Andrew Gilligan: In a big busy world small announcements about small policies are a waste of all our time

Andrew Gilligan is a writer and former No10 adviser.

Remember the new ‘digital tool for expectant mothers’ allowing them to “refer themselves to NHS maternity services online?”

What do you mean, no?

Surely you must recall the breakthrough “small business plan,” featuring a new drive for “café culture to revive our derelict high streets” and a “crackdown on late payments to suppliers”? (We’ve never had either of those before, have we?!)

And how is it possible that the trailblazing “£88 million package of support to transform opportunities for young people across the country” has passed you by?

These are among just the last months’ worth of government ‘top-of-grid’ policy announcements, each of them intended as Whitehall’s main news story of the day.

But it is, of course, completely possible to see how they passed you by, since they achieved almost no news coverage (the youth one got two news in brief items in the national press, and a few local paper pieces. The small business plan got some online pieces and a flurry of supportive letters in local papers from York to Devon – though on closer inspection they all turned out to be the same letter, written by the same man.)

One of the failings of all British governments, including this one and the two Tory ones I served in Downing Street, is the time and effort they waste on the hamster-wheel of endless small and medium-sized announcements that make little or no impact and barely trouble the consciousness of a single voter.

Each rent-a-spare-room initiative or veterans’ tree-planting scheme has its passionate parents in interest groups or Whitehall, officials and lobbyists whose pet project and professional life it has been. They’re not always totally without substance, either. The online maternity self-referral scheme has apparently been used by 60,000 women in the five months since it soft-launched (though expectant mothers have long been able to self-refer through their local hospital’s website, and about half already did so.)

It all dates from the golden era of New Labour, whose spin-doctors believed that unless you filled the newspapers with your stories each day, the hacks would just find their own things to write about, God forbid. But even at the time, people were pretty cynical about it.

And now, if nobody’s covering your stories at all, what’s the point?

It’s worse than pointless, in fact.

These bonsai policies still take a lot of work – including to ensure that they don’t blow up, ironically sometimes the only way they ever get noticed. That means less headspace for the few things that the public will remember, and that will change how they perceive you.

Thinking up new things to announce can be counterproductive. Often, what’s really needed is better, firmer, more organised, more consistent application of the policy and laws we’ve already got. And the language is wearisome, further undermining public trust: I used to shudder at government press releases’ endless use of the word “transform.”

Many politicians appear to believe that the electorate is listening to them carefully at all times and that if you give them (or, rather, if you say you’ll give them) a new circus animals welfare guarantee they’ll notice it, believe it, love you for it and vote for you because of it. As we in fact know, the public takes very little notice of politics, clearly rightly in the case of these announcements, and public perceptions turn on a handful of key events – Black Wednesday, Gordon Brown’s decision not to have an election, Partygate, Liz Truss’s budget, Rachel Reeves’ slightly less disastrous one.

Yes, it’s not totally simple – those events are perhaps best seen as lenses, through which a lot of smaller, contextual events and balls-ups are gathered and focused. But the lesson is still: stop the little announcements, the pointless policy initiatives. Governments may still need to do small things – but do fewer, and don’t talk about them. Leave them at the policy level where they belong.

Plan a few big policies, a few big announcements, think them through, and do them properly.

Put absolute effort, weeks and months of effort, into getting them right. Be clear about your objectives and how the policy will meet them. Work out its strengths and weaknesses. Predict and pre-empt lines of attack. Test messages, stroke stakeholders, refine the offer for each place and demographic, recruit advocates.

Because the announcements are rarer, they will have more impact.

And most of this advice holds good for oppositions, too.

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