Season 4, Episode 7: How can charities influence policy?

Transcript

Stella Tsantekidou 

Hello and welcome to the Catch22Minutes podcast with me, Stella Tsantekidou. I’m Head of Policy and Campaigns at Catch22 and today we are talking all about influencing. Specifically, how charities can influence the government.  

Charity campaigning was never going to be as well-resourced as lobbying by the private sector, but at the moment with government cuts and the cost-of-living crisis, it means that the charity sector is working under increasing financial constraints. Whether they receive national or local government funding, or they’re relying on the goodwill of the private donors or the public, charities have to make do with limited resources. So this means that we have to be even more strategic about how we try to influence government.  

Now with me to discuss the best strategies to do that and some of the considerations that we all need to make is Babs Williams. Babs, would you like to introduce yourself?  

Babs Williams 

Hi Stella. Glad to be with you on this podcast today. I am someone who is a former lobbyist, and I’m currently heading an AI (Artificial Intelligence) startup focused on reducing domestic violence. But yeah, I suspect I’m here in my former – in the guise of my former hat. 

Stella Tsantekidou 

Yes, indeed. I mean you have a lot of interesting opinions about how to influence government and about charities and obviously you work with a lot of other charities and – British politics, you are a keen follower of British politics, obviously, and you’ve worked in and around politics for how many years now?  

Babs Williams 

All right. I mean, that’s just essentially asking what my age is. I’ve worked in, and around politics for around 17 years. 

Stella Tsantekidou 

Well, I’m sure over these years you will have seen a lot of changes, as have I. I have been in the UK for 10 years and we will be talking a little bit about later about what charities can do when they’re seeing policy changes happening which are not for the better, but they are for the worst.  

But let’s start with my first question, which is one, of the things I have noticed over the last decade of being in and around British politics and working in the charity sector in the UK, is that no matter the policy area, whenever you talk to people working for frontline services, one of the things they all want is: first, they want more funding. You will always see that from all charities. They all just want more funding. And the second thing is they’re really crying out for more long term funding over short term funding because obviously it means that they can plan better. Often it means things are cheaper if you have longer term funding for your programmes.  

And they are always asking me, how can we convince the government to one, give us more money, or two, give us the financial stability of extra time. Do you have an opinion on one, what do you do if basically your policy ask is just government please give us more money? And two, do you have any solutions on how to convince politicians that long term solutions are better than short term fixes? 

Babs Williams 

So I think there’s… essentially, I don’t think that charities are alone in this. I think every organisation in every sector wants more money or thinks it needs more money and every organisation would love to have more money in the long term versus the short term ie. it being guaranteed over a longer cycle. So again, charities aren’t alone. I suppose the question that we have to ask is, is why do charities need this money in the long term, over other sectors? And I’m not necessarily sure that that’s the case, to be fair.  

I do think that government commissioning of has services in recent years, especially under the Conservatives from 2010 onwards, and this sped up in light of a lot of the criticisms of Kids Company, has essentially led to a very hyper competitive charitable sector, where funding is short term and a lot of these people are fighting over very small pots which are actually getting smaller with each year. And I don’t necessarily think that’s a good thing, but I don’t necessarily think the guarantee for long term services is also a good thing. I think there’s probably a balance to be found there because I do think competition in the charity sector has improved many of the services that people have to offer, but at the same time hyper competition has led to a race to the bottom in terms of the costing of services.  

Like you know, there’s an organisation I used to work at where they’d be bidding for how much it costs to run a service plus a little bit on top. And we were sort of wondering how these other organisations could be bidding for the same service at significantly lower costs, which meant that they were cutting on service provision. 

Stella Tsantekidou 

Do you think there is any way of convincing – are there any good arguments to make to convince politicians to think more about, if not long term funding, but how do you actually create opportunities for charities to improve their services and not just make them, as you say, have a race to the bottom for an increasingly decreasing pool of money. 

Babs Williams 

No. There’s the simple answer to that. I think you have to look at it in terms of political cycles, right. So you have Tony Blair come in, in ‘97, as an example. He won a huge majority that was almost guaranteed, it guaranteed that he was going to win the next election. In fact, if you hear him speak now, he seemed to think he was never going to lose. He seems to think that if he’d been able to fight the 2010 election, he would have won that as well. And so you have, when you have that mindset, you can then have long term planning. But if you, and you can therefore have a long term, a process of long term bidding and charities can make the argument for politicians to think in the long term. However, when you have an environment where leaders don’t know how long they’re going to last for, politicians and prime ministers are dropped at the drop of the hat. You know, like you have, how many prime ministers have we had in the last few years? And then you’re going to go in there and say, well, you now need to think in the long term. I mean that’s, what does that mean? 

Stella Tsantekidou 

Now that we’ve started talking about some political, trickier topics, right we are alluding to the fact that obviously both of us at one point or another tried to lobby the government, at the same time we obviously have our own political opinions.  

