not influenced by national policies. European commissioners are obliged to say that they are not there to pursue national interests.

Question: Do you think Peter Mandelson is capable of performing that role?

Colin Farrington: We shall wait and see but I think he would be well advised and it would not be in Britain’s long term interest if he did anything which suggests he had another agenda being there.

It is probably a dubious appointment on those grounds because people will see it as something that is connected with British politics and British Euroscepticism.

He needs to prove quite quickly that that is not his intention and he needs to avoid those interpretations.