The director of communication and strategy at Westminster City Council insists on measuring the effectiveness of his comms output. But, as he tells Neil Gibbons, that’s as much about achieving better outcomes and it is saving taxpayers’ money
Photographs by Sam Friedrich

"Evidence, evidence, evidence.”

That’s the mantra of Alex Aiken, director of communications and strategy for Westminster City Council. And it’s that fastidious demand for empirical proof of the success or failure of his communications output that has enabled Aiken and his team to slash expenditure while targeting resources in a way that ekes the most from the council’s budget.

A man who clearly despairs at the hit-and-hope school of communications, Alex is widely credited with transforming the communications approach of the central London council.

But he came to the industry accidentally. “I only went into communications because I couldn’t get into the London School of Economics football team,” he says. When he arrived at LSE to study Economics in 1985, there were, he says, two things he wanted to do: play in the football team and join the newspaper collective. His footballing ambitions were scuppered by his Saturday job at Selfridges, which rendered him unavailable for games.

And he struggled to get involved in the newspaper collective. “I wasn’t their type of person,” he says. “The LSE was quite elitist in many ways; I came from a comprehensive.”

And so Alex found himself drawn to student politics, launching himself into the LSE Conservative Association – “the only people who wanted me,” he says. “They’ll take anyone.”

This was more than just dabbling. Alex applied himself to the cause with such zest that was eventually elevated to the role of chairman. And this gave him exposure to the sort of work that tooled him up for his career in communications, including making over 100 speeches on causes such as the poll tax and student loans to sceptical audiences.

“I developed an interest in campaigns and PR and the public presentation of policies,” he says. “It was a pretty tough environment but it taught me a lot about presentation, public speaking and politics generally.”

By the time he graduated, Alex had been bitten by the politics bug. He spent his first year after university working for two Conservative MPs, George Gardiner and Teresa Gorman, before being named chairman of the National Conservative Students.

Although there was no danger of Alex becoming a career politician – witness the year he spent working at Smithfield Meat Market – he found himself enjoying the machinations of party politics. And so it was that Alex was recruited by Conservative Party Central Office as a press officer.

“It was a strange call,” he says. “I’ve got Margaret Thatcher to thank for that.”

In early 1992, he explains, there had been a purge of Thatcherite press officers – the new director of communications Shaun Woodward [now a Labour Minister] had decided to get rid of Thatcherite ‘dead wood’, as he perceived it – and suddenly there was a shortage of press officers.

“They were literally ringing round people they knew had contacts in the media and understood it,” Alex recalls. “And having been the chairman of Conservative Students, I’d done a lot of media work. So they said, ‘You’ll do.’”

He ended up staying at central office for eight years – a period during which the Conservatives gave new meaning to the term ‘beleaguered’. But Alex still describes his time there was “hugely exciting”.

Starting out as press officer, Alex moved up through the ranks to chief press officer, head of regional media, head of news, and then in 1999 deputy director of political operations – “which meant head of campaigns, basically”.

In this role, Alex discovered a passion for campaigns that has stayed with him to this day. “I enjoyed the media work,” he says, “but it was the campaigns work I loved. It was the understanding that campaigns focus all your communications tools on a particular goal: a perception or behavioural change.”

He had been tasked with creating a campaigns unit, and his new team mounted campaigns on ‘Standstill Britain’, ‘Keep the Pound’, as well as taxation and education.

In May 2000, a job opportunity came up at Conservative-led Westminster City Council as head of communications. Alex decided to apply. Why jump ship from the Conservative party, with whom he had such a strong attachment? “I didn’t feel that the Conservatives under William Hague had made sufficient progress to get into government,” he says frankly. “I just felt it was time for a change.”

Besides, the role as Westminster represented a tantalising challenge. “It was interesting because it was a failing communications team,” Alex states. “It had been taken out of house twice in the 1990s; the council had suffered from the Shirley Porter debacle (in which the District Auditor had declared the ‘Building Stable Communities’ policy illegal, ordering Porter and five others to pay the £27 million cost); it had no leadership or direction. It wasn’t working.”

Alex saw an opportunity to turn it round. “They needed stability. Until then, people weren’t sure what the next organisational change would be, which made it difficult to focus on the job they were paid to do. As soon as I got there, I told them they were going to become the best public service communications team in the country.”

Alex immediately identified the most urgent requirement: proactivity. “That was obvious from day one when the media team told me they couldn’t do any proactive media relations because they were taking too many calls from journalists. The solution to that is simple: call them first.”

Under Alex, the team drew up daily task lists – outlined at a 9.15 team meeting each day – and weekly news lists, and sent cards to the nationals’ newsrooms offering comment whenever a London-based story arose.

By ‘selling’ stories rather than issuing press releases, his team gained more confidence. Armed with that assurance, he was able to introduce a new campaign-based approach, striving to eradicate what he calls the SOS approach – “sending out stuff” – and replace it with campaign-based communications.

But it was the scientific approach to measurement that truly transformed the council’s communications output. Alex commissioned a piece of research, ‘Who Reads What’, which sought to identify the media consumed by key audiences.

“We saw, for example, that local newspapers were utterly marginal but regional TV was critical,” he says. “That empowered the press office to sell stories that were fit for TV.”

