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The first round of the Prize asked candidates to submit an essay entitled “How will Brexit affect the UK public affairs industry?”. Below is the entry submitted by Anna Jobling, Senior Consultant at Interel. You can also view Jonathan Millman's entry online here. |
The PRCA has announced the
How will Brexit affect the UK’s public affairs industry?
Brexit dominates the UK political agenda so it’s unsurprising that it will have a monumental impact on our industry. The common narrative is that Brexit will be good for business. However, if we do not anticipate and adapt to the changing environment this growth will be threatened. Below, I explore three ways in which Brexit will affect the industry and more importantly, how professionals should be responding.
Crucial and accountable
During the Brexit negotiations, our industry will be critical in making sense of the complex and uncharted political process. We will be invaluable in identifying opportunities, spotting threats, helping to secure positive outcomes for business and helping clients to make relationships early. As a result, public affairs companies are seeing a boost in business, with new clients and growth of existing accounts.
However, in such a rich environment for specialist support, we may see new consultancies opening and one-man band operations grow. As an industry, we need to engage with new companies, encourage them to join the PRCA and APPC, and to abide by the Codes of Conduct and Professional Charter, which uphold industry standards. Therefore, to maintain the growth of the industry, we need to ensure best practice so that the industry is not brought into disrepute.
Busy political agenda
A Conservative MP recently shared an anecdote with me, that when he first joined Parliament in 1992 every room in the upper committee corridor would have a public bill committee scrutinising legislation line by line. Since then legislation has increasingly been made at an EU level and accordingly the legislative agenda has been less crowded.
Brexit will see a reversal of this trend and there will be much more parliamentary activity for consultants to keep abreast of. Consultancies should be ensuring they are adequately resourced for this increase in activity so that clients are well-placed to seize the opportunities. In the short term, we must ensure that Parliament looks beyond Brexit and guard against important issues to our clients being squeezed out, which in turn could mean clients put non-Brexit related activity on hold. Both of these factors will be important to ensuring the longevity of relationships with clients.
Changing the message
Brexit showed there was a disconnect between politicians and people, which is more severe than ever before. We are also seeing a shift from left-right politics to identity politics. Politicians are increasingly aware of this and will look for policies to appeal to those voters. We need to understand this dynamic and help identify opportunities for our clients to work with this trend.
It is also quite easy for businesses to complain to politicians and civil servants about the negative impact of Brexit. To prevent fatigue, we need to balance this by working with our clients to create a more balanced message and ascertain how they can work with Government to generate growth and opportunity in the future.
While advising our clients on messaging is already a key component of what we do, the challenge for us will be to ensure we understand the new dynamics at play and the changed external environment.
Concluding thoughts
Sir Gus O’Donnell said Brexit is the greatest challenge for Whitehall since WWII. This is not the case for public affairs, as making sense of the chaos, forging new relationships and getting a client’s voice heard is our bread and butter. However, only the companies who seek to understand and have a strategy to adapt to this new environment will make the most of this opportunity.