📜 The best policy influencing strategy is...

The best influencing strategy? Americans

I have yet to find a better influencing strategy than bringing excited American policy or political types to talk to the government. It's very specifically Americans as well. They don’t have that ‘everything has to be miserable’ vibe – they're just confident and optimistic. You can introduce them and say ‘actually, here are some people who have done it, you could learn from them’... it’s really helpful. Yes, there’s the practical advice on whatever policy area it is, but it’s also the confidence building, that excitement about what they have done and how the UK could do it too. Ministers, advisers, and civil servants are so often told about what they are doing badly or wrong, instead of giving them that inspiration – that they can do good things and find solutions. It’s helpful on a deeply personal level, and builds up to the state doing good stuff too.

Good consultants tell clients when they are living in a bubble

One of the things that people think you can do, and bad consultancies do, is just add politics at the end. It doesn’t work - it has to be embedded from the start. You have to have that political judgement, to understand how the issue fits into the government’s narrative and the level of prioritisation they are giving it, and therefore how you are going to frame that issue or who you’re going to get to advocate for it. Businesses struggle with it - they often think very specifically about small regulatory issues, without being able to put the issue into the wider political picture. They live in a bubble.

Be clear on what you want

Let’s pick a random example: ‘We should invest in our creative industries.’ There are a couple of issues with that. First of all, ‘invest’ is an unbelievably broad term. Do you mean time? Do you mean resource? Do you mean loans? Do you mean guarantees? Do you mean grants? The second is that ‘creative industries’ is very broad. Is it video game development? Is it opera? If you can't get to that specificity of what you want the government to do , then you're not going to win. Obviously you care about your thing, but it’s important to situate that in what the government cares about and how you’re helping them achieve their objectives.