Internally, research such as this was a crucial aid in positioning the communications team as a source of expertise. “If you’ve got ten people at a board meeting, ten of them will consider themselves communications experts,” he says. “As a head of communications, having the numbers helps to prove that you’re the expert. That’s why we obsess about measurement and evaluation.”

By 2003, other local authorities were sitting up and taking notice. A representative from the London Borough of Richmond approached Alex. “They saw we had good campaigns and had increased our profile and asked us how we’d done it,” says Alex. “We explained our approach, based on communications leadership, campaign work and the need for evidence, evidence, evidence. They took that on board but came back and said they didn’t have the skills or capacity to implement it. Could we put people in?”

And that’s exactly what Alex did. Between 2003 and 2005, he headed up communications for Richmond in the first-ever communications partnership agreement between two local authorities. He has subsequently served as interim head of comms at the London Borough of Hillingdon.

“Each local authority is different,” he says. “Richmond has the highest council tax in London, Westminster has virtually the lowest. But they have similarly high value-for-money ratings. That’s fundamentally because they’re both good. But the campaigns we run in Richmond are different. In Westminster, it’s about how we’re improving efficiency, and driving down council tax. In Richmond, we explain that they’re getting a poor deal from government so residents may have to pay more for good services. It’s the difference between Sainsbury’s and Waitrose.”

In 2008, Alex was elevated from head of communications to director of communications and strategy, a reflection of the value that the comms function has in shaping strategy.

“The communications team has to act as the conscience of organisation,” he says. “They have to provide the evidence to show what’s works to influence behaviour and challenge bureaucracy and process – to be on the side of the citizen. To continually ask, how are we going to effect an improvement in public services?”

However you care to benchmark it, Westminster’s approach has been successful. All the metrics – resident ratings, effectiveness of campaigns – point to a highly effective communications unit (the 2010 resident informed rating looks like being the highest recorded). And the work of the communications team has been recognised publicly. Westminster was named PR Week Public Sector team of the year in 2009 and has won over 20 other national awards for media, marketing, internal communications, public affairs and evaluation. Alex himself was named the PRCA’s In-house Professional of the Year in 2008.

In 2008, the council undertook a Best Practice Review to test the current operation. The independent panel concluded that Westminster delivers communications “comparable with the best”. This year, a report from Westminster’s finance scrutiny committee endorsed the approach to communications, citing that the unit has “grown from a reactive press office to a team that provides best in class communications”. Even the leader of the minority party, Cllr Paul Dimoldenberg described it as “one of the best, if not the best in local government”.

Not that Alex involves himself in party politics these days.

“Councils are political but as an officer you have to stay out of the party politics,” he says. “Some heads of communications try to stay out of all politics but by doing that you divorce yourself from policy development. It’s legitimate to stay involved in the politics, as long as you avoid the party politics. You have to be able to understand the emerging agenda.”

Going forward, Alex has set himself the task of developing what he calls Westminster communications 2.0 – a move from corporate communications to reputation advocacy. “The old ‘broadcast model’ of communications is increasingly ineffective. These days, it’s about creating advocates.”

The dividends of this approach are already apparent. It was through this that West End Live, an annual theatrical showcase was able to beat Madonna’s live shows in a poll to determine the city’s live event of the year.

“We promoted it through all channels, but especially through social media and Facebook groups,” he says. “It meant that West End Live built a tremendous following.”

Does that mean that Westminster City Council is concertedly adopting social media?

“We adopt what works,” he says. “And that comes down to the research we do. We use a quarterly reputational tracking poll to analyse it. Social media is a useful tool in some cases – it helped make Westminster more famous than Madonna and brought £3 million extra spend into the West End – but we look at a campaign and ask what will work. For older people, it’s paper-based communications. But our responsible drinking campaign was mainly online.”

Again, it’s an approach based on the numbers: a council study of Westminster residents has found that 2% use Twitter; in contrast, 7% read The Economist.

Nine years into the role, Alex has no urge to move on. And there are two broad reasons: the role and the city.

“Fundamentally, each day is an opportunity to build and protect Westminster’s reputation,” he says. “In terms of career development, I still learn things. The challenges continue to multiply.”

The last nine years have seen the communications team cope with challenges as varied as the 7/7 bombings and the Litvinenko poisoning. Few roles can match that for excitement.

And it’s also clear that Westminster is in Alex’s DNA. He was born in the City, and although he moved to outer London as a child, he bucked the trend of London professionals and moved back into the heart of the city as soon as he could. “Westminster is a vibrant international business centre,” he says proudly, “bigger than the City of London.”

Any hankering he may have had for the LSE football team has been quenched by his involvement with Westminster Wanderers, the corporate communicators’ football in central London – or as he describes it, “Lots of very well-mannered professionals from Westminster who go and play on fields in Tooting and get clattered by more ‘traditional’ Sunday League players.”

As you’d expect from someone who wears cufflinks bearing the crest of Westminster, he’s settled in Westminster, and is currently living in Pimlico – “an 11-minute walk to work” – with his wife and two children.

“I was always determined to come back to Westminster,” he says. “We are a Westminster family.”