Government communications fall flat over The Great British Bake Off

The civil servant responsible for the Department for International Trade’s twitter account might in future pause before mixing baking and government messaging. As many trade experts rapidly pointed out, the department’s claim on Twitter, sent out during an episode of The Great British Bake Off, that soy sauce “will be made cheaper thanks to our trade deal with Japan” was not accurate. The following day, DIT issued a convoluted clarification that it “will be cheaper than it otherwise would be under WTO terms, on which we would be trading with Japan from 1 Jan if we had not secured the UK-Japan trade deal”.

The soya social media flurry was a trivial incident in itself, but it was the latest in a line of misleading messages from departmental twitter accounts. In August Matthew Rycroft, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, publicly accepted that the description of “activist lawyers” who were trying to “delay and disrupt returns” of migrants should not have been tweeted from the Home Office account. The Northern Ireland Office, meanwhile, continues to maintain its assertion that “there will be no border in the Irish Sea between GB & NI”, convincing no-one of anything except an ability to dance on semantic pinheads, and despite officials on both sides of the Irish Sea working hard to implement an array of the checks necessary to cross what becomes a trade border between GB and the EU.

This increasing abuse of official communications is a problem which needs to be addressed.

Civil service and special adviser codes require honest communication

These accounts are funded by the taxpayer for the purpose of informing the public – not misleading them. The civil service code requires civil servants to “set out the facts and relevant issues truthfully” and not to “deceive or knowingly mislead ministers, Parliament or others” – and that applies to their special adviser colleagues as well. The professional standards for communications specialists are even more explicit, requiring messages to be “objective and explanatory, not biased or polemical”. If government cannot meet these standards when trying to do fast paced communication, it needs to hold off, not lower the standards.  

It is the art of government press officers to simplify complex policies and concepts into material that is more easily accessed by the media and public. There is no bar to those messages presenting the government’s plans positively, indeed a lot of effort goes into finding the best way of presenting material to put the government in the best light. But there is a world of difference between a legitimate gloss and deliberately misleading the public. Communications directors and their permanent secretaries need to police that boundary in all our interests. 

Government needs to ensure its sign off processes prevent misleading messages

Formal public government statements or quotes are almost always written by committee, with at least three contributors: a policy expert, a press officer and a minister (or more often a special adviser delegated to act on the minister’s behalf). In general, the more controversial or novel the issue, the more senior the clearance required. This can be clunky and results in frantic late night email chains when an unexpected story breaks, but it gives the government a good chance to ensure that messages are accurate, intelligible and in line with its political and wider policy approach.

Something seems to be going wrong with this protocol. Perhaps it is the speed of social media and the desire of civil service communications teams to be pacy, informal and relevant that means checks are getting missed. Or perhaps it is a more conscious attempt by ministers and their advisers to test the boundaries, stir up controversies and turn official government outlets into campaigning tools.

Either way, it is permanent secretaries, as the most senior civil servants in their departments and the guardians of their teams’ propriety and ethics standards, who need to enforce a sign off process, even for seemingly innocuous tweets about condiments. 

Government will be less effective if it is seen as serially untrustworthy

This government has decided to centralise its communications. In theory this is a perfect opportunity to enforce a streamlined but authoritative accuracy and propriety check. More likely it will mean official messaging being further removed from the policy experts, and nearer to a No.10 communications operation that has not stood out for its reverence for the facts.

It is in ministers’ own interest to act to keep this tendency in check. They need the media and the public to trust what the government is saying, especially during a pandemic when effective and honest communication is the most important weapon the government has against the disease. That is not worth sacrificing for any fleeting media hit.