My grandmother died this time last year, at the grand old age of 98.

I lived about half an hour away from her when I was at university, and I’d jump on the train every month or so to see her. We would debate Middle Eastern politics, I’d show her how to do things on her computer, and—very importantly—she’d cook me a proper meal.

My grandmother’s catch phrase was: “But what does it mean?” When she said “mean”, it was like she was using a medieval torture device to stretch those vowels out as far as they could go.

Many of us in the policy world would do well to have my grandmum sitting on our shoulders as we write. Perhaps today’s interview with Jemima Hartshorn, the founder of Mums for Lungs, illustrates why.

School Streets is a scheme intended to protect school children from cars—both in terms of not getting run over, but also from pollution—at the start and end of every day. Jemima lays out how School Streets is sound policy, but politically challenging. As we spoke, I had my grandmum at the back of my mind.

What does “School Streets” communicate as a name? That this street happens to have a school on it? It certainly doesn’t communicate the value of the policy. What if it were called a School Shield?

Jemima gives the example below of how some journalists report on School Streets through the frame of revenue raising. The policy isn't about protecting kids, the headlines argue; it’s a cash cow. I wonder what difference it would make if the name signalled the policy outcome. Local authorities making money from drivers missing road signs is one thing—but making money from drivers who have actively driven through, pierced, a School Shield paints a somewhat different picture.

Tom

💡 Training

• What ministers want. Too often external engagement with ministers and their teams ignores the reality of how government works. Learn how to engage effectively with what those in government are looking for. Starts 12th March.
  

• How to write well. Good writing is a communications superpower. Analyse what good looks like, and learn how to apply the key tenets to your work. Starts 19th March.

Nudging: useful or immaterial?

It sometimes feels like you can do incremental change through behaviour change, right? If some of us choose not to drive, not to have deliveries, not to burn our fires, not to use the gas stove at home, we can reduce air pollution levels. That’s true–but the result is going to be limited. 

Really in order to achieve the change that is needed, it requires the government to step in and make interventions that then result in national behaviour change. Across the country, we are experiencing air pollution levels that cannot be tinkered with. They need to be addressed, and that requires political leadership.

The policy is there, but is the politics?

What we have seen in air pollution is that the modelling of interventions, and how they translate via behaviour change into air pollution reduction, is really precise. Precise in the sense that the ULEZ [London's traffic scheme designed to reduce air pollution by discouraging the use of older, more polluting vehicles] is doing exactly what it was meant to do, and a tiny little bit more.

So the understanding of what drives people to do certain things—such as driving at certain times, in certain cars, in certain places—is well-established. The fact that these models are playing out in real life with the policies that have been enacted has given me loads of confidence in experts, it’s great!

But clearly politically this is not the time and place for more clean air zones to be introduced anytime soon, and that is where the problem is. The challenge is not mapping the solutions to the problem. It’s the communications, the narrative, the politics… that is where we are struggling to make progress.

Does your policymaker need evidence, or ammunition?

I've been campaigning on air pollution from road transport for nine years. No local authority officer that I've ever spoken to needs compelling evidence. They know the problem. They know the reality. Usually, what we hear from policy officials is that they want to go much further, faster, and quicker.

That’s not the same as the wider public. Lots of people have heard that air pollution is a problem, but I think the vast majority still don't truly understand that their lung or heart issues might already be linked to the dirty air they are breathing or  it could very well impact their own lives and the future. That is what we, as a clean air movement, need to change. We need to make it more personal—making it a topic that isn't just a 'nice to have', but something that viscerally impacts you.

Does our focus on ‘stories’ trivialise reality?

I want to push back on the notion of 'stories' because I dislike the term. That is both because it sounds a bit like make-belief, and relatedly because this is about health and real-life human experience. These are people going to the hospital with their children. These are people losing children to air pollution, whose lives are impacted on a daily basis. These are people who have heart disease and cancer. These aren’t stories, they are people’s lives. It makes much more sense to use terms like ‘narratives’ or ‘arguments’.

Think about your messengers (it may not be you)

We've consistently made a strong argument for the ULEZ. Being on the radio as normal people, as parents—people the public can relate to—really works. It helps immensely in a time when political messengers are often viewed with controversy, and when discussions around cars, even if they relate to health, are constantly dragged into culture wars.

Not everyone has the same incentive

A School Street is a scheme where you close the road next to a school to through-traffic twice a day for about an hour, right when huge numbers of children are walking to school. We know that children breathe in a disproportionate amount of air pollution during the school run, so a School Street is a really obvious solution.

And yet, the media headlines we see are often along the lines of, “XYZ local authority has made this much money through School Streets.” The way these schemes make money is that there will be a road sign stating you’re not allowed to drive there at a certain time, accompanied by a camera. If people still drive through it, they get a fine.

So rather than asking why drivers are ignoring road signs, the media frames the scheme as a cash cow. Which then turns people against a scheme that is there to look after our kids. Is this what the media should be doing?

Thank you to the 100 (woop!) readers who have referred a colleague to Policy Unstuck.

The keen-eyed among you will notice Andy has been on Policy Unstuck before. Last time, he explained why the Civil Service operates the way it does, arguing its perceived slowness comes down to the sheer scale of the challenges it faces, and that a powerful finance ministry is a good thing.

Today, we’re exploring a recurring theme of this newsletter: what do ministers actually want? Previous guests on this include current Minister Kirsty McNeill, former Secretary of State Gillian Keegan, and former civil servant Reza Schwitzer.

Andy recently developed a training course with us that answers exactly that, exploring how ministers and their civil service teams want external organisations to engage with them. Today’s interview serves as a primer so you can see if the full course would be useful for you or a colleague.

I especially enjoyed his translation of what civil service phrases actually mean: we could probably do a whole separate interview just on that.

Tom

P.S. We are hiring a brand/social media consultant (£35k-40k salary). Know someone? Please do forward the job description on.

What civil service phrases actually mean

‘The government is minded to' means we have only briefly thought about this and we're worried it might not be the right thing, so please tell us quickly before we go further. 

Another one is 'when parliamentary time allows.' This phrase generally means that while you feel this issue is important, it is not yet important enough for the government, so it's not going to happen for a while. Just ask anyone working on audit reform over the past six or seven years how many times they’ve heard those words.

Are you meeting the right people at the right point in time?

Map what stage the policy development is at and what kind of policy development is happening because that sets your scope for opportunity to influence.

If you're having a meeting early on in the policy development phase and you understand that ministers are fairly open then you have a massive opportunity. Don’t be afraid to ask direct questions: Have you got a clear sense of where you're headed? What is it? What is it you need from us? Are you open to ideas or do you just need help making this successful in reality?

That assumes that policy is actually in development. If what you want exists within the current bounds of political preference then engage with officials to shift things within that window. If not, go and make noise. 

The category error to avoid

Don’t waste the first 25 minutes of a meeting. The best people move quickly through the credibility setting: 'Here is what we know, the policy work we've done, our position in the sector and ask: what can we help you with?’

For example, on private sector rental policy in 2013, the government had no budget for communications or legislative change; we wanted to involve organisations in the development of the 'How to rent' guide and have their support in communicating it. 

The organisations who were useful (and had influence) said ‘here’s the data, here’s the policy work we’ve done, and if you incorporate some of our suggested changes, we will use all of our channels to get this out to the people who need it.’ That is what happened–and that guide is now given to every tenant in England nearly 15 years later.

Not every minister wants to talk detailed policy

At one end, you have the expert—often from the House of Lords, having spent years in an area and often a relevant sector before that. They spend time on the details. Baroness Barran [read Baroness Barran’s Policy Unstuck] is one who utterly cared about that. 

Others might be slightly less engaged in a particular area but focus on working for the Secretary of State and delivering their agenda, willing to make trade-offs. Then there are some who are only big picture—focused on communications and winning political arguments. Engaging them in policy can sometimes be challenging. 

How do you know which camp a minister falls into? Officials are always up for giving you a sense of how much is being led directly by the minister versus how open they are to advice. A good clue is the specificity of a politician’s answers to questions in parliament. If you're getting lots of advocacy without much specificity, they are probably more of the big picture breed.

Categorise your civil servant partners

Generally, officials are collaborative by nature, want to understand problems, and enjoy working in government as a means to enable change. Within that, some care deeply about being the expert. They take pride in understanding the detail and outlasting the external people seeking to influence them. 

Then there are those who move around quickly, climb the ladder, ask the right questions, and trust others to know more while navigating change through the system. This ‘mover and shaker’ might sometimes be a better ally to make stuff happen quickly, whereas the long-standing expert is someone you want a deep relationship with to shift policy over time.

You should work out if the person can help you achieve your policy objective. Do they have influence internally? Quite often, movers and shakers have more influence, even though they know less. To be a trusted partner to someone influential, you need to be responsive. If they're with a minister and need a quick view, you can't take three days to respond.

Yes, use powerful stories, but situate them and connect to solutions

It's important for people to tell emotive stories in policy influence. But some people almost require policymakers to come and live that story with them. Policymakers are required to be objective: the challenge is getting the right level of detail without being drawn into stuff which risks tilting you away from the full evidence base.

For example, working on modern slavery, you'd hear a really hard-hitting story, but to include it within policy formulation you would need to understand where it sat within wider prevalence data. 

So can you say more about what it shows regarding the nature of the crime and what policy interventions you think might help protect this person and others. (Freedom Fund were one organisation we worked with who did this brilliantly.) 

Want to learn more from Andy about how to work with ministers and officials? Here is who the ‘What ministers want’ course is for, and what you’ll learn.

The course is for people who have been working for a few years publishing reports and engaging with policymakers, but haven't quite had the impact you hoped for. This course will help you reflect on your approach and come away with concrete actions for next time. There are broadly three things we cover:

• Decode Whitehall: Build a true insider's understanding of how government functions (and stalls).

• Think like a policymaker: Step outside your organisation's bubble to understand what civil servants actually need (and want) from you.

• Master ministerial reality: Understand what ministers' lives are actually like and how to effectively use your time with them once you secure it.

Through course exercises, you’ll apply what you are learning directly to your current work, like writing policy briefs or preparing for engagements; you will take things you are already working on and build a progressively deepening understanding of how to improve them.

What ministers want starts on the 5th March. It is a 5 week online course, costing £375+VAT per person. We offer organisational discounts for purchases of 5 or more seats. Find out more about the course and sign up.

Thank you to the 97 readers who have referred a colleague to Policy Unstuck.

I met Anna Dolidze at the Open European Dialogue in Milan, a forum for European members of parliament of all persuasions to learn from each other.

Many referenced the 'technocratisation of language’ (the phrase itself perhaps an embodiment of the problem). Politicians were frustrated that the language they were being given by their policy communities was too technical; they could not use it to talk to voters because no-one understands it.

The corrosion of language is a theme we have touched on several times in Policy Unstuck. Previous guest Anna McShane made the (bang on) point that when we start using technocratic language in communications among ‘elite’ groups, eventually that technocratic language drifts into the public sphere.

A kind explanation for this is that the language has become so normal within a group that they think everyone understands it, or that they think precision of language is more important than comprehension of language. A less kind explanation is that they are using language as a shield—it’s much harder for someone to challenge you if they don’t understand what you have said.

When a politician talks to the public about ‘fiscal headroom,’ and you consider that most will not understand what that politician is talking about, it is a failure. It breeds this pervasive feeling that the system isn’t built for ‘people like me.’ Fiscal headroom can be explained simply if they want to: ‘how close we are to breaking the financial rules we set ourselves.’

Technocratic language is only one half of the problem. The other is the abstraction of language and the use of dead language. Rather than using metaphors or similes that evoke an image in your head (“their polling numbers are buckling like a cheap suitcase”) we use metaphors that have entirely lost their visual or emotive connection. They meant something once upon a time, but they have died…

• A ‘delivery vehicle’ is no longer a van that drops off parcels, but a group of people working together to ‘execute something.’

• ‘Executing something’ is no longer chopping something’s head off, but ‘delivering change.’

• ‘Delivering change’ is no longer giving someone 20p back from a fiver, but ‘managing a transition.’

It was great to get into these issues with today’s guest, Anna Dolidze, not least given her career move from academia to politics, and—her words—having to ‘unlearn’ how to speak. It’s a class I could certainly do with taking!

