📜 The squeaky wheel gets the grease

You’ve got to ruthlessly prioritise

I was working for David Cameron's post-Coalition government. They finally had a majority and the focus was on delivering on the manifesto commitments. Everything was very focused towards that, and sometimes public affairs people would come to me with quite left field requests. You just say, ‘look, if this doesn't fit with what we're trying to do, I can't make the time for you’. You’re not going to give up even 30 minutes for a ‘get to know you’ coffee unless that person is going to be a tier 1 contact. As a special adviser, you’ve got to be nimble with the time you’ve got; you’ve got to ruthlessly prioritise.

Just don’t do it

I had people who tried to harass me or bully me to get what they wanted–calling and shouting at me because I wouldn’t give them information about parliamentary process. It's a stressful job. You want people to collaborate and help you out. Anyone who's going to make a problem for you is not someone that you're going to be inclined to help. Making unreasonable requests and being aggressive… just don’t do it.

The best public affairs people come with something to offer

People don’t appreciate how long things take in government, or the process that you need to go through to get to a certain point. Really good public affairs people have enough contacts within government and within the wider sphere that they do understand those things, and have some good intel which helps them build a picture of what’s going on in government, what’s going on around a certain issue, and what the blockers are. The best ones then come into government with something to offer on that basis, not just something to ask.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease

There are probably three main tools of influence. The first is to publish research, or have an evidence base for what you want. If you are a policymaker, you need to show that something isn’t just based on ideology and that there is evidence for why it matters. The second is to make some noise. This isn’t for everyone, and some organisations want to be more quiet and in the background, but, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If you are shouting loud enough you will get the government's attention. And thirdly, don’t work alone, build alliances. The chances are that there will be others out there who share your cause or have gone before you that you can build on. Don’t reinvent the wheel. [Read the 10 Commandments of Policy Impact for more on this]

They’ve got this clock thing in New York

When I was at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, a campaigning think tank, our approach was all about making a lot of noise. I remember a meeting with then-boss Matthew Elliott. He argued that the national debt was oblique to the public and people didn’t understand how it impacts other things. We ended up talking about this debt clock in New York where you could see how fast the US debt number was going up. Anyway, I walked out of that meeting having agreed to commission an 8 foot tall ticking clock that was going to be mounted on the back of an articulated lorry.

The lorry changed the debate

It worked. We had a lot of media attention, on all kinds of national and regional media. ‘What’s the national debt?’ became one of those standard questions that politicians were getting asked in media interviews. People started to think about how much the national debt was for each household in the UK. It was something most hadn’t talked or cared about before, and that contextualised a whole other debate around public spending and how taxpayers’ money was being used. 

There’s always another way

After I left government, I started working for Bird, the electric scooter startup. The American head office wanted to get scooters on the road in the UK, but there was one problem with that: the way the current law is written means you cannot ride an electric scooter on the road because it doesn’t have tax or insurance, and you can’t ride it on the pavement because it’s an electric vehicle. We were not going to convince the government to change primary legislation, so we tried to find a way around that. We started running trials on private land at the Olympic Park, and then used that to pitch the Department for Transport the idea of running some limited trials on public land. There is always another way to do things.

Policies don’t always stand the test of time

Having used this as an example though, these things don’t always stand the test of time. The intention with the original trials was to move towards primary legislative change after a couple of years. But of course what happened was several changes of prime minister with their various changes in priorities, and changes in transport ministers. You can’t future proof everything.

Who’s got a wafty idea?

A lot of people have a wafty idea of what they want to do. It's okay if that’s your mission and your vision, but what are the individual goals that get you there and what's the journey? SMART is definitely one of my go-tos. It's a really good framework to help you be rigorous about the way that you're thinking about something. The key thing is to do what works for you, but make sure you’re being rigorous in the planning process - it will make a difference in helping you get a better outcome.