Why comms and policy go hand in hand

How did you first become interested in communications?

When you work for a politician, you do everything: the policy, the speech writing, the comms… I quickly realised that to make change happen, you need all of those things. Logic will not always win an argument, and different audiences are receptive to different messages.

If I’m sat in a darkened room in the middle of London, I have no idea what messages will resonate. I like to get out on the ground and pick up those insights. So I’m viewing each piece of work through a strategic communications lens – as well as other perspectives – right from the outset.

How do you incorporate comms principles into your work?

My focus is bringing health and the economy together at a national level. That’s actually a very broad remit: it includes the place you live, the services you provide, universities, local government, the high street, finance, construction, the prevention agenda and more.

So my work is about understanding the perspectives of lots of different people, looking for opportunities, and persuading organisations to take actions that will improve people’s health over a number of years.

That involves ongoing communication between me and them. And strategic communications is absolutely vital in making any of this happen.

Sometimes us policy people get caught in our own part of the puzzle. We think our job is to do some of the thinking and we stop before we think about the translation into practice. We might even think our comms colleagues are there to engage with the media, and that this might get in the way of the pure policy – our perfect, Utopian ideal we’ve just created.

But if you want to make change happen, the story of how you do it is as important as the purest policy principles.

What’s the most important communications principle for you?

Even within the health sector, you need to tailor your message to your stakeholders. You need to understand the broader context and then translate your message into that context.

For example, in England, the new sub-regional health and care planning units are designed to be system leaders, not service leaders. So when I speak to them, I’m talking about civic leadership in its broader sense. I’m conveying that our role is not to provide services but to make places thriving, prosperous and healthy.

That’s just one new audience for whom the traditional NHS managerial or operational approaches is no longer enough. It’s radically different.

What trends are you seeing in your work?

The understanding of the links between health and the economy is night and day compared to where we were. When I started, when you spoke about health, people would assume you were talking about life sciences. Today, there’s a much wider understanding of concepts like the NHS treating people so that they can be productive, and the importance of thriving high streets for healthy communities. The pandemic played a part in that.

So it’s gone from being a very lonely area to mainstream public policy. But health and the high street would never have taken off with just a policy paper or a technocratic approach. It was a visioning piece. If we hadn’t created that narrative about ‘a healthy workforce is a productive workforce’ and health being at the heart of a place, none of this would work.

What are the biggest misconceptions you see in your work?

That communication happens after the event. Policy change starts with an idea – you could call it ‘having a nose for a story’ – such as interesting practice or big challenges. You get a sense of people’s frustrations or hopes, and then you can start connecting the elements and building up a picture.

Only then, if it fits together, the policy work kicks in. And yes, you need to know the technical detail, but you also want to know what messages will land well with the business community and what will land with clinicians. So you go back to these people and ask ‘Is this going to work?’ ‘Will it help you?’ And this sparks a continuous conversation, with different facets and different audiences, at different times.

These are the undulations of making change happen – and the process incorporates multiple skillsets and perspectives throughout – not just one expert in a silo. If you try to embed change without the messaging, people will just resist because you’re making their jobs harder.

So, ultimately, you need a social movement approach to get leaders excited. That requires communications skills to persuade people that something different is really possible – and technocratic skills to rewire the system.

1. Strategic comms is a policymaker’s best friend. It can make some of our ideas real. It can also expose some of our ideas as the purest nonsense that should never leave our desk.

2. Tailor your approach to different stakeholders To get people excited, you need to approach the same topic quite differently with different audiences.

3. Change happens by building a social movement. That needs technocrats to rewrite the system, but it also needs communicators to develop the vision and narrative.