Enjoy,

Tom

💡 Training

• Communicate to persuade. Agree with us that ‘policymaker’ is a terrible audience definition? Learn how to write a good one—and see how it changes your approach to communications. Starts 26th Feb.
  

• What ministers want. Too often external engagement with ministers and their teams ignores the reality of how government works. Learn how to engage effectively with what those in government are looking for. Starts 5th March.
  

• How to write (so we want to read). Good writing is a communications superpower. Analyse what good looks like, and learn how to apply the key tenets to your work. Starts 19th March.

Do you spend enough time with the people you want to convince?

If a politician is making several media appearances a day, who is the person they have in their mind as they speak? They might be imagining their friend, their colleague, their adversary… but those are not the person they should be speaking to. They should be speaking to their voters.

Why don’t they speak to their voters? It's a question of lived experience. Think about it: where does this politician spend most of their day? To whom do they talk? Where do they get their information from? Where do they get their metaphors from? When politicians get an office, they distance themselves from their constituents, and their communication suffers.

Advisers may not be in a better situation

It’s equally hard for political advisers to course correct, because they exist in the same bubble. Nor is it easy for consultants to go to a politician and say, “What you are doing is not working.”

I’ve seen a consultant try to convey the message, “People are calling you a loan shark,” and the politician responded, “Well, that's not a bad thing.” It is a bad thing! But people don't like being told they are wrong, and it’s especially hard to do if you want a contract from them.

Policy reports have no soul

99% of the time advocacy groups don’t give you what you need to make a political argument. If somebody gave me a policy argument already translated into influential, accessible language, I would take it as a gift. Usually, they just give data.

And so political analysis has become incredibly boring from the perspective of a normal person. The people who go to the ballot box are the same people that watch shows in the evening because they are fun: those shows touch their emotions and existential fears. Policy reporting is so far removed from that.

→ Take this training if you want to inject soul into your writing.

What is the British dumpling?

A good politician is a person who is an interpreter between different realms, including between voters and the world of experts. Their job is in part to be Google Translate.

For example, in the minimum wage or inflation debate, I use the dumpling check. The Georgian dumpling is the most popular food in Georgia; nothing beats the dumpling. I tell policy experts that whatever numbers they have, they must translate them into how many more dumplings a person can get in a restaurant with that money.

I don't think the policy world thinks in those terms on its own.

‘Dead language’ creates the space for populism

I remember meeting a voter in a hair salon who said “I admire you, but you have to speak simpler.” All the new non-mainstream parties understand that this is a serious grievance that a lot of people have–that people do not understand the language that politicians speak from their podiums. And so those parties fill that void.

To fix this, you have to engage with the vocabulary of expertise, but you must be like Anthony Bourdain: able to go to a shabby little diner and also go to Davos. You have to be bilingual in that broad sense and translate the codes.

Even people from populist movements eventually have to speak with the World Bank or the Big Four auditing companies. The ability to traverse these fields lies in being able to switch between those two languages. 

If you can’t, you lose touch with the people whose hearts you have to win.

The technocratisation of political careers

Political parties in Western Europe have become bureaucratised. They take a young person who then serve through the ranks, and becomes technocratised in the process. 

Look at the biography of someone like Angela Merkel: she was in politics from the time she was a student. The upside of that for the politician is tenure—safety of that office for years. The drawback is the loss of inspiration: when was the last time you heard a political speech that inspired you? 

Think back to the times where classic political speeches were made. They’re full of visual language. It’s why so many songs are made from Martin Luther King’s words, because it is so poetic. What I think they have forgotten—not all of them, but bureaucrats—is that first you have to mobilise in a democracy. This is what the struggle is.

Only after you mobilise people and have the mandate do you translate it into policy and negotiate with power. If there is any good thing about what’s happening in European politics right now, it is that the competition from fringe movements is a wake-up call for people to go back to this very first stage where they secure that mandate.

Thank you to the 94 readers who have referred a colleague to Policy Unstuck.

Recent polls suggest that were an election to be held in the UK today, Reform would comfortably win. More in Common put it at a majority of 112 seats over all other parties combined.

Danny Kruger is the man responsible for ensuring that Reform can actually implement their policy proposals if elected; ensuring they are not hamstrung by, as Keir Starmer put it, “a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than… it ought to be.”

In the interview below, we cover:

• The problem diagnosis: what is the wrong with the current set up, and what Reform want to restore.

• The Starmer case study: what lessons Danny took from Labour’s ascension to power—and what Reform will do differently as a result.

• What it means for you: Reform intend to build a thick manifesto—engagement now is the route to influencing it.

Enjoy,

Tom

💡 Training

• Communicate to persuade. Agree with us that ‘policymaker’ is a terrible audience definition? Learn how to write a good one—and see how it changes your approach to communications. Starts 26th Feb.
  

• What ministers want. Too often external engagement with ministers and their teams ignores the reality of how government works. Learn how to engage effectively with what those in government are looking for. Starts 5th March.
  

• How to write (so we want to read). Good writing is a communications superpower. Go back to basics on what good looks like, and learn how to apply the key tenets to your work. Starts 19th March.

The goal: restoration of the British state

The underlying architecture of the British state is the best in the world. Reform makes it clear: we are very radical in our desire for change, but we want restoration, not revolution.

I'd like to see a revival of the cabinet committee as a meaningful decision-making forum, and restore the role of the secretariat–able officials and advisers who support the cabinet–which is what the Cabinet Office was intended to do.

The notion of the impartial civil service is an admirable one, but there's something essentially broken about the Northcote-Trevelyan model of a professional civil service operating independently of party politics. If we believe in those principles, we're going to have to change a lot about the way it works.

The executive centre is clogged and dysfunctional

Policy is being developed by colleagues led by Zia Yusuf, but downstream of that is the work of thinking about how we actually operationalise that policy. That includes thinking in general terms about the machinery of government—how we ensure that the decisions made by ministers are given effect—as well as how we deliver on manifesto commitments.

There will be some obvious, very immediate priorities around economic policy, around migration, law and order, and so on, that we'll want to see given effect as fast as possible. My job is asking: how do we do that given the state of the system?

The challenge is partly a pretty clogged-up centre. The process of decision-making at the heart of government is dysfunctional, with a bloated and incoherent Cabinet Office, much duplication of roles, all sorts of dysfunctions in the Civil Service, and the inability of ministers, particularly the prime minister, to give effect to his or her wishes.

So, we need to reform the model of decision-making, advice, and implementation that happens around the centre of government.

The challenge goes beyond ministerial departments

Over the last 25 years, successive governments have outsourced a range of functions to arms-length bodies of one sort or another* in an attempt to depoliticise, professionalise, and improve the quality of service.

The result is that we've created unaccountable bureaucracies which are no more efficient than the old model of centralised Whitehall delivery, but have the additional disadvantage of a lack of proper accountability to ministers and therefore to Parliament. So, how do we take back control of the government itself?

And how do we approach the challenge of the House of Lords, where there's a massive inbuilt majority against what a Reform government would want to do? How much can we rely on the Salisbury Convention or the Parliament Act? We will need to create new Reform peers (we currently have none)... will that be enough to ensure that mandated manifesto commitments are not endlessly delayed or frustrated altogether in the Lords?

* Examples include non-ministerial departments like HM Revenue & Customs or the Charity Commission, and quangos like the National Lottery Heritage Fund or the Forestry Commission.

When we say rule of law, what do we mean?

In recent times you've seen the development of judicial review, notions of fundamental rights as being superior to statute, and significant activism on the part of judges right to the top.*

While preserving the rule of law–the judiciary needs to operate without political interference–how do we ensure that the rule of law means the actual rule of law made in Parliament and through case law, rather than the rule of lawyers?

* Previous Policy Unstuck guest Lord Sumption, the former Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, explores this in his book Democracy and the Rule of Law and his Reith Lectures.

What Reform learned from Starmer’s playbook

Starmer was convinced, probably based on his own experience of being one of the 'Wednesday Morning Colleagues,' that the system would work for him.

He thought that based on his sympathy with the system and his belief in public service, that when he arrived with a manifesto he would simply switch on the Rolls-Royce machinery, and it would purr into life and drive in the direction of the New Jerusalem.

But it didn't.

The great lesson there is: have a plan. 

If you see what happens when a sympathetic government comes in, one that is supportive of the civil service and whose policy ambitions are on the soft left, and they still fail… imagine what it will be like when a government arrives that is pretty hostile to the current ways of working and has policies most senior civil servants object to. 

We intend to arrive in government with much more than just a thin manifesto of headline aspirations. There will be a proper plan. It will guide us, but it will also signal in advance what is expected of the system so no one can say, 'you didn't tell us what you were going to do.'

The door is open for policy engagement

Across the whole spectrum of policy, there's a role for all organisations to submit ideas. If charities choose to sit on the sidelines with a cross look on their face because they don't like Reform, that's their choice. But there will genuinely be a willingness on our part to listen and engage. 

We are going to go into government with a comprehensive plan, so the opportunity to make policy in opposition is much fuller. We want to do that in an open way because we don't have the capacity internally to do everything. 

I challenge the sector to engage in good faith with a party that has 30% of the popular support.

A Reform government will start with a bang

The public are very attuned to reality. The despair they felt so soon after Starmer came in was because it was very quickly clear that this was another bunch getting into a total mess about trivialities. That's the 'uni-party'; you vote for different ministers but nothing changes.

We're going to do things differently.

The public needs to see us doing things that are structurally meaningful from day one. To a certain extent, that will communicate itself by the howls of outrage we're going to encounter from established powers. 

We intend to be ready for them.

Suggested additional reading for those of you that got this far, both written by Danny: ‘Radical change to deliver a smaller, better civil service’ and ‘Restoring Government.’

In Alison Griffin’s Policy Unstuck, she identified five barriers to change: decision-makers don’t know about the problem; they don’t care; vested interests are too strong; there’s no bandwidth; or your analysis is wrong.

On the back of Henry’s comments below, perhaps we should add a sixth: nobody is project managing it to fruition.

It points to the very real, and very mundane, reason why so many things—in every kind of organisation—are never delivered.

But Ali’s barriers assume you at least know what you want to achieve. I am not convinced that is always—or even often—the case. I remember Cast from Clay being asked to bid for a piece of work. We asked what the client wanted to achieve with the budget, to which the response was: “We don’t know, we just need to do something.” Perhaps not the best use of budget.

It’s not an isolated incident. The lack of clear strategy manifests in organisational documents that lack objectives, or metrics that target noise rather than signal—like the common goal of ‘media hits.’

Media hits are a useful tactic to securing political interest, but a short burst of news articles rarely changes policy. The hard work of getting something through a government system, as Henry describes below, is not solved by a headline in The Times.

Today’s interview explores how to make things happen within government from the perspective of a political appointee. It’s based on an article Henry recently wrote which is definitely worth flicking your eye over.

Enjoy,

Tom

P.S. a warm welcome to the recent influx of Canadian subscribers.

💡 Learn things…

• Use AI to massively increase your efficiency, starts today {last call}

• How to make friends and influence people, starts 26th Feb 2026

• How to actually run that ministerial meeting, coming soon

• How to write so people want to read, coming soon

You think you know what a political adviser should do, but…

Some people have misconceptions about what the role of an adviser should be.

Obviously, you have policy advisers and communications advisers, and the names give it away. But actually, I found that one of the most valuable things an adviser can do for their minister is to project manage things through the department.

You can't guarantee that stuff will get delivered unless a minister or an adviser is project managing it. That skill set isn’t necessarily found in a communications or policy professional. The dream combo is someone who can do policy and comms, but also has the ability to project manage something through the department.

I don't want to overplay it; lots of people have very impressive operational experience and management techniques. This is really basic stuff: keeping to deadlines, holding people to account to make stuff happen, and unblocking things to move forward. It’s not rocket science.

If special advisers find it hard to work cross-department…

The brutal truth is that if you want to actually get something done in government, you want to do the stuff in your department, that you can control yourself.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t do cross-governmental work—when you sit in Number 10, that is all you do. But the number one thing you hear people say in Number 10 is how frustrating it is to get anything done.

When you’re in your department and you have control over the spending, you can actually do stuff. If you have a list of things you want to do, prioritise the things you can do that don’t require going elsewhere. You’ll achieve much more, much quicker. 

