Lee Cain: Urgent overhaul of government communications needed to avoid Covid ‘failures’

In a guest paper for the Institute for Government, Lee Cain, Boris Johnson’s former Downing Street director of communications, calls for an overhaul of government communications and media handling to ensure a “failing” system does not repeat mistakes made at the start of the pandemic.

Modernising the Government Communication Service is published today, alongside the IfG response (also attached) to Cain’s recommendations. Alex Thomas, IfG programme director, welcomes Cain’s ideas to strengthen the GCS but argues that better messaging is no substitute for coherent policy nor a remedy for misleading statements from government.

Cain, who worked in No.10 from 2019 to 2020, argues that unclear lines of responsibility, endemic leaking and inconsistent policy development contributed to the mixed messages that undermined the government’s Covid response. He calls for a major restructuring of government communications and a shift away from a “predominantly analogue system in a digital age” to one that “drives public confidence in the government’s direction and actions”.

Cain’s proposed reforms include:

• strengthening the GCS by bringing it under one umbrella organisation with more senior leadership
• restoring civil servants as the lead press/official spokesperson in their departments to reduce the reliance on special advisers
• reducing the numbers of comms officers across Whitehall from 8,000 to fewer than 2,000 (eventually capping at 30–40 per department) but with increased remunerations and training
• increasing the focus on digital and broadcast communication, putting it on par with print
• renewing the government’s commitment to hold regularly televised press briefings, fronted by the prime minister or his press secretary, to increase accountability.

Cain argues there is much the government can be proud of in its handling of the pandemic – such as the success of the ‘Stay Home’ campaign. But in his critique of its communications failures, Cain highlights a structure that has failed to evolve – leaving communications officials lacking the seniority of their policy counterparts, and a system that was fundamentally unprepared for a crisis the scale of Covid.

Cain also sets out how the “strains of the system became clear as the government came under increasing pressure” during the crisis:

• The new Cabinet Office media ‘hub’ created to manage Covid communications “performed poorly due to an opaque remit, weak leadership structure and inexperienced or poorly skilled team”.
• The government had “no data-visualisation capability in the early days of the pandemic [and] there was no one who had the ability to create slides for the daily press conference… slides were often sent only moments before press conferences were due to begin”.
• Because the “vast majority” of government communications staff “do not have an adequate understanding of strategic communications or campaigns” the “poor first iteration of the Covid campaign… had to be scrapped and restarted with outside expertise”.

Lee Cain said:

“Brexit and Covid presented the government with two of the most significant challenges since the end of the Second World War, and while there were many successes in communication, there were also lessons to be learned.”

Alex Thomas, programme director at the IfG, has responded (attached) to Cain’s paper:

“While Lee Cain is right to call for a strengthening of the Government Communication Service, structural changes alone won’t repair the damage that a lack of honesty and transparency from leaders has done to public trust. Confidence in government messaging depends on being able to distinguish political spin from factual information. Journalists dispute official statements not because press officers lack confidence or status, but because too often information is incomplete, wrong or left uncorrected when errors are exposed. Even the best government communications team cannot obscure poor policy decisions or indecisive leadership.”