📺 We held our research for BBC Panorama—here's why it was worth it

In today’s interview, Ali covers…

1. Why traditional media still trumps social media

2. The building blocks of the coalition they built to secure policy change

3. Why, as Dom also argued last week, the simpler the ask of government, the better

See what you think, and let me know what you agree/disagree with. Separately, I’ll be running a webinar on the lessons I’ve learned running Policy Unstuck on the 16th October. If you’re thinking about setting up your own content channel (maybe so you’re not so reliant on social media companies), you may find it useful. You can register here.

Tom

Splitting a policy issue across two departments doesn’t end well

One of my biggest bug bears is that we have policy silos. So when it comes to food and food policy, we have people working on it from a health perspective in the Department of Health & Social Care, and people working on it from an environmental perspective in the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, and across many other departments on food related policies like school food. 

There's very little joining of the dots between them. And that’s despite the fact that interventions on dietary consumption are a lever for people and the planet.

The building blocks of an effective coalition

The government recently announced voluntary guidelines for commercial baby food, which we’ve been campaigning on for years. The key take away for me from that journey has been around collaboration and the variety of partners you need to make something happen. 

From the outset, we shared responsibility across organisations, so we all had specific roles to play in turning policy asks into concrete actions. If we hadn't taken that collaborative approach, I don’t think we’d have achieved the result. 

What that looked like in practice… Diane and I, based out of the University of Leeds where I’m a Visiting Research Fellow, provided academic research. And that evidence has to be at such a detailed product level to make a convincing policy argument. We did assessments of more than 600 products to look at how the commercial baby food marketplace measures up on nutrition. So that brought the evidence.

Then there was First Steps Nutrition and Bremner & Co. who brought the deep knowledge of early years, public health guidance, settings, parents, all of that stuff. Food Foundation, the Obesity Health Alliance, and Sustain were the campaigning organisations, and all of us supported the media effort. So it was that blended coalition that was able to take the data and turn it into a public-facing campaign that would secure policymaker interest.

Traditional media is still very useful to demonstrate legitimacy

Mainstream media was critical. But it was less about using media to get through to individuals in the civil service, and much more about how we used the media to show that constituents cared about this. And how we used the media to get this data out there so that within the government bureaucracy, the right actors within that bureaucracy can make the argument they need to.

By continually landing media, we were keeping the issue on the top of the food policy agenda at a time when there are multiple competing issues, and everyone is fighting for the same set of limited attention.

But, the media aren’t always easy to work with

We didn’t publish our study when we intended to, because we held it back for a BBC Panorama documentary. That was strategically difficult for us, because we had some clear policy milestones that we needed to influence early on in the year, but we held it back for Panorama anyway.

They filmed with us for 2 days in person in Leeds. Not that much of it made the cut, and their documentary just covered baby food pouches, whereas our work looked at the whole baby food market. But, that Panorama moment was so important in driving attention and getting us to the outcome, so it doesn't really matter in the end.

Politicians care about… politics

The thing that was different about our research is the voice of parents. In the last round of research we did, we did 600+ product analyses, but we also did a 1,000 strong survey of parents up and down the country, as well as in depth focus groups, to get insight on their perceptions, beliefs, and also what they want to see from the Government.

All of a sudden we weren't just talking about key stats that really only make sense to a technical audience, like “90% of fruit products fail the nutrient profile model”. We were saying “7 in 10 parents want a front-of-pack warning label on high sugar baby foods.” That’s a way more convincing argument for intervention. 

Avoid asking for money

There's no government funding allocation to deliver on the commercial guidelines that the Government has announced. They’re a voluntary benchmark for the actions that industry needs to take to clean up its act. The more you can ask the government for stuff that government can just decide on, and doesn't have to put money into, the better.

And of course, as much as possible, you tie it into the existing policy agenda. So as we were writing our policy summary report, we tied it back to the 10 year health plan, Labour’s commitment to “raise the healthiest generation of children”, and the House of Lords report on Food, Diet and Obesity. It's about using the existing policy context to situate your policy ask, and showing that your data and insights address some of the questions already being raised.

We are all conscious across the sector that the narrative on economic growth needs to be tackled as part of what you're trying to achieve. Showing how your policy area fixes obesity, which is one of the biggest barriers to economic growth, and is driving vast numbers of people out of the workforce links the public health outcomes with economics.

It’s not about preventing the growth of the baby food market, but making it good growth.