Take on some cross-governmental stuff, sure, but go into it with your eyes wide open that it’s going to be much harder.

The power of a forcing function

If you said, “the Secretary of State is going to do a speech on potholes on this date, and he needs something to say that includes progress on all these things,” you can use that as a forcing function to make the system work.

The beauty of the Bletchley AI Summit as a forcing function was that it was prime ministerial level, and we had leaders of other countries coming. We just had to make it work.

I don’t buy this idea that you can’t create forcing functions in areas seen as less sexy. If the government makes an area a priority, then it will happen.

But it’s about the hard work of not just saying, ‘I really care about this,’ but coming back to it every single week. And doing not just one forcing function, but three: a speech here, an event here, and a report there.

Too often it’s, ‘Oh, I made a speech, that means everything’s done,’ and surprise, surprise, nothing actually happens.

Hands up who wants to get shouted at?

Politicians care about making new losers for obvious political reasons.

Civil servants care about it because you have teams of people whose sole job is to engage a specific sector, and so they have lots of relationships with stakeholders.

If we do something that annoys those stakeholders, their job literally gets worse. It’s painful for them to walk into a meeting and explain something they themselves don't necessarily like. Of course, you want to do the thing that makes your stakeholders happy and makes your job easier.

That doesn’t mean that stakeholders dictate the rules.

Of course stakeholders don't want you to do certain things, but you've just got to do what you've got to do. You have to make the argument, be brave, and get on with it. 

If politicians want to get something done, they can get it done. The UK State can do a bunch of stuff if the prime minister and the team around them want to make it happen.

Thank you to the 93 readers who have referred a colleague.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing about cognitive biases on LinkedIn. One post explored the curse of knowledge: once we know something, we struggle to imagine what it’s like to not know it.

We then communicate assuming that everyone else has the same level of knowledge as us. In many (most?) situations, that is a flawed assumption.

There are endless examples of people tripping up over this. Perhaps the most relatable: we have all been in a room where someone is using acronyms that we do not know. In most cases, the speaker is not trying to be clever; it is unimaginable to them that people wouldn’t know what this assortment of letters refers to.

So while the speaker continues with their point, the listener is distracted—their brain whirs into action pondering what the acronym means, trying out different words combinations that could explain it, and wondering whether they are the only one in the room who doesn’t get it. The speaker’s argument is lost in the noise.

It’s even worse when there are double meanings—when you think you know what someone is saying, but it just isn’t adding up. Some of my favourites: CSIS or CSIS? CPS or CPS? IEA or IEA?

This bias afflicts us all, including the Government—as Anna’s recent research shows. I especially enjoyed Anna’s points around the futility of announcements, the use of meaningless words, and the lack of imagination when it comes to narrative shaping.

My challenge to you is to think about your organisation when reading her comments: these challenges are not unique to government.

Tom
P.S. Our clients at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies are on the hunt for a Communications Officer. Could it be you?

💡 Learn things…

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Announcements do not signal ‘delivery’

Government announcements aren’t a credible signal of action anymore for the public.

This isn’t just to do with the current government, it has been a relatively long-running trend. There are just so many of them and they don't cut through.

The government announces hundreds of things every year and most things capture a tiny bit of attention for maybe 24 hours, and then attention flatlines and doesn’t return. Words just aren’t enough.

Maybe because the words themselves don’t mean anything 

We did a piece of research looking at the language the government uses just before Christmas which was called “What are you talking about?” We did the research because so much of the language that comes out of government just doesn't exist in the real world.

I got a bit of pushback from some in government who argued “Well, sometimes we're speaking to the voters and sometimes we're speaking to elite circles and we use different language for different places.”

The problem is that that ‘elite’ language then becomes commonplace in how we speak in government, and that then drifts into how people speak because they think it's normal. It’s not normal. 

Who has ever said “joined-up care pathways” or “outcome-based commissioning?” No one speaks like that. If you wouldn’t say it at the pub, don’t put it in your public communications.

In this really low-trust world that we live in, it just sounds evasive. Using plain language—speaking in feelings and experiences—is key.

Should you even be using words to talk about policy?

There’s a quote that stuck with me from a focus group I did. The question was, “What can Starmer do to regain or gain your trust?” And the guy said, “There is nothing that Starmer can say to earn my trust. He’s going to have to physically show me.”

That “physically show me” bit is important. When you’re planning your policy and you know where you want to get to—let's say it’s a million and a half homes in five years—what are the milestones along the way to get there and what are going to be the opportunities to show that we're getting there?

The government needs to think about how it is going to communicate progress. And it needs to embrace visual storytelling.

Even when there is a real opportunity to use imagery or video to tell a story, the government doesn’t seem to want to. My favourite example was the government announcing that they were going to use drones to identify fly tippers, and they were going to crush their cars. And then they never spoke about it again. 

Come on! Where are the videos of Starmer on a 4x4 or a monster truck crushing cars? It can't be that hard to think of these moments that are novel and show the policy in action in a visceral, exciting way.

The government grid incentivises short-term media hits

The error that they've made is that they don't use the grid strategically enough. They don't think about how they're going to announce something once, and then at what point they're going to return to things. It’s very much a method for that first press release.

And even when they come back to it once or twice over the next 12 months, it still feels like they're trying to make it a new story. But because of that, it doesn't feel like it builds on anything. The repetitiveness that you need to have a really coherent narrative gets lost in the grid because it's just “what's the next new thing?”

It seems that they are thinking that “as long as our grid is really busy and we look really busy then we’ll look really purposeful.” But without that bigger thinking of what sits above it, what that narrative is, it just doesn't work.

I should say that I don't think we should drop the grid. It is important because loads of stuff happens in government, it’s a chaotic place. You don't want departments announcing big things at the same time and the grid helps with discipline. There are lots of benefits to the grid–but it does need to be used strategically as well as tactically.

It’s also a question of who is hired into government comms roles

When you’ve been trained in that newspaper room environment, your ultimate goal is to get the headline that day. That’s the goal. But strategic communications is a completely different skill set. It’s a completely different muscle that needs to be used to build a narrative and then have the perseverance to keep going on essentially the same thing.

It can be boring because it is boring when it is just ‘breakfast clubs, breakfast clubs, breakfast clubs.’ But that is what you need to do if you want to create a narrative. You can’t keep jumping around to new shiny things.

Thank you to the 88 readers who have referred others to this newsletter. If you want to boost your referral count, the most successful social media posts for driving referrals to this newsletter all do the same thing:

They screenshot a section of an interview and write a post relating it back to a question/topic/policy area that their social media followers care about. In other words, they show people the value of the newsletter—that, hopefully, it spurs ideas. (Just remember to use your referral link, not the link to the interview in question!)

Who remembers the Conservative’s use of Comic Sans? Aaron Bastani responded to that tweet by saying: “this is either genius or you've been absolutely conned by a leftist design studio. I suspect its the latter.” Aaron was wrong.

The content went viral and prompted a series of commentary pieces (even Creative Review got involved: “Is Comic Sans going to get Brexit done?”) with many commentators realising they had just been introduced to shitposting.

Ben was one of the brains behind the campaign. I’ve admired his work from afar for some time, and on seeing him subscribe to Policy Unstuck, couldn’t help but take the chance to speak to him for the series.

My takeaway from his comments: if you can’t be bothered to distil your ideas down to something simple, your audiences will do it for you. Do you want your distillation, or theirs, to be the one that is used?

Tom

P.S. Thank you Ally S for your referrals to Policy Unstuck—you’re the first person to hit 15. Very much appreciated.

💡 Learn things…

• Use AI to massively increase your efficiency, starts 6th Feb 2026

• How to make friends and influence people, starts 26th Feb 2026

• How to actually run that ministerial meeting, coming soon

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The reality of public engagement in the attention economy

Boris Johnson understands that politics isn’t just about a battle of ideas. It’s also a battle of wits. And he knows that politics competes for people’s attention. You’re competing with the Premier League. You’re competing with whatever’s on Netflix… you’ve got to be at least as entertaining.

Everyone knows that zip wire thing or that rugby tackle. He was willing to look silly to compete for that attention, in complete contrast to most politicians who are terrified of looking undignified.

Authenticity means refusing to mould to crowds

Everybody knows that a large part of success in communications comes down to being authentic, but the problem is everyone says you’ve got to be authentic and it ends up meaning nothing.

Being authentic means having the kahunas to not do what everyone else is doing. Most people don’t act authentically in their normal behaviours. They mould to adjust and adapt to the crowd.

The question for any aspiring politician is ‘why did you bother getting into this in the first place?’

It’s a crap job. Everyone hates you—especially if you win. The pay is garbage unless you really make it to the top and then go work for OpenAI and pull an Osborne. So you’re not really in this for the money. The UK is not like one of these tinpot dictatorships where politicians live like kings, at least for now anyway.

So there’s genuinely some reason why you’ve gone into politics. Don’t be ashamed to tell people what that is.

If you can’t distil your argument down to a slogan…

Your audience is never going to remember the footnotes no matter how good they are. And the audience is going to have something to say about you, whether you like it or not. The question is do you want the one thing that they say and remember to be what you want it to be, or what they want it to be? 

If you can condense your message down into something really simple and clear that makes sense to people, they’ll use it. So, you may as well work it out and give it to them. 

Also, it’s a slogan. It’s not a manifesto. It’s a heuristic, right? It’s a thing that people use to label the information they store about you in their brain. You’ve got to lose stuff to get down to that lowest common denominator.

Memes are information units, not just images

Forget the idea of a meme as an internet picture with words on it; a meme is a unit of information that can spread across a network. 

Memes are powerful because they compress all these heuristics about how people think and views they hold into a single word or group of words. It’s why Boris is so interesting because when you say ‘Boris,’ your brain immediately conjures up this disheveled, charismatic politician who’s not like all the others, and he’s posh but he doesn't act like it. 

That word evokes so much emotion and so much interesting context, and that’s what gives it meme potential because you've got all this information encoded in a single word. 

When you’re thinking about meme potential, you should be thinking about how much implicit knowledge is attached to whatever phrase or word you are using.

Hyper-targeting general public content is over-hyped

So much of the value of content that you produce is the social potential of it. 

If you and I live in completely different social feed universes and see completely different things because of that, we aren’t going to have much to talk about. But the chances are that we probably see a lot of the same stuff from a lot of the same people and that gives us things to geek out about together. 

So from a social content perspective, you don’t actually want everything to be hyper-targeted. You want people to be able to share that experience and talk about it.

The other thing is that you’re paying a premium for the sniper rifle compared to the shotgun, right? The way that data targeting works is the more layers you add on, the more expensive it’s going to be. So the question is: is that premium justified, especially given the social component to behaviour change that we’ve just talked about?

Delegate campaign decision-making to win

It doesn’t matter how good you are as a leader, if you’re spending your time signing off tweets, then you’re creating a bottleneck that’s going to slow a campaign down.

Boris trusted the campaign machine, and the campaign machine trusted us. That meant we could operate at crazy speed–I think on some days we were doing 20 Facebook posts a day.

When you can work quickly, you can do a lot. We often describe our political campaign approach as water dripping on a stone. You've got to say the same thing again and again and again until you wear down your audience. Only then are you finally starting to cut through, because quite frankly no one gives a damn–you have to make them.

A question for those of you that read Policy Unstuck to the end each week:

Every so often we host dinners at our offices in London, where we take apart an issue that has come up in one of these interviews. Let us know if you’d be up for joining a future one (no promises.)

One downside of democracy is its structural incentive for short-term thinking—politicians want to win the next election, which is never that far away.

For those of us who would like to see government deliver a more long-term agenda, that presents a challenge. Why would the government of the day do it? The system in which they exist incentivises them not to.

With that in mind, it was a great pleasure to speak with James to think through how you get organisations to think more long-term. When we spoke in late December, he was the Head of Futures and Foresight at the UK Cabinet Office—how you get people to take a long-term view was his job.

We also talked at length about AI given the role he was about to step into. Given that so many of you have taken our Generative AI course—I hope you’ll find his thoughts relevant and useful.

Tom
P.S. my colleague Aneesha is hiring a consultant role (2-3 years experience, £30-35k salary) onto her team. More info here.

