On 29-30 September, Parliament’s Directorate for the Media upped sticks to one of those leafy locations in the Brussels commuter belt for a day and a half’s think-in about our plans for the 2009 European elections.  It is often hard to say what one gets out of such large scale seminars, though the bonding value between colleagues who see each other relatively rarely is in itself always worthwhile.  The format was the classic presentations-workshops-presentations-conclusions one, with a little team-building bonus thrown in, and by the end of it there was a consensus that it was all a great success.

At the outset of the seminar one thing struck me forcibly. The gathering of (nearly) the whole directorate in one place brings it home just how many people there are.  I’ll have to check the numbers, but there were at least 150 administrator-grade people there: the “management”, press officers from Brussels, press attachés from all the member states, web editors, audiovisual specialists, the EuroparlTV people, web technicians, graphical designers and so on.  When you combine that lot with the technical facilities they have available to them, you can’t help thinking that this is enough to constitute one of Europe’s foremost communications agencies. But it doesn’t work that way, for, I think, two (and a half) reasons.  

First and most importantly, languages.  The main reason all those people are there is that our collective job involved communicating with the citizens of Europe across the range of EU official languages.  It would be over-simplistic to say that we have 22 or 23 people for every one who would be employed in a monolingual environment, but it does at least give a ballpark impression of the situation.  Of course, the issue is not purely linguistic, we also have to deal with very different media environments and communications cultures on the ground across various countries (a fact which emerges quickly in any discussion at such a seminar), but no-one can doubt that the language factor inflates the number of staff without any corresponding increase in the range and the nature of the activities we can engage in.  

None of this is to question the need for us to do the job in all the languages – it is a prerequisite of our status as a democratic public institution – but it comes at a cost.

Second reason, budget.  Though we have resources galore in terms of people and equipment, our operational budget – money to spend on communications activities – is, as we are frequently told by consultants, derisory.  Especially for any sort of communications campaign involving the purchase of media space, we are simply not in the picture.  Example: we can produce quite good TV spots, but we can’t afford to get them broadcast where and when it matters. (For later reference, this is another good reason to look to viral distribution on the internet as a way ahead.)

The final half-reason is more subtle and is simply that we don’t have the creative room for manoeuvre that a true communications agency would have.  There are limits to what we can do given the political environment in which we work.  The necessity of maintaining political neutrality, which in practice means avoiding the expression of anything to which any one of Parliament’s political groups might object, is a considerable limitation.  Again, fair enough, it goes with the territory, but it is a major factor restricting the possibilities of what we can do.

Which brings me to the big issue of the seminar: how far can you go?  But that’s for another post.