And this is one of the things that can often be a tension with people who work in the charity sector. They’re trying to influence government, but obviously the reason why they do these jobs is because they’re highly political people themselves. And I think there is this tension about when trying to influence the government. Should you go all out and try to change the conversation in the public conversation and put the politicians in the corner and trying to force their hands that way? Or is it more effective if you lay low, you decide on the small technical changes that you want to make and that way you try to convince politicians to pass through the changes that you make that you want to see. Do you have an opinion on that? 

Babs Williams 

Good question. I think there’s a step just behind that if I’m honest and first of all, you have to sort of look at the charity and ask where their funding infrastructure is, how their funding infrastructures is made-up or what it’s made-up of should I say. So if you have a charity where 80-90% of their funding comes from local services commissioning, the reality of it is that behind the scenes conversations and lobbying is going to be a lot better than publicly trying to humiliate the government. Yeah, and trying to undermine the government. Especially in a hostile charity charitable environment that many charities found post the Kids Company debacle.  

If you’re a commissioning based charity and you’re criticising local government, who you’re also trying to lobby behind the scenes and you’re publicly criticising them and you’re publicly criticising national government, that just to me doesn’t seem wise. It just doesn’t seem to be feasible or sustainable long term.  

However, if most or a large chunk of your funding comes from public donations, people donating, grant makers, non governmental sources of money, then you can go out and you can criticise who you wish. But then that brings us to the question that that you sort of posited is, is that effective?  

Being nasty to people sometimes works in terms of getting your way, but that’s a very short term tactic. Being nice to people, engaging with them over the long term, like in any walk of life, is more effective than persistent bullying. And that is to some extent, charities would say that they’re not bullying the government because the government is a far larger body, politicians, there’s an asymmetry of power. Do you know what, I actually agree with that, they are right. However, if they understood how fragile, emotively fragile many MP’s are, how fragile they are about their personas and how much time they spend cultivating these personas. They don’t look at it and they’re like, oh, wow, this person has kicked me a little bit online with this, like, campaign, I should maybe think about what they’re doing. No, these people are vindictive and petty, and they’re in a bubble. They look at it as, this is a bit humiliating.  

For the most part, most policies get changed behind the scenes, written by people we’ve never heard of, and we’ve never seen. And we can have all sorts of conversations about whether that’s moral or not, or whether we need to change that system. But it is the one that we’re currently working with. And if charities want to pass policy effectively in the long term, you should probably not be making enemies of the people you need to change those policies. 

Stella Tsantekidou 11:30 

So, on the one hand I agree. I agreed up to extent. I think you’re also onto something when you’re saying how much a lot of politicians lack confidence, because a lot of politicians, they are asked to have an opinion and to vote on a million different issues and they may have, when they enter parliament, they may have a policy portfolio of one of two policy areas at best. And they will have some kind of professional background that may or may not be useful to them in some capacity. And they are constantly feeling like they are bombarded by public opinion.  

Human beings, as animals we are not used to being seen and listened to by that many people on a day-to-day basis. We are all used to relying on the opinion of a handful of people who are close to us. So basically, politicians, as far as I can tell, they feel like they are constantly besieged by public opinion and for that reason, as you say, they’re very, very sensitive. And I think there are two ways that they can react to that sensitivity. They can either become vindictive, as you say, which I do think there is a higher concentration of Machiavellian traits in people who choose to enter politics. But then there are also a lot of politicians, and I think this is the majority of them, they simply want to be liked, they’re massive people pleasers. And I think there is a lot of low hanging fruit when it comes to policy making. And a lot of people who work in the charity sector and they’re doing soft influencing kind of jobs, where they basically, they don’t have specific targets, their job is to challenge the specific narrative, and they don’t have a boss who will, you know, give them quantifiable targets. There is a lot of low hanging fruit and they don’t realise all you have to do is, you have to put a convincing enough case in front of a politician and you will probably get them to adopt your opinion if you are the last person they listen to, unless it is obviously a very controversial area. But most policy areas are not as controversial. It’s very often the matter of lack of time and lack of expertise.  

But it is interesting what you’re saying about charities who rely on public funding, and they need to be commissioned too for their long-term survival. But what I have actually seen is charities who are completely funded by the public, who still don’t seem to have the confidence to put forth a convincing political policy narrative, and I think that boils down to the individuals in them just being very risk averse and I think that has to do with the kind of individual that chooses to work for a charity is usually a person who is very risk averse, otherwise, they would probably be going into the private sector or something like that. I don’t know, maybe I’m generalising here but… 

Babs Williams 

Yeah, I mean, so you have a situation where you have a charity where they get 95% of their funding from donations and grants from foundations. And they don’t do anything that’s public facing campaigning. They don’t do anything that’s behind the scenes. That’s not because they can’t. It’s because they’ve chosen not to, you know, so. I think there needs to be differentiation between your bandwidth to do either.  