💡 Forthcoming training

• Generative AI for Policy Communicators, starts 6th Feb 2026

• Communicate to Persuade, starts 26th Feb 2026

• What Ministers Want, coming soon

• How to Write (So People Want to Read), coming soon

How do you get organisations to think long-term?

The first thing I would say is co-create. My team was set up to do analysis on the long-term future of the UK. As part of that, we interview decision-makers and experts. If you involve some of those stakeholders in the process, then they're more likely to become champions for the work in the long run.

The second thing is linking things to the urgent. There's been a lot going on in the UK in the last 10 years. Brexit, Russia-Ukraine, we've had elections, and so on. You can sometimes point to things where there is media attention, or the civil service is focused, and then use that to have conversations about some longer-term trends. 

The third thing I'd say is making time for it. We'll often go to board meetings or meetings of senior people and say, ‘Look, let's set some time aside to talk about this.’ Often the reason people find this hard is because they don't have time to do it. But if you can make time, ring-fence it, then it usually goes down well.

Baby steps into the world of foresight…

If you want to think about second, third-order consequences, there's a technique we use called the Futures Wheel. You take an issue, you put it in the middle of a big bit of paper, and then you look at all the cascading things that could occur. 

So, a pandemic leads to work from home, which then leads to maybe improved outcomes for kids, but maybe it leads to worse outcomes for businesses. It’s a useful tool to look at all the different cascading impacts.

The kind of case study Keir Starmer would love

The example I usually give of how useful AI is… imagine some kind of disruption to the Brazilian rubber supply that would be harmful for the UK car industry because it means we can no longer make tyres. 

If you think about how we would have to manually find out about that and start addressing it: we’d need someone who speaks Portuguese, someone monitoring the Brazilian newspapers who also has a good understanding of the UK economy and the different departmental equities. And then imagine doing that for all the other issue areas, all around the world. It would be impossible. 

But AI can do that really quickly because you can just give AI the context and say, ‘Look, I care about the government's priorities here and I care about these departments. Now go look around the world for stuff that's going to hurt that.’ And AI is very good at that. It would be so labour-intensive to do it manually, you would never try.

But… keep humans in the loop

Remember though that AI will flag up a lot of things that might be false positives. What you don't want to do is scare people with things that sound scary but really aren't, so you need to keep the human in the loop, a human analyst checking outputs. 

An outbreak of a disease in a country might not be that big a deal, for example, but at first glance for me as someone who doesn't know very much about diseases, it might be terrifying.

The young ‘uns showing us how

We are seeing people at the lowest levels of organisations finding the biggest efficiencies because they're often doing the repetitive tasks and they're AI native.

They might not have the judgement to know exactly what's going to work, but they have the technical knowledge and they're embedding with people who do have that expertise. 

People always say, 'Oh, I'm worried about graduates not getting jobs in the future.' I don’t know about that… they're doing it already.

It’s not the teacher’s job to grade, it’s yours 

We grade everything we produce. Grade D means nobody's read it. Grade C means we get lots of feedback, people like it, or lots of people read it. Grade B, it influences people, and we hear it discussed. And then Grade A is where we see some kind of action on the back of it, like calling a meeting or agreeing to investigate something further.

What we’re trying to answer is whether what you're doing is actually having an outcome or is it just interesting?

For Grade A, you’re looking for a story of how your work might have been a contributing factor to some decision. Invariably, there's a million other contributing factors that go to that decision, so you're trying to produce a convincing narrative that our work mattered. 

For the annual horizon scan, we might present to 900 people in one go, so we’ll say, ‘Put in the chat what you're going to do now.’ And then the audience will give you Grade A immediately because they're giving us all of these lists of things they're going to do.

If we don't get Grade A, we stop and look at why. That process lets you get better every year because you move into continuous improvement, rather than continually starting from inception.

Thank you to the 87 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred a colleague.

Frank, Natallia and I met for lunch a few months ago, and we lamented the predictability of so many policy recommendations. It seems like many of you feel the same.

What is the point in calling for a ‘whole of government’ approach when civil servants will tell you they are already talking to their colleagues? The problem usually isn’t that government isn’t talking to itself; it’s probably that a specific, logical blocker exists.

For as long as the recommendation remains at that superficial level and doesn’t address the blocker, there is little point in making it. And yet policy thought leaders continue to.

I recently read a paper written by an award-winning policy academic on reimagining how government operates. But if I had been a minister or official who wanted to do something, there was nothing in there for me to actually implement. We abstract our recommendations to the point of futility.

None of this is new. Dolly van Tulleken wrote about what needs to be present for policy recommendations to be implementable several years ago. Of the 689 policies she reviewed in her research, only 8% had the requisite information for things to be adopted. 🤦‍♂️

Frank is the perfect person to get stuck into this with—he’s a former political campaign director, government department non-exec, think tank leader, and now the Chief Policy Officer of a charity. I especially enjoyed his comments around think tank incentives being to secure policy wins, not social change, and idea of a political philosophy as a social Theory of Change. I hope you do too.

Tom

💡 Forthcoming training

• Generative AI for Policy Communicators, starts 6th Feb 2026

• Communicate to Persuade, starts 26th Feb 2026

• What Ministers Want, coming soon

• How to Write (So People Want to Read), coming soon

The hackneyed policy recommendations we’re all guilty of

I should begin by confessing that I am a repeat sinner here, just in case anyone points the finger at me…

There were three from your LinkedIn post that stood out for me. One is suggesting something must be put on the national curriculum. There might be good reason for something to be on our national curriculum and taught in schools. 

But most people would also recognise that we spend a lot of time teaching children maths, English and foreign languages, and a lot of children still come out of school without the sort of knowledge we would hope they would have. 

So if you fix a lesson or two onto the curriculum, you've got to ask yourself: what difference will that make?

'National strategy' is another one. Calling for a national strategy is almost a way of saying, ‘We want a national strategy, as long as it contains all the things that we want the government to do.’

And then the final one won’t surprise you: a minister for something or other. Again, I have done this more than once. Or put another way, ‘We want a minister we can lobby to do all the things that we want to do.’ 

Government isn’t the only vehicle for change

One reason we congregate around the same kinds of policy recommendations is there are limited levers that any government machine can pull. So you will end up returning to the same old things if your focus is entirely on government as the only vehicle for change. 

We've got to question whether we need to take a step back and ask whether government is the only actor in making change, or actually, are there wider societal changes that would make a big difference, such as strengthening families or expectations around personal responsibility?

That might be harder than getting a bullet point in a national strategy, but it might be more effective, too.

Think tanks should be about 'big ideas', not civil service replication

Think tanks should have the space and capacity to think big ideas about big change. I would always caution against think tanks becoming an adjunct to the civil service, where you have hundreds of policy professionals inside a department servicing a minister with policy development.

Think tanks shouldn't replicate that function. Think tanks should have the freedom to challenge authority and orthodoxy and to say the things that no one else is saying. They need to give ministers what they cannot get from their civil service teams.

The problem is… they don’t

The question I think we need to ask is whether we are in a think tank recession. If you look at things like the introduction of Universal Credit 15 or 20 years ago, that was clearly a big idea that led to profound change, whether you think it was a good or a bad change. Is the think tank sector producing those kinds of big ideas today?

There are reasons for that. It’s extremely challenging in this country to fund think tank research, and it’s not the think tank director's fault that they have to pay the bills like the rest of us. 

But if you are focused on doing what you need to do to keep the lights on, there’s a danger that you don't leave space for saying the challenging thing that is unpopular. History tells us that often the unpopular thing becomes the popular thing.

It’s not just a question of funding–we need to ask questions about the career paths for people inside think tanks.

If the only route for advancement and a bigger salary is to go from a think tank and end up in government as a special adviser, well then naturally you’re going to be reticent to publish something that is controversial, is not what the government of the day wants to do, and might be initially unpopular but end up being accepted in five years’ time.

The sector chases ‘wins’, not social change

Unless you have a very benign and far-sighted donor or donor pool, any think tank needs to demonstrate its relevance and success through ‘wins.’

The language of wins is very embedded within the think tank world. It comes back to that conversation around securing a bullet point in a strategy–that is a ‘win’. Nobody’s life may change because of that bullet point, but you can put in an email to a donor.

The obsession with 'objectivity' is misplaced

Are think tanks objective? The question should be: does it matter if they’re not?

In the charity sector, people pay a lot of money for ‘Theories of Change.’ Well, in politics, our theory of change is ideology. It is a political philosophy on what makes successful change happen. 

It’s striking to me how having a political philosophy is frowned upon slightly in the think tank world. But in the charity sector, having a Theory of Change is something to be very proud of.

The thing that matters isn’t objectivity, it is credibility. 

You can have a clear political philosophy, but you must demonstrate that your research stands up to scrutiny. People can sniff out a partisan activist—someone who is just an adjunct to a political party producing subpar work—a mile off. That is self-defeating.

But having basic principles is not something we should be ashamed of.

Thank you to the 81 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred a friend or colleague.

If you don’t follow Kirsty McNeill MP on LinkedIn, you should.

Several of her posts, like this or this, get into the kind of detail on policy influence that a Policy Unstuck reader will value. Yes, Kirsty is an MP and a minister, but she’s also a former executive director at Save the Children, and a former chair of IPPR (a left-wing UK think tank). She’s seen this terrain from many vantage points.

Three things I took away from our conversation:

• We don’t value philosophical study enough. The narrative has become ‘philosophy is disconnected from reality’; the narrative perhaps should be ‘philosophy is a useful tool to understand humans.’

• The phrase ‘lived experience panel’ doesn’t always communicate what people think it does.

• Effective public affairs people are facilitators, not representatives.

This is the last interview of 2025. It’s been a real pleasure having an excuse to speak to such interesting people. Thank you to everyone who subscribes and gives me the reason to do it, and especially to those of you who share Policy Unstuck on your social channels or refer your colleagues. I’m hugely grateful.

Have a great break & happy Christmas,

Tom

💡 Forthcoming training

• Generative AI for Policy Communicators, starts 6th Feb 2026

• Communicate to Persuade, starts 26th Feb 2026

• What Ministers Want, coming soon {reply ‘tell me more’ if you want a notification when it’s online}

Constituency of interest: is yours tightly defined?

Don’t tell me that you know more about my constituents than I do–you don’t. But, you probably do know much more about your constituency of interest than I do…

One of the things that was announced at the recent budget was a change to the pensions of some people who worked in the coal industry. What the trade union movement did really well in securing those victories—which are hard-fought, and they’ve been pushing for those changes for a really long time—is applicable elsewhere. They said: ‘This is of outsized importance to this named group of people. And you will not have any questions about whether we speak for them.’

If you claim to speak for a group, be very explicit about who this group of people are, whether they are carers, conservationists, young parents, whoever it is. And make sure that it is very clear to me that you know what their hopes and dreams are.

But… (sorry team)

The most effective thing to help me understand that depth of representation is for people in that group to be speaking to me themselves. Most of the time it’s a public affairs professional doing it; it’s always more effective when it’s not.

The ‘lived experience’ paradox

The trade union movement must find some of this discussion about ‘lived experience’ completely baffling. 

They find the idea that we might have to have a special process to understand what people want just completely wrong, because their bread and butter is representing the material interests of their membership–‘we don't need to have a 'lived experience panel' of ambulance drivers, because our members are ambulance drivers.’

Prejudging the person opposite you is a fool’s errand

Do you ever find yourself litigating a case that is premised on the idea that the person opposite the table from you does not care about the things that you care about? 

It may be the case that they do indeed have fundamentally different values, but the only way you'll know that is to ask.

In advocacy, as in life, approaching people having prejudged them doesn't lead to meaningful, generative, creative, respectful, equitable relationships.

→ Kirsty recommends ‘Political Philosophy: a beginners’ guide for students and politicians’, by Adam Swift {Amazon}

A lack of ideological diversity is a function of lack of curiosity

If the presenting symptom is an organisational lack of ideological or worldview diversity, I'm not saying that's not a problem—that is a problem–but the underlying problem is a lack of curiosity.

If you lack curiosity, that will be showing up in every element of your life and professional practice. You should be curious about every single person that you meet. You should be curious about what your board thinks, what your donors are motivated by, what and why other political ideologies think the way they do.

If you get that right, a lot of these other problems will sort themselves out.

