Amanda Coleman and Ben Smith discuss the UK government’s communications performance since the Covid-19 crisis kicked off

This week I’m interviewing Amanda Coleman, Ex-head of Corporate Communications at Greater Manchester Police and author of the book Crisis Communication Strategies.

Amanda has recently founded her own agency, Amanda Coleman Communications.

Amanda and I are going to be looking at the UK governments’ communications performance since the Covid-19 crisis began.

To emphasise, we are not attempting to assess the UK governments overall response to Covid-19 because neither Amanda nor I are scientists! We’re purely looking at the communications response.

Here’s a flavour of what we discuss:

• Whether the speed that the virus took hold meant that the government’s communications response was likely to be too slow?
• How effectively central government has communicated its message to the public
• How central government has effectively retained control of its messaging - but this meant that it was less able to use the resources of local government and police communicators
• How the lockdown messaging is about to become more complex and why this may mean central government has to disperse some control of its communications
• Why the daily briefing worked well to start with but has lost momentum
• What the UK government has communicated well during this crisis.
• Amanda rates how well the government ministers have communicated through the Covid-19 crisis including Boris, Micheal Gove, Dominic Raab, Priti Patel, Rishi Sunak and Matt Hancock.

Amanda reveals why she decided to write her book “Crisis Communication Strategies: How to Prepare in Advance, Respond Effectively and Recover in Full!”