Your bandwidth to be louder, brash, more in your face is significantly higher if you’re not taking money from local government. Your bandwidth to be brash, loud and in your face is significantly lower if you’re taking commissioner funding. And I would question the communications strategy of an organisation that is primarily commissioning based and has chosen to be loud, brash, and aggressive against the government of the day. For me, that would be that would be doing a disservice to your service users, the people who depend on and rely on you to deliver high quality services, and to be a sustainable organisation. And that, I wouldn’t, if I were on a charity trustee board, I would have serious questions with the day-to-day running of that organisation. 

Stella Tsantekidou 

The final topic I want us to talk about is what is good politics versus what is good policy and how do you influence good and effective policy making versus having politicians basically reaching for the thing that they think will sound the best to the voters. I think immigration is a very good example.  

I moved to the UK 10 years ago and I remember immigration was a policy area, I mean it was already completely exploding, but I remember the mugs that the Labour Party had at the time that said, “put caps on immigration”, “cap immigration”, and I remember Ed Miliband as the leader of the Labour Party at that point trying very, very, uncomfortably and awkwardly basically to pander to what the right wing media accepted position was at the time on immigration, which is that we need to reduce immigration, it’s a very big problem. And there are arguments you know there are all sorts of arguments you can make on immigration. But what’s clear to me now, 10 years later, is that the people who should be making, who should be challenging the narrative, the dominant narrative on immigration back then didn’t do that. And 10 years later, we are at the stage where Parliament is spending countless amount of time and resources on their one bill and on similar other policies, which as far as I can tell are going to bring zero… they will have zero positive effect on the average voter and yet it’s something that the political class and the media class seem to be obsessed with them.  

And I’m worried that a similar thing could be happening with the criminal justice system and with the whole being tough on crime rhetoric and specifically with the prison system. And what I often see in the justice sector is people who work in the justice sector, they will speak about the prison population as if it is an argument that we, as if reducing the prison population, is an argument that we have already won. But you talk to normal people, normal people on the street, and they will tell you, like most people think we should have more people going to prison, we should keep people locked up for longer because this is going to make us safer, and then the evidence doesn’t show that. But nobody is challenging that narrative in a particularly effective way.  

So, what do you think about basically, convincing politicians to make good policy, even if the politics don’t look to be the ones that are going to get them to win the elections. 

Babs Williams 

I almost feel with that sort of intro that I should be interviewing you, Stella, and not the other way around.  

So, look, immigration is a complex one. There’s no guarantee considering what has happened around the world. This isn’t just a British problem. There’s no guarantee that had British politicians gotten in early on this topic and said actually here are the reasons why immigration is good and useful to this country, there’s no guarantee that the last few years, as things have gone, wouldn’t have happened, especially as there were politicians making these sorts of arguments in other countries, and yet they are still in the same political climate, febrile political climate, on immigration. So, there is something big happening there.  

With prisons and in terms of, people’s responses to crime, look, I think that’s different to immigration. I think immigration for many people is this huge issue that they think undermines their quality of living. And their standard of living in so many different ways, they think that immigrants are taking their jobs, they think that immigrants are making them feel unsafe in the streets and so on and so forth, the list could go on. You know, they’re taking bed spaces in hospitals, whilst at the same time delivering nothing back. These are the sorts of things that people traditionally who are anti-immigration tend to think of immigration. And then you have those sorts of people who think to themselves, immigration is good, but it erodes at the cultural fabric of the country. And for some people, that’s what the negative side of immigration is.  

I think that’s very different to policing and crime. On immigration, we have to win the public debate, like as in, I say we as someone who thinks that immigration is beneficial to Great Britain. And there needs to be a case where, otherwise this febrile environment will continue, will remain febrile and it’ll probably get worse, and it has been getting worse. But there needs to be a stand amongst people who are in that 20-30% of people who say, well, look, the economy is going to not do so well if we don’t take in that many immigrants. Your health service, so on and so forth and those arguments, people always say, well, look, those are quite technocratic arguments. They don’t work.  

I think that’s because, in the same way that people have a low bandwidth for listening to politics, lower and lower bandwidth for listening and engaging to politics because they have busier live than ever before, we have a lower bandwidth for delivering a message, you know and there aren’t people who are willing to say these messages again and again and put their name to it. When you ask me the question and you decided to talk about immigration, I was like, oh Christ, do I really want to be on a mic whilst being recorded on video talking about this you know? So like, people like me need to get over that discomfort and we need to keep on banging that drum. 

Look, with crime however, I don’t think it matters that the public think one thing and you’re doing something else in public policy, because when it comes to policing, not policing, prisons – there’s a very different impetus there. I.e. you can quietly start releasing people from prisons, you don’t need to make a song and dance about it. But you can’t quietly start letting people into this country without someone covering it, you know, you can’t quietly do that. We’ve already been releasing people from prisons for years, shutting down prisons, and new prisons aren’t being built at the same rate as they were in the 50s and 60s. We’re doing those things, so we’re winning the policy battle even if we’re not necessarily winning the public relations battle, and that will then follow as people see crime being reduced, so on and so forth. 

Stella Tsantekidou 

Wow, what a way to finish the podcast, Babs. Thank you very much for joining me, this was a great conversation.