When ‘don’t ask, don’t get’ goes wrong

If a campaigning organisation mobilises people to say, 'please sign an early day motion about X,' or ‘please ask a parliamentary question about Y,’ well, as a minister I can't do that. 

I don’t mind when members of the public ask me these things, but if you’re a professional public affairs person, it is your job to know this. It doesn’t reflect very well on your organisation if you ask me to do things that I just cannot do.

Ministers as policy champions within government

Asking me to effect a policy change outside my department won’t work, but I can use my internal communications channels to champion things.

I have been running a campaign to champion social clubs across government, for example. This is not me saying ‘I disagree with government policy’ but saying ‘here is a piece of our national life that I would appreciate us turning our attention to.’

Championing things internally is a fruitful way for people to get a hearing.

To those who do the civil service down…

There is a very clear distinction in function: officials have things to do, which is supply quality analysis, and ministers have things to do, which is to take decisions. 

Ministers can only make effective design decisions on the basis of unbelievably high-quality analysis, and the quality of analysis that I have received from the civil service has been really outstanding. They perform their function in a world-class way.

Good design is about structure; don’t overload

Good design matters. Acknowledge that audiences will want to get the gist as fast as possible, and then curate their own journey if and when they want to go deeper. 

Remember that your level of knowledge on your policy area is so much higher than mine. You should treat me as if I am a learner, because I do not know as much about your topic as you do. 

So, curate the knowledge accordingly, and tag it to signal to me what I need to understand, and in what order.

Thank you to the 81 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred a friend or colleague.

Plenty of criticism has been levelled at the new generation in the workplace. But, it’s pretty easy to level criticism at every other generation too. Perhaps a more useful conversation is how we can make intergenerational workforces…. work.

When Rachna mentioned the successes the New Lines Institute* comms team has had co-developing content with Gen Z colleagues—content that delivers both for their institutional brand and for those colleagues’ many thousands of social media followers—that felt like something worth exploring.

The two things I was left pondering after we spoke:

1. ‘Experience’ has a reputation problem. It is too often seen as a blocker to progress, rather than as the creator of it. That is bad for all of us in the policy space.

2. How do we get better at anticipating the outcomes of big societal changes, like working from home, or increased usage of AI?

Let me know what you think.

Tom

* The New Lines Institute is a client.

💡 Forthcoming training

• Generative AI for Policy Communicators, starts 6th Feb 2026

• Communicate to Persuade, starts 26th Feb 2026

Generation “Why?”

Gen Z is very good at asking ‘Why is it this way?’ Or ‘Is there a different way we can do it?’ They believe there is a different way a lot of the time, even if they don't have a clear idea of what that different way is. That is partly a product of being young, but it’s also partly a generational belief in decentralisation. 

Their drive for something better is not focused on institutions or nation states in the way that perhaps older generations were. Instead they are focused on decentralised organisations, networks and people-first approaches to things.

The link between AI and cognitive atrophy

Knowing something and being able to think about it critically are very different things.

I know teenagers who are asking ChatGPT to come up with the text to break up with their boyfriend. It’s a small example, but it demonstrates that they are either not confident in their own thinking, or they think this is the best way to do it. 

I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t use LLMs, but there is a question here on the wider implications of these tools. I’m concerned that the door is closing for this next generation to have creative, individual, and critical thought.

Experience matters

Younger generations sometimes think of experience as this dirty word, like ‘Oh, you're old, you don't have fresh ideas,’ or that you want to unilaterally make decisions or be dictatorial. 

Experience is not just ‘I've been working in this field for 10 years.’ Experience means that you know who to pull in to help inform decisions. It means you know who or where to go to consult. Experience is understanding the context that you are working in, and how to work with it. 

It doesn’t mean you are tired and don’t have new ideas. Quite the opposite–it means you’re much more likely to know where the new ideas will come from.

Are we letting down junior colleagues by WFH?

What I thought were established workplace norms have almost disappeared overnight. For many Gen Z staff, either they are in their first job or their first job was during COVID, so they weren't in the office experiencing professional norms.

So the boundary between what is professional and what is personal, or the idea that you need to have a professional persona, is less important to them–or maybe they don't realise that it is needed. 

I hate to hear myself say this because I love my days working from home, but… socialisation matters. How can we expect Gen Z to pick up these norms if they are only in the office one day a week? 

For example, Gen Z feel empowered to create content–great. But there isn’t always an understanding of why you have peer feedback, strategic direction, and workshopping. There’s a sense of ‘I have this great idea, I'm just going to go record it, do it, and publish it.’

That works for a personal social media account, but that quickly comes undone on corporate platforms. Norms and process are there for a reason.

The key to successful collaboration: guardrails

We’ve had a lot of success with Gen Z colleagues creating content, and leveraging their personal channels and networks to get it out there. Key to making it work is having quality control, some standardisation, and making sure it is additive to the organisational brand.

We look for coherence between what our research focuses on, and the personal brands of our Gen Z colleagues. We’ll think through whether the person is the right fit to talk about that particular policy area, whether their channel is the right fit given the other things they post about, and whether there is any reputation risk to posting New Lines content on that channel.

We let them write the first script for the content, then we iteratively edit it until we get to a point where my Gen Z colleague feels like the content is true to themselves and honest, and the comms team also feels like it’s within the guidelines for New Lines. The video is always posted on our organisational channels first, and then colleagues can share it in the way that they want on their own channels.

We know we need to engage younger audiences with our ideas. And to do that we need to find a way of working with colleagues to speak to those audiences, but without taking away from the analysis. Younger staff have a lot to offer and their contributions are critical. But at the same time, if too much of your content is being produced by people seen to be quite new in the space… you have to be careful about perceptions of credibility and expertise.

Do androids dream of viral tweets?

What’s going to be critical to communications in the future is understanding how digital channels actually work. What is the algorithm secret behind each? 

I'm sure that by 2035 there'll be a hundred new digital channels and digital networks that we'll be engaging in. How does network behaviour on digital channels happen? Which algorithms are being used to promote which types of content over others? And how can we reverse-engineer content so that we maximise reach and engagement on each one? 

It will become more technical, more Game Theory computer science vibe, than the more qualitative gut-feel approach to comms that we are used to.

Thank you to the 81 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred a friend or colleague.

Some time ago, someone in the midst of a special adviser (SpAd) recruitment process asked what Policy Unstuck interviewees had to say on what these roles are like. (For those outside the UK, a SpAd is a ministerially-appointed political adviser.)

If your job involves influencing or working with political advisers, and you are an avid Policy Unstuck reader sold on the idea of bureaucratic ethnography, this issue is for you.

As ever, feedback most welcome.

Tom

If you try to grip everything, you grip nothing

Robert Ede, former Special Adviser to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.

Pressing issues were like little piranha bites out of my day, and with each one the amount of time I had to think about the long term eroded. When I came into government, I remember talking to another special adviser who had worked in government before. I said that I wanted to spend about a third of my time thinking about longer term stuff. He laughed, shook his head, and said 'you are completely naive'.

You quickly realise that if you try and grip everything, you grip nothing. I came in thinking ministers need to have more control and oversight. Over time though, I realised that there is only so much you can oversee; you have to focus on where the politics adds most value.

My advice to new advisers is to work out who the officials and externals are who you can really trust. You need to identify the people who get what the secretary of state's priorities are and won't put anything forward that is ill thought-through. Then you can let their submissions go through with a little less scrutiny, and use that time to focus on the things that are high on the worry list. If you try and do it all the risk is you burn out far too quickly. Trust and relationships are a shortcut to doing slightly less while getting more done.

→ Read Robert’s full Policy Unstuck interview here.

Figure out the problems with a policy as soon as possible

Hannah Guerin, former Special Adviser to various Secretaries of State, including in the Home Office, the Department of Health, and the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.

We would always think about it from the opposing side: what problems would I highlight if I were my opposite number? If it's some kind of funding policy or a formula, which areas of the country are going to benefit? Is it viable at a national scale, or on a smaller scale? Who are going to be the winners and losers? How is it going to play with our election targets? 

You need to think through how to mitigate the problems before you make big announcements. That doesn't mean 'don't talk about it'. Lots of people are concerned about keeping policy under wraps and keeping it secret, but getting out and talking about it and working out how and where the problems are can really speed up delivery of what you want to achieve. You've just got to know this stuff in order to get your policy through in the first place if you're having to negotiate with Treasury or Number 10. These are the questions advisers will be asking. With finite time and finite resources, you've got to be really clear on the benefit of what you're trying to deliver.

My advice to new advisers is to step back. There is so much going on, you are so time poor. Everyone is pulling you in a hundred different directions. Have a not-to-do list as much as a to-do list. Particularly these first six months, they will pass you by unless you actually take that hour, two hours, three hours, to sit out and work out what your strategy is for what you want to be true at the end of the year. Be kind to yourself.

→ Read Hannah’s full Policy Unstuck interview here.

Understand the nature of power

James Nation, former Deputy Director of the Number 10 Policy Unit, and former Special Advisor to the Chancellor.

Getting policy unstuck depends on the issue. If it's something with a quick fix, then it can be something that the PM says at PMQs or where he wants a particular situation or a small pot of money or regulation change, provided that's not too hard legislatively. In those cases action can happen quite quickly. But for the more systemic issues where you have to fundamentally change a culture in a department or maintain pressure from the centre, then that resolute focus and accountability on that department, of course, is harder.

It comes down to a variety of factors around the intangible nature of power and effective power. What is the Prime Minister's position? What kind of majority do you have in Parliament? If it's something legislative and then with the Department, it's making them believe that this is something that you are going to be consistently held to account on.

But also, have you got that link between the people at the top and the delivery side? There are so many gaps in between, and authority and detail get lost as it moves through the system. If you can get direct contact between people who are known to have the Prime Minister's ear - or even the PM himself - and delivery people, that really helps make things happen but, given time pressures, choose your moments and the issue.

If you're thinking about Special Advisor roles in the new Government, you're probably a thoughtful person in your particular area and you've got a lot to contribute. You've been in opposition or you've been in think tanks thinking about all of this for quite some time. So trust your instincts and remember that you are there as that person to challenge and to try and engage with the outside world as much as you can, even while you're also directing or helping to direct the Civil Service machine. Try and hold on to that - it's difficult. It's an enormous privilege to work in these roles, you've got that chance to shape things. Enjoy it.

→ Read James’ full Policy Unstuck interview here.

The three questions you need to have answers to at all times

Jack Sellers, former Special Adviser to the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Wales.

My advice to SpAds is always to stay strategic and above the detail. There are policy experts employed who have specific niches and expertise. Trust them to do the work, and when it comes to you, maintain the strategic level. Focus on: Why are we doing this? Who is it aimed at? What are the politics?

Special advisers are political appointees, so they serve as reminders of the politics—why you're doing something, how it fits into the government's agenda. From a comms perspective, we can't tell the public we have five priorities and then start talking about something completely random. People will think, "I thought you were focused on this other thing." Government narrative is crucial.

You see this with Labour at the moment. The feedback they're getting is: "What are they actually doing?" With us, people knew what we were trying to do—they might not have agreed with it, but they could identify our five priority areas. With Labour currently, it's less clear.

→ Read Jack’s full Policy Unstuck interview here.

Thank you to the 81 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred a friend or colleague.

I had the fortune to speak alongside Rakesh at this year’s On Think Tanks conference (on how to get policy unstuck, of course). His contributions were a conference highlight. Anyone who stands up in front of a room full of think tankers and tells them to stop thinking (!) is worth hearing out.

The three things I took away from his Policy Unstuck interview:

1. Fuzzy goals are not just a sign of poor management, but a failure of moral responsibility.

2. Policy is a means to an end. Make sure you are clear on the end you are striving for, and critically assess whether policy is the right instrument to realise it.

3. Unrestricted funding is the reward of strategic coherence, not its cause.

Let me know what you think.

Tom

Policy is not the be all and end all

Getting the policy right is really important, but it's maybe 10% of the work. Getting the implementation and execution right is 90%.

Implementation is not about just following the blueprint. It is a complex, intellectual challenge. Getting to things like a shared clarity of purpose, aligning incentives, establishing trust and relational accountability is hard. The design of execution, well beyond policy, really matters.

When we become members of the fundamentalist church of policy, we fall into the trap of thinking “good stuff is not happening because we do not have the right policy”. We make the assumption that the lack of a good policy is the core problem, when the core problem may be something else, like why the issue is not politically salient.

