Adam Sampson: “Policy influencing is rarely an exact science”

Yes, at the Labour conference we may have managed quick conversations with key Health and Social Care Ministers – this year we got to speak with Yvette Cooper, Dame Diana Johnson and James Frith all in a triumphant six-hour burst. But as you hop on the fast train out of Liverpool Lime Street three days later, you have to ask yourself: was the outcome worth the effort?

That is not always straightforward to assess, but there are good reasons to be optimistic. Policy influencing is rarely an exact science: there is no empirically tested formula that guarantees a particular action will lead to a specific outcome. However, this is true of many areas of business activity. Anyone who has been involved in advertising – or, perhaps closer to home, patient education initiatives – will recognise that even relatively modest impacts can represent meaningful progress.

Equally, businesses that never make any effort in marketing or advertising are taking a potentially fatal risk. The difficulty in measuring the precise impact of an activity vital to your long-term future is not a reason for not doing it. Those representing optometry cannot complain that no one in government understands or values what we do and then dismiss the very idea of engaging with them.

In any event, expecting an immediate impact from a particular piece of engagement is to fail to understand how change-making works. Change does not come about by someone having a single conversation with a single Minister: it comes about by slowly building a consensus that a particular policy is the obvious, uncontroversial response to an agreed issue.

So, while the – relatively fleeting – interactions with Ministers are valuable, what is of equal value is the much larger number of interactions across all the party conferences we attend with the wider political and policy community: MPs, special advisors, think tankers, and our peers across the healthcare sector.

Change does not come about by someone having a single conversation with a single Minister: it comes about by slowly building a consensus that a particular policy is the obvious, uncontroversial response to an agreed issue

A positive takeaway

One of the pleasing takeaways from this season of party conferences is the way that their reaction to our primary policy ask – for a core set of clinical optometry-led services available across all of England – has shifted in the 12 months we have been campaigning on the topic. While a year ago this idea was being received as something new and strange, this year it was treated as an accepted wisdom, an obvious solution to some of the pressures being felt by GPs and hospitals (it didn’t do any harm that we shared our Labour fringe platform with the President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, and something which Ministers could point to as an immediate example of the three shifts at the heart of the 10-Year Health Plan.

To square the circle, one of the benefits of spending time with the wider political and policy community is that acceptance into their ranks gives you opportunities to have longer, deeper conversations with Ministers. If spending time with Dame Diana on and around our fringe platform at Labour was helpful, just as helpful was the invitation that followed from a think tank to a private, pre-Budget dinner where I found myself seated next to a Treasury Minister, who was keen to pick the brains of the half dozen or so attendees about what measures they wanted the Government to take to help support their business ambitions. That access, which enabled me to land some key economic messages with a part of the Government that we do not usually get access to, only came about because of the broader links we had made during conference season.

Of course, none of those interactions mean that what you are seeking will automatically be granted. As I have said, there is no immediate link in lobbying between action and outcome. However, we face three choices: try to engage, pretend to engage, or refuse to engage. If the first cannot guarantee success, the second is hypocritical and the third the counsel of despair. I know which one I prefer.

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