Dear Chief Executives,
At a time of unrelenting financial pressure, organisational reform and frontline challenge, we recognise the impossible calculus you face.
The demand to do more with less is relentless. Often, the easiest targets for reduction are those teams and services perceived as non-essential.
Clearview’s founders and associates, a collective of strategic communications and engagement professionals, urge you to pause and consider what is truly fundamental to the success of public service transformation.
Strategic communications is not a luxury for calmer times. It is the infrastructure that enables trust, cohesion, and clarity both inside and outside of your organisations. In moments of disruption, the need for purposeful, credible, and sustained engagement only intensifies.
The cost of false economies
Across the NHS and wider public sector, we are seeing strategic communications teams being thinned out, sidelined or systematically underfunded in the name of short-term savings. This is a false economy. The long-term consequences – organisationally, culturally and reputationally – are deeper and more expensive than any immediate efficiency gain.
These teams do more than write press releases or manage reputational risk. They are the architects of internal alignment, cultural resilience and public trust. They are often the only part of the systems you lead with a view across siloes, able to join the dots between strategy, delivery and staff and patient experience. When they are lost, organisations lose memory, context and coherence.
And if we are honest, the roles and requirements don’t disappear, they are simply displaced. New roles pop up around the organisation often at greater cost, with less continuity and strategic grip.
We have been here before
We have seen this dynamic play out elsewhere. When parts of the UK rail sector underwent major restructuring in the early 2010s, many operators deprioritised communications in favour of operational cost-cutting. The result? Confusion among staff, loss of public goodwill during timetable changes, and a surge in crisis communications needs that had to be met by high-cost contractors unfamiliar with the organisational context.
By contrast, the energy sector, particularly during the post-privatisation regulatory upheavals, invested in strong, strategic communications leadership. It helped major players navigate difficult price reform narratives, manage regulatory relationships and maintain public legitimacy even during price hikes and infrastructure transitions.
In local government, those councils that protected engagement capacity during austerity were able to sustain community partnerships, deliver behavioural change campaigns, and manage expectation during service redesign. Those that didn’t faced deeper trust deficits and had to rebuild at higher cost, if at all.
The NHS is no different. Indeed, the complexity and emotional intensity of healthcare make trust and communication even more central to system effectiveness.
Strategic enablers, not support functions
If we are serious about transformation, integration and culture change, we must stop treating communications as a back-office support function. It is a strategic enabler. It should sit alongside finance, digital and HR as one of the disciplines required to steer complex change, retain staff, and connect with communities.
When you cut these functions, you are not just reducing headcount, you are removing the very capabilities you will need most as the pace of change accelerates. And when the gap becomes too visible to ignore, you will reintroduce these capabilities at higher cost, with lower impact, and often without the benefit of institutional knowledge.
As a strategic communications agency we’re actually arguing against our own commercial interest here, because it’s the right thing to do for your staff, patients and the communities you serve.
A call to leadership
This letter is not a complaint. It is a call to leadership.
We understand the need for efficiency. But strategic choices must be made in the round. Protecting and empowering communications professionals is not an indulgence. It is foresight. It is an investment in the organisational credibility, public confidence and staff alignment that will be essential for what comes next.
We ask you to resist the temptation to cut what cannot be immediately measured. We ask you to consider the compounded costs of disconnection, misinformation and disengagement. Above all, we ask you to remember that the public sector is nothing without the public—and that sustaining trust is a discipline in its own right.
Clearview
Clearview Communications 