The importance of people-level outcomes

If we make policy reform the end goal, then we can bang on endlessly at something that may not be ultimately effective, and we have no way of checking ourselves. 

The right thing to focus on is a meaningful or measurable difference in people’s lives. That allows us to test whether our assumptions and actions on what needs to be done are correct, and adjust as we go along. For example, if children in care are being abused, new policies may not help if the true problem is under-resourced institutions, corrupt leadership, or demotivated staff. 

So make the outcome–in this case that all children in care settings are safe–our goal. And then work backwards from that goal to devise and prioritise our actions, of which policy reform may or may not be a critical part.

The folly of fuzzy ambition

If we have fuzzy goals, the likelihood is that we'll do fuzzy things and not deploy our talent and energy and resources in the most effective way. 

Defining clear outcomes is not about being finicky. It is first and foremost a moral responsibility, because how we frame the goal will shape what we prioritise and do, and how we measure progress. Clear outcomes help us be accountable. 

For example, we could succeed at a goal of “kids should be in school” and still fail the kids. They could all be in school and still not learn to read and count, or experience violence and bullying. A better goal would be something like “all children in third grade should be able to read and count, and be safe”.

To have this level of strategic clarity and focus, we need to safeguard our independence. That means no longer begging for support from donors. No longer twisting ourselves into pretzels to fit their whims, but instead persuade them to fit our goals. 

Unrestricted funding is earned 

First, make our work of really high quality. Focus on tangible human-level impact with clear outcomes and an evidence-informed approach. Explain how we are going to measure and adapt. Have clear governance and accountability mechanisms. Getting this right is deep work, but it is worth it because it is more likely to produce work that commands respect.

Second, less is more. One cannot do deep work on too many things. When we do too much, we become beholden to continuous fundraising and maintaining staffing, rather than focusing on impact. We must step back, reflect on the outcomes that matters most, and pare down. The quality of attention one can bring to a task is probably the most underrated quality of success. 

Third, develop Board-approved policies and practices for funder relations. This should cover how and why we will:

• only raise funds for work that is consistent with our values, mission and strategy;

• define contract and reporting terms;

• avoid dependence on single donors–and not have too many small donors;

• and set boundaries on board seats, site visits, and the like.

These policies provide a backbone to navigate power relations, and far too many NGOs do not have anything of the sort.

Beware the self-fulfilling prophecy

I’ve had colleagues hear this advice about setting boundaries with funders, smile, and shake their heads. Many think tank and NGO leaders do not believe that they can set the funding agenda. They feel the power dynamic is fixed.

If we believe it can never happen, it won’t. There was a time when people believed that women would never have the vote, or that gay people would never be able to get married. Things are impossible until they are not, and the difference is people working to make it happen despite the odds.

Shrinking to grow

One of the healthiest things we can do is to turn down money that doesn’t align with our values or approach. Yes, it may mean needing to cut activities and let go of staff.

Part of the journey is recognising that we might need to get smaller to achieve the strategic coherence that is necessary for focus and impact. The point is not the size of our organisation or budget, but the clarity of our purpose and the meaningfulness of our impact. 

Turning down money from a donor on principle can set the foundation for long-term success. It can signal to donors that we stand for something, that we care more about the necessary conditions for impact over the quantum of funding, that we are not desperate or ‘money-hungry’, that we expect to be treated as equal partners, that we have integrity. Our reputation goes up. 

And, besides, when we deal with funders with this posture, it can feel delicious.

Thank you to the 81 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred a friend or colleague.

Today’s guest is the head of policy at one of the top 100 UK companies by market capitalisation. We agreed to keep the interview anonymous so they had more freedom in what they could say.

The conversation covered: how you can shape outcomes at events that you aren’t able to be at, what makes a good trade association, how this FTSE100 uses its access to capital markets to give civil servants what they cannot get, and why net zero is dead.

If you’re one of the hundred plus readers that have subscribed to this newsletter over the past week… Cast from Clay is a policy communications consultancy. We advise on:

1. Strategy: positioning, fundraising, team structure

2. Communications: brand development, public affairs, campaigns

3. Digital: website design, data products, AI workflows

Hit reply if you’d like to connect.

Tom

The power of the vignette

Working with HM Treasury can be incredible–if you get the right person. Obviously you go in with the economic argument. Your beginning, middle, and end is the economic argument. And if you can’t do that, you shouldn't be having the meeting. 

Maybe 30% of the proof points we use with the Treasury are from Reuters, Bloomberg, the Financial Times or something with comparable credibility. And then the remaining 70% are vignettes from the real economy and interactions with the capital markets, because that’s what civil servants can’t easily get. 

They can get the stats readily enough, but stats don’t really change anyone’s mind, particularly in a one-to-one meeting. It’s those anecdotes and cautionary tales that get cut through.

Trade associations: what makes a good one?

The worst trade associations do their own thing. Their mission drifts when there are changes of leadership.  They don’t consult with their members or encourage input. They don’t notice inactive members or members that have gone quiet; they take you for granted. A strong indicator of a bad trade association is if you are a member and you have no idea who to pick up the phone to.

Every year I have to justify the £20,000 or £30,000 membership fee for a trade association. What you need going into that meeting is the collateral that demonstrates the value the trade association delivers. The good ones are always on top of that, making sure that it’s really easy for me to make that case.

The best ones are when you have someone that feels like they’re part of your team. You can pick up the phone and bounce ideas off each other. You can cook things up together. 

The think tank gold standard…

E3G* are brilliant. They’re always in the right place at the right time saying considered and sensible things. They just nail it time and time again. They’ve got this hall of fame: the Transition Pathway Taskforce, the Powering Past Coal Alliance*, the Global Climate Action Agenda. They’re in the top five globally in terms of think tanks. They don’t have the brand recognition outside of the wonk circle, but I don’t think they need it.

They are influential because they don’t try to do everything. They have this precision focus on the key things that can cause a modal shift. 

I know it can be hard for think tanks, because you don’t get to choose who pays your bills, and they might want to cover different ground. But it’s the hallmark of a good think tank that they’re able to persuade those that pay the bills to come around to their way of thinking, and to get them to back those ideas.

* E3G and PPCA are clients.

Net Zero is dead

On the Outrage and Optimism podcast, Christiana Figueres was talking about how ‘net zero’ is the least motivating phrase ever. What does it even mean? It doesn’t mean cheaper bills. It doesn’t mean cleaner air. 

There’s so much upside that we could capture. We should articulate something that is more positive, that makes you want to move towards it rather than move away from it.

We need to learn from the communication tactics of those that are against net zero. When you watch some of their speeches and public broadcasts, even if it’s not your political cup of tea, you feel yourself buying into it because it’s so well thought through. 

Net zero doesn’t cut through… the question is what we do instead.

How to shape events from afar

A lot of people who want to be at COP aren’t going, whether because of logistics, budget cuts, or concerns about being seen on the ground during the sustainability backlash.

If you can’t be at big multilaterals, you need to be imaginative about how you can get your ideas on the table. If you’re looking at COP next year and you think you can’t go, what are the preceding forums leading up to that where decisions are made? Is it the African Climate Summit in the first half of next year? The UN General Assembly? New York Climate Week? IMF annual meetings?

Which government departments can you work with that will be sending people to COP or whichever multilateral it is? Brief them in person ahead of time with a leave-behind that says ‘this is what we would ideally like to see and why’, with those economic vignettes alongside. That constructive approach lands really well in my experience… and put those trade association memberships to work! 

Thank you to the 78 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred a friend or colleague.

Tom (M) replied to a previous Policy Unstuck saying “I'd be interested in a future edition that sets out what you (or one of your interviewees) think makes for a good public affairs KPI. We had something at YoungMinds where we kinda did it on vibes…”

So, we talked vibes-based KPIs, and:

1. Remembering that you’re not at the centre of the universe. Campaign planning fails when it assumes everything flows from your actions. Instead, recognise you are but one player in a complicated context.
   

2. The three tests for a theory of change: Is it easy to explain? Is it built around barriers to change? Is it easily rewritable?
   

3. Being careful what you agonise over. Tom’s team agonised over an output, only to find out it was completely ignored by target decision-makers.

See what you think, and if you’ve got an idea for a future edition of Policy Unstuck (or the name of an interviewee you think would be great), hit reply and let me know.

Tom (H)

P.S. the next cohort of our 5 week online training, Generative AI for Policy Communicators, starts later today. If you want to sneak in before it starts, you can register here.

The vibes-based approach to public affairs KPIs

KPIs tend to fall into two categories, and both are problematic. 

The first is definitive: have we won or have we not? Have we secured this change or have we not? Which is often what you're judging yourself on when you're reporting to your board or a funder. 

The second is super output-y: how many consultation responses have we submitted? How many MPs have we met? But these don’t correlate with progress in any meaningful way. 

The sorts of questions KPIs should be formulated around are vibes-based.

If you’re a team that can be honest with itself and the people you're reporting to, then you can answer subjective questions like: have we got the relationship with the minister that we need? And you can grade it from ‘they're not replying to us, zero out of ten’ to ‘we're chatting weekly, ten out of ten.’

At YoungMinds there were a host of similar questions we used: are we being invited to the big meetings? Are they checking in with us before they make a big announcement? Are we the go-to organisation for media comment? Have we got enough MPs batting for us?

You can measure those things and you can discuss them in some depth, but really you’re going on that overall sense of ‘are we making progress we need to in these areas?’

Sometimes pressure for output-based KPIs comes from people who are conditioned to want things you can count as evidence that you’re succeeding. And I suppose that’s where trust comes in.

The fallacy at the heart of many theory of change processes

The key thing that theory of change processes often get wrong is they assume that you’re at the centre of the universe, that everything flows from the actions that you take. If you write a theory of change that looks like that, you’re going to get it wrong.

But if you write a theory of change which says ‘all this stuff is happening around us, we are but a player in it. How do we navigate that external environment?’ Then it can be really useful.

So you're asking yourselves: what are the motivations of the other players? Why are they behaving as they are? Why are they making the decisions they are? And what power have you got to lead them to behave differently, or make different decisions?

To do that, you need to be really clear about what it is you are trying to change. You have to be really focused on who is the person ultimately who’s going to make this call and what exactly you want them to do.

Why isn't your target already doing what you want?

Always ask why aren’t you already winning, or why your target is not already doing what you want them to do.

If you frame everything around that question then you are getting inside their heads: ‘okay, they’re making this decision because they’re motivated by these things, or they’re under pressure from these groups, or they’re in a context which is challenging for these reasons.’ So, the reason why this person isn't already making these decisions is because of this, this, and this. 

If you can whittle that down to a top two or three, then you’re onto something because you can really focus on: what are the biggest reasons why this isn't already happening and what can we do about those things?

The three tests for your theory of change

There are a few ways to sense check your theory of change. The first is whether you can describe it in 60 seconds. If not, you’re probably focusing on too many things. The second is whether it is built around the barriers to change, and the idea that a lot of what you’re trying to do is outside your control. And lastly, is it written to be rewritten?

If you’ve written one which is really intricate and you’ve got all these lines and you're like ‘Oh god, if I move that…’ then you’re not going to rewrite it, and it won’t get updated and used as a living document–it won’t be useful.

In one recent campaign where we were being fobbed off by the minister, that lack of quality engagement  was one of our barriers to change. But once we got in the door, that wasn’t a barrier anymore, so we can take it out of the theory of change, and replace it with ‘the minister is unconvinced by our evidence base’. You don't have to spend ages rewriting the whole thing, just update it so you are focused on what needs to happen here and now.

What are you doing that you think matters, but your target does not?

I had a campaign once which was targeting Ofsted [a non-ministerial department in the UK that monitors education standards–the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills]. At the end, I had a meeting with a key person as he was leaving Ofsted and we had a really candid conversation. 

I asked ‘what did you think when we did this or that?’ For example, we made a film and there was so much debate internally about whether it was too punchy–we agonised over it. 

He hadn’t watched the film. No one at Ofsted had watched the film. 

But one of the things that was really powerful was young people emailing Ofsted as part of the consultation. Because there was such a volume of it—and they were a little bit annoyed because there were some safeguarding things that came through—he accepted that the fact that so many people were writing in meant that they had to give that more attention in the room.

