Abstract
It is difficult to divine the public purposes of UK government communications, since they are rarely if ever explicitly stated. This chapter draws on two main sources of evidence—official documents, and interviews with government communicators about their public role over time—to set out some basic criteria for good public communication. The one effort to shore up government communications by introducing explicit public values, the 2004 Phillis Report, was quietly abandoned in 2010 in a ‘year zero’ approach to history. Since then, government communications has become more marketing-focused, more closely aligned to political manifestos and more subject to strategic control by politicians. Without widely understood and shared public values, to what ends can the public, parliament and the media hold the service accountable?
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Notes
- 1.
The Phillis Report is available in the Government archives at https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100407175617/http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/reports/communications_review.aspx
- 2.
It is puzzling that a House of Commons Library Standard Note (SN/PC/06050) Abolition of the COI (2011), which is mildly critical of some of the processes (or possibly the lack of them) behind the closure, has been removed from circulation and is no longer available—with no reason given. My query to the Library went unanswered.
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Garland, R. (2021). What Makes Good Government Communication?. In: Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77576-6_9
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