It’s a good reminder that often the things that cut through the best are when we put people affected by the policy in front of decision-makers in some way.

Thank you to the 75 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred a friend or colleague.

In late 2001, Politico published an article calling Paul Adamson the ‘godfather of lobbying’. It conjures up an image that couldn’t be further from the truth. But a source of wisdom on public affairs, he is.

Paul’s key points:

1. KPI’s make little sense. The impulse to measure the things that can be measured—like meetings—can drive you toward things that have no impact.

2. Brussels is a different league to Westminster. It’s more complex, more arcane, multilingual—and you can't rely on the old school ties that can work in the Westminster village.

3. The flaw of a generalist civil service. The UK civil service's generalist culture means officials never stay long enough in the EU to build institutional knowledge, or the relationships that matter.

Finally, the next cohort of our 5 week online training, Generative AI for Policy Communicators, kicks off next week. Find out more and register here.

Have a great weekend when you get there,

Tom

The UK civil service problem

The UK is incredibly bad at keeping people in one policy domain for an extended period of time. They never build the relationships they need to have those trusted conversations about what needs to happen–they remain generalists.

It's so embedded in UK civil service culture. It's almost like a badge of honour on the Foreign Office side to be a generalist. You can acquire technical knowledge quite quickly, but what you're missing is the institutional knowledge, the historical knowledge. What's happened in a similar area in the past?

It's that whole thing about if a tree falls in the forest and nobody sees it, did it actually happen? They don’t know if the tree fell.

Personal relationships are also dependent on how long you stay in a place, and while you wouldn't think so in an age of AI and technology, knowing somebody is as important as it was when I arrived in Brussels 44 years ago.

Brussels is an entirely different beast to Westminster

Any Westminster operator reading this will say, ‘Goodness, he's being so dismissive about the Westminster scene.’ I just think Westminster is quite simple compared to Brussels.

Party fragmentation is now a reality, but for a long time the UK had a two-party system. Westminster was a closed shop. Outsiders didn't talk to civil servants in representing interests, although that is now changing. And at the end of the day a lot of debates in the Parliament weren't particularly interesting. Interest representation seemed an easier job to do.

You can use ‘techniques’ in Westminster that you would never be able to deploy in Brussels: ‘oh I was at school with somebody’ or ‘I went to a wedding of somebody’, because at the end of the day it's a village, the Westminster village.

In Brussels, you can't have been to school with all 27 commissioners, or know every member of the European Parliament. It’s not a physical possibility. The system is more complicated, it's more arcane, and it's multilingual. It’s a totally different beast.

Cultivate the ignored commissioners

Cultivate people who are slightly ignored. Everything in the European Commission is currently through the prism of von der Leyen and one or two other commissioners. But there are lots of other commissioners out there who are undervalued.

If you want to do an event, as long as it's not too specific, invite the commissioner for X or Y. People say 'well he or she is not responsible for that,' but they sit around the table at the weekly College meetings. They'll probably be very pleased and more available as well. So many commissioners, especially in the current Commission—and it's only a year old—are being almost neglected.

The same applies to the European Parliament. Every five years there's a 60% churn. That means 400 new members of the European Parliament roughly speaking. The top jobs, the rapporteurships, the committee chairmanships are held by the incumbents who have been there for a while—the grandees.

But there are lots of new MEPs who people don't really know about and who are looking for a role. They may have an interesting backstory–the European Parliament, unlike the House of Commons, has lots of interesting people who had real lives before becoming MEPs.

When you've got a chance to influence (and when you haven't)

You have no chance to influence when you're late to the game.

Don't self-censor, and don't be self-defeating. Don't think ‘because this thing I'm representing is unpopular’—or not even unpopular, but not on people's list of priorities—that it won’t happen. Just try it out and see what happens.

The most sensible approach is sincerity. You have to be sincere, otherwise it won't work. And make whatever you're trying to do part of the current political zeitgeist. The Draghi report, the competitiveness debate—that's a good current example in Brussels. If you can tie what you're representing to the competitiveness agenda, that is really helpful.

The illogicality of the KPI

People say we have to have lots of KPIs—a certain number of meetings, a certain number of events, or count the number of people you've met. I find it totally ridiculous, but that's the way of the world.

How do you measure influence? There's a disproportionate emphasis on the things which are measurable, so that when clients say 'what have you done for your fee?' you can point to the number of meetings or encounters you’ve had.

I’m being dismissive of course, but it’s important not to lose sight of the actual outcome.

AI reinforces the need for the personal touch

You see criticism about MEPs using AI to make speeches in Parliament. LinkedIn is full of AI-generated content, and people are writing reports and presentations in seconds.

It's creating noise but not really helping. People used to sweat hours doing PowerPoint, now they can do it in seconds. Great! But so what? Did you get the result you wanted?

Thank you to the 73 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred a colleague. If you enjoy this newsletter, please do ‘add to address book’ or reply and give me feedback (positive or negative). These are ‘positive signals’ that help Policy Unstuck land in your inbox.

Today’s piece is a bit different. Peter Betts wrote his book, The Climate Diplomat, after receiving a terminal brain cancer diagnosis. He died in October 2023. 

Betts spent the majority of his career in government working on climate, including as EU Lead Negotiator at the 2015 Paris Agreement, and as the Director of International Climate Change in the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change.

The book is a forensic assessment of climate diplomacy over a multi-decade horizon. Betts holds no prisoners on what people were like to work with, which countries impeded progress, and perhaps of most interest to a Policy Unstuck reader, how these countries obstructed progress and the roles of other actors in supporting them to do so. 

The book has a number of interesting dimensions to it, and some of you will be especially interested by Betts’ repeated critiques of NGOs–a taste of which I have included below. The book is well worth the read.

I’m grateful to Fiona MacGregor, Peter’s widow, for reviewing the edit, to Peter Jones at Profile Books for permitting me to reproduce the quotes (the subtitles are my additions), and to Charlie Ogilvie for the book.

Tom

If people change roles, they lose their most valuable currency: relationships

It is essential as a negotiator to listen carefully to one’s counterparts, and understand what really drives their position, and to accommodate their concerns while meeting one’s own. Obviously this is far more likely to be successful if it is supported by close personal relationships. All this is far more important than clever legal drafting or mastery of process. (p. 17)

[And yet, the] UK civil service constantly moves people around, particularly at senior levels. The longer the policy officials coming out from London had been in their roles, the more effective they were at helping to make the UK case. (p. 19)

Do you profoundly trust your opposite number?

The EU had formed ad hoc alliances with vulnerable countries at many points during the UNFCCC negotiations, reflecting the reality that we had many objectives in common. 

But the [Cartagena] Dialogue went much further than this. It did not just come together at the last moment at COPs: it had informal governance, an institutional structure, and, most importantly, individuals who trusted each other profoundly. This was a crucial reason for success in subsequent COPs from Cancún to Paris. (p. 93)

When your contributions to an outcome work to prevent it

A great deal of my time was spent not on substance but on thinking through how to prevent procedural disruption. It could be very hard to call out difficult countries for their procedural disruptions. This was for several reasons. 

First, NGOs and others would often be reluctant to criticise ‘developing’ countries. Second, procedural disruption by some emerging economies would be reported by the media as developing countries as a whole wanting something and being resisted by ‘developed’ countries. 

This was often flat-out wrong and many developing countries actually wanted progress and were as frustrated with procedural delays as the EU were. (p. 34)

Overall, campaigners and NGOs were dominated by what they see as a pro Global South agenda, but which in reality provided political cover for the emerging economies at the expense of the most vulnerable. (p. 55)

Ideology or progress?

The whole point of the [Cartagena Dialogue] was to try to understand each other, and find ways forward. I often worry about modern cancel culture, where unwelcome views are simply silenced. If we had applied such an approach to the Paris Agreement we would never have got anywhere. (p. 97)

[There] is a pressing need to focus on the pace of implementing policies to tackle climate change. The approach of some on the left who argue that a wealth of other global problems, not least the legacies of colonialism, should also be solved through the prism of climate change, may run the risk of impeding that pace. (p. 275)

Want to prevent progress? Prepare a massive text

The negotiating text going into Copenhagen was hundreds of pages long with multiple repetitions and was utterly impenetrable. A good editor could easily have simplified the document enormously by eliminating duplication, aligning similar proposals and bringing out specific options on issues where Parties disagreed. 

But sensible editing and synthesis was vociferously opposed by key delegations… meaning the text was essentially useless. (p. 57)

If you can’t work with them, go around them

[We] needed a new report as authoritative as [the Stern Review] had been, one that took account of technical and economic developments and showed that the short-term transition was affordable, practical and compatible with countries being able to prosper and address poverty at the same time… the idea was rejected by the Treasury. (p. 146)

How could we proceed, given the resistance of the Treasury? I had a discussion with Michael Jacobs who floated the idea of a Global Commission drawn from every part of the world who would submit the report to us.  

In other words, the Treasury could not block it or seek to shape it because it would be the Global Commission’s report, not ours. (p. 147)

Whose narrative are you narrating?

The popular TV comedy Yes Minister has in many ways served the [United Kingdom] badly…  [It] helped to create a narrative that the civil service only serves its own interests – a narrative which can even influence ministers. 

It is not the only source of this narrative. Think tanks have a vested interest in running down the civil service, because they are competing sources of advice. So too are the large consulting groups, which often provide a very poor service at much higher cost. (p. 213-214)

Be selective with who is in the room

It was decided that we would make a much longer presentation on climate to the whole of BEIS top management, starting with the science, and then going on to impacts of climate change in the UK and internationally, and finally commercial opportunities [...] 

Unfortunately, we spent almost the entire meeting with the BEIS director of finance questioning the basic science of climate change. It was saloon-bar stuff and meant we lost out on having our arguments and evidence property interrogated… It had been a complete waste of time. (p. 212)

You can buy The Climate Diplomat at Waterstones and Amazon.

In this week’s interview, Amy covers:

1. The “dystopian, divide and rule feeling” in the civil service

2. Why Dominic Cummings’ “reign of terror made the system work a lot worse”

3. And why it’s a bad thing that if “you suggest big, bold, radical ideas… people might think you're a bit loopy”

And three things we’ve got coming up:

1. [Webinar - today] How to build a policy-focused newsletter

2. [Training]: Communicate to Persuade

3. [Training]: Generative AI for Policy Communicators

Please do hit reply and let me know the good, the bad, the ugly.

Tom

The shared troubles of civil service reform

For The Human Handbrake, I interviewed 20 public service reformers—prominent ones, from ex-permanent secretaries to local authority chief executives to civil society leaders–and I asked them what it was like trying to get the system to change.

The most surprising thing about what they said is how little I’ve been surprised. Lots of this work feels less like revelation and more just recognition; someone giving a name to a colour that you've been seeing your entire career. 

The rules within the civil service around not speaking publicly, around impartiality and objectivity… They are there for good reasons, but they contribute to this almost dystopian, divide and rule feeling, that you can't talk about your shared troubles.

Over-managing is a logical response to a highly complex, risk-laden system

Throughout the political system there is this focus on blaming individuals. I don't think that really gets at the problem. 

There are huge numbers of very talented, very committed people in government all over the country. The problem is that the dysfunction in the system is a reflection of the really weird and difficult operating environment that all these people work within. 

The civil service, and politics more generally, is a very risk-laden environment: political risks, fiscal risks, delivery failure… It is vastly complicated. The human response to that feeling of overwhelm is to clamp down into the safer space of over-monitoring, over-managing things. 

The way we solve that…

It leads to a very strong argument for a more devolved government. You can have much better, saner responses to risk if you're closer to where delivery is happening on the front line. 

Do I think this is an argument for a smaller state? If you talk to any civil servant, and I've talked to a lot of them, many will concede there are parts of government where there is a lot of ‘bloat’. But they also say there are many parts in government that are completely underpowered relative to the ambition of ministers. 

It's important to be precise and nuanced about that conversation: there will be some places where smaller and more dynamic teams are really important, and others where you really need to get the ground covered better.

Yes, let’s change the system, but working with it, not against it

Dominic Cummings has had this fascinating impact on the civil service and on Whitehall reform. The aggressive way in which he took on the system massively widened the Overton window for what feels possible in terms of changing Whitehall. 

Partly because I think people are so grateful that it wouldn't be Cummings implementing it, they are now much more comfortable with reform that’s not as aggressive and destructive.

I agree with Cummings that there is a lot that needs to be changed. But I think his method–smashing up the system–is impractical. Government needs to go on. You can't tear it down and try to rebuild it on the move. It's like the car mechanics on a Ferrari trying to dismantle the parts whilst you're also still trying to win the race.

The irony is that when Cummings was in government, his reign of terror made the system work a lot worse. People felt their jobs would be on the line if they did something that wouldn't please him, which made them even more invested in hierarchy and all the things that Cummings didn't want.

Let’s evolve the system, but go with the system. As in, work supportively and respectfully with civil servants, and let's embolden them to be a bit braver about reform and more radical.

Money is not always the solution

Policymaking and the policy discourse hasn't changed a huge amount since the New Labour era. You see a lot of the same kinds of debates about policy areas and the same sorts of solutions continuing to be suggested. 

But we are in a different world. That means we need to think about different ways to respond, and think about levers other than ‘let's put X amount more money in this service.’

There are some services or some parts of government that really need more investment than they're currently getting. Money remains a massively important lever in the government's armoury. But it’s not the only thing.

I'm doing some work on children's mental health, for example, and a lot of the debates have been about how much money the UK’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service should get rather than what is making our kids sick and what healthier childhoods look like.

Yes, it’s hard to build relationships, but they really matter

Whitehall is a black box, and it's hard to figure out how to build relationships with people on the inside to see how they’re thinking and therefore how to pitch them. 

But…the currency of politics and influence is relationships. And obviously, there's massive problems with that, given that relationships are patterned by privilege. But it is the reality of human nature that relationships drive a lot of behaviour. 

What that practically means is that cold emails saying ‘here's our new report’, but you've never spoken to the person who's receiving it before, are unlikely to work. Find some kind of way to connect to the person you're sending it to. Find a way of having a conversation with them as a fellow human, rather than it just being a cold interaction. 

Similarly, try to contextualise your policy asks within an attempt to imagine where the person receiving it is coming from, which is likely a huge nexus of trade-offs. What are going to be the things that are really stressing them out? How can you be sympathetic to that in what you’re going to say, or how you’re going to say it? 

Do we value the things that will deliver?

Imagination and creativity are not necessarily valued in the very clever, scientific, think-tanky worlds and civil servant worlds, you know? There's a lot of pride in certain quarters in those spaces in being very objective, very rational, very sensible. 

If you suggest big, bold, radical ideas, there's a lot of self-censoring that happens because you feel people might think you're a bit loopy. But that’s probably where we’re going to find the ideas that really work in this different world we’re in.

A massive thank you to the 70 of you who have referred a friend or colleague to Policy Unstuck. The people with the highest number of referrals all do the same thing: they post their referral link (yours is below) on LinkedIn or Reddit with an explanation of what it is about Policy Unstuck that they find useful. And obviously please tag Tom and Cast from Clay in the post so we can reshare.

In this week’s interview, Dewi covers:

1. Why you should focus your efforts on junior civil servant engagement

2. The downside of the UK’s overly legalistic approach to governing

3. The challenges of intergovernmental workings between the nations of the UK and Ireland

We’ll be running Communicate to Persuade again soon, our 5 week online course that teaches you how to be a more persuasive communicator. Ditto our Generative AI for Policy Communicators. Check out the web pages for more information.

Have a great weekend when you get there,

Tom

The three things a special adviser needs to do

Firstly, you have to work around the hierarchy of the civil service and invest in those relationships with the people lower down who are actually doing the work and equally invest in those from outside who will be affected by your policies or even want to challenge them. Don't get caught up in the ‘it's all about being at cabinet’ and meeting your director general all the time.

But, secondly, you do need to invest in the leadership of your department. You will realise that ministers, and even less advisers, don't have the currency to move people around in the department or change the structures. It’s the permanent civil service that does that. So, you’ve got to ensure that as far as possible, the leadership of the department are aligned with what the minister and the government want to do.

And thirdly, always make sure you are the last person in the room with the minister before one of those moments where the minister has to step up and deliver… at cabinet, meetings with other ministers or externals, speaking on the floor of Parliament, whatever it is.

The value of junior civil servants to a political adviser

As an insider I got a lot of value from investing in relationships with junior colleagues. And not just because they are the ones actually doing the work who understand whatever policy in detail.

The more junior civil servants might give me intelligence on what’s being blocked by senior civil servants, or even coming to my desk–not in a surreptitious way– and saying ‘we are working on this ministerial advice but there's a blockage somewhere that means we can't get it to you.’ 

Then I’m informed so I can give a bit of push back in my weekly meeting with a senior civil servant and get things moving.

→ Read Andy Ormerod-Cloke’s interview (former Deputy Director in DfE and DESNZ), for more on why junior civil servant engagement is important.

What does the type of person in politics tell us about the values of the system?

Every single member of the Chinese Politburo has an engineering degree of some kind. And as Dan Wang says in Breakneck, something like every candidate for US president and VP going back 45 years went to law school. 

His view is that China is an engineering state. It uses a sledgehammer to get things done. Whereas America is a legalistic state, and it's the gavel that decides everything.  It's all about process and making sure you've ticked off certain things. 

That's even more true in the UK. You see the civil service trying to deliver reforms, and often it feels as if it’s the legal advice that's the most important thing. Legal advice seems to be there to prevent things happening and that drives civil servants behaviour, which ends up driving ministers’ behaviour. 

Ministers and officials need rules and regulations to prevent bad faith actors. But we should be measuring policy development and delivery against the impact it might have on the common good and better lives, rather than the bogeyman of potential judicial reviews, legal advice and pretend consultations.

Single metric impact assessments go wrong

The way the schools performance measure had been set out was that you didn't need a GCSE [academic qualification], but a BTEC [vocational qualification] would do it. Now, BTEC has its place, but it is a less accurate record of a 16-year-old's academic achievement and progression.

What we discovered was a lot of schools in disadvantaged areas were putting 100% of their kids in for BTEC, and getting a 95% pass rate. And it was doing down those kids because they then thought they were brilliant at science, but you can’t go on to be a doctor if you have a BTEC. It was fundamentally gaming the system and the targets schools were meant to be meeting.

I'm a big believer in data and using it to inform both policy delivery and understanding. But that was a great example of how measuring the wrong thing leads you down the wrong path. It’s something we’ll be looking at as part of the new national Research Capability Hub for social scientists.

England needs to learn from its fellow nation states

PolicyWise works across the nations of the UK and Ireland. Our Wise in 5 briefings compare policy across those administrations on everything from tourist taxes, to cosmetic procedures, to education for refugees. Each administration can learn things from the others, but that’s not without challenges.

Sometimes you hear anglophobia in the devolved nations. England is seen as the big brother philosophically, it's generally a bit of an outlier to the others, and there can be a sense of ‘we're not going to learn from the pesky English.’ That's just wrong, isn't it?

At the same time, there is sometimes still the view that Westminster policy, which generally is English domestic policy, is the norm or the standard, as if it is the real policy and the others are just diverging from it. Well no, that's not how devolution works. 

The other countries' systems or policies are happening in their own contexts and for their own reasons, generally not as a response to what's happening in Westminster. Westminster may find it can learn from them. We’ve got to do better at getting the culture and structures of intergovernmental relations right.

-> Read PolicyWISE’s research in this space here.

Yes, you do need to engage Reform

I’m of the view you have to engage as long as a party is not beyond the pale, and Reform is not beyond the pale. So, I think you should engage with them and their prescription on what's going wrong. Some of that has merit in terms of political disempowerment, and the distance between decision-making and the people who are on the blunt end of those decisions.

Look, they have two metro mayors in England at the moment and those mayors don't have a massive prospectus yet and are looking for ideas. That is an opportunity to engage–they are in charge of big budgets and will have an emphasis on place-based policy.

→ We’re helping a number of clients think through their approaches to Reform. Reply to this email if you would like to discuss how you should approach the changing political winds.

For those of you not in the food policy world, the 2019 EAT-Lancet Commission collated a team of scientists to define what a healthy diet from a sustainable food system looks like. It recommended more plant-based foods, and limited meat and dairy consumption.

It also made a splash: 28k report downloads in the first 6 months, over a million social shares, and 5.8k media articles. Most impressively, it has had nearly 600 policy citations, making it one of the most influential scientific reports ever.

But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. The report was the subject of a significant ‘mud-slinging’ campaign, which attacked the recommendations of the report (and the people behind it).

The 2025 Commission launches tomorrow. Ahead of it, I was curious to learn what Fabrice, EAT’s Chief Science Officer, had taken away from the previous launch, and what the lessons are more broadly for Policy Unstuck readers.

As ever, feedback gratefully appreciated.

Tom

Don’t completely close the door on those who disagree with you

I've been asked by some of our partners why we're not giving more attention to critical actors in Brazil, the United States, or some in the meat sector. The question is why would I? I could blow millions of dollars engaging with groups unlikely to change.

Instead, one of the things that has been useful is to say ‘let's focus on those who want to change’ and leave the door open to those who may want to be part of that in the future. 

And by leaving the door open and being open to dialogue, we now have very courageous dairy and meat actors who were antagonists in 2019 but who will be in Stockholm for the launch of the 2025 Commission.

In practice, leaving the door open means… 

We had individuals and organisations who invited us to engage in spaces that were likely to be more antagonistic, and we showed up.

We went to the World Farmers’ Organisation general assembly with the late David Nabarro. We went to Cornell and had a debate on meat and dairy. We went to talk to Irish beef producers. We created the Science to Solutions series with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

When we had the opportunity to sit down with people in person and explain the science and listen to their concerns… even if there wasn’t agreement when we left, by sitting down face-to-face we built trust and understanding. Most importantly, an understanding that we weren’t out to ‘get’ anyone.

Scientists have a duty to engage society, but through the right channels

I don't think that scientists are well set up for public engagement. It's really important, particularly in democracies, that society decides how it wants to move forward on any policy area, and scientists have a role to play in informing that.

For us, we want society to understand what the consequences are of not moving towards a healthy diet. For example, in the US, that consequence is just under 50% obesity. Globally, the food system contributes 30% towards climate change. But, with innovation and better practices, that contribution to climate change could be almost zero.

So we’re doing things radically different to most academic models. Instead of sitting on a shelf for years, our reports feed directly into action. 

We've created 10 communities for action, from farmers, to fishers, to chefs, restaurants and food service providers. Each has written its own briefs, in its own language, which lay out concrete commitments about what each group will do, what they will stop doing, and where they need help.

These communities of action speak the language of that community–the farmer's brief is written by farmers in a farmer’s language. So the science is communicated by those who can best translate the science into action for that specific community.

Fight the battle you can win, not the one that is hopeless

Of course there are vested interests. I have a friend who’s a soybean farmer in Iowa. He wanted me to drive his tractor one day, so we went outside and there’s a beautiful big barn with a gorgeous John Deere tractor in there along with millions of dollars of equipment.

If you go and say ‘Well, I think you should grow almonds and not soybean’... it’s a non-starter. 

Rather, we started talking about protecting rivers and streams, keeping his soils covered, precision fertiliser applications… meeting him on his field in his conditions, so to speak. 

A key part of where we’re trying to be better about our engagement is recognising where people are at the moment and being able to find solutions that match that context, while promoting and moving towards a longer-term vision of the change that we need to implement.

Are you the right messenger?

One bit of misinformation in 2019 came from an article that said the majority of the EAT-Lancet commissioners were vegans and vegetarians. But the author missed that I spent seven years in Latin America working on livestock and agricultural environmental management at a university in Costa Rica with farmers from throughout Central America. 

So being able to say ‘yeah, I've been on a cattle farm, yeah, I've milked cows, and yeah, I went to Iowa State and I worked with soy and maize farmers, I was at UC Davis working with Central Valley pistachio and almond farmers’... That has been important in terms of being able to say, ‘All right, this isn't someone who has never been on a farm before.’

I care about farmers and farming, which gives me an entry point that farmers can relate with. 

On the subject of messengers…

We heard from Donald Trump that this is about killing all cows. Technically, the meat sector is about killing cows.

This is about including meat on the menu, but in healthy proportions, with production practices that reduce environmental harm.

The 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission launches tomorrow, Friday 3rd October. Read more about it here.