Question: You've just taken over as President of the Institute of Public Relations (IPR), what will be your priorities for the IPR in the coming months?

Ian Wright: Well, we've got urgent priorities, immediate priorities and some longer term things we are developing. It's a lot! In an interview I did for PR Week, it looked like I was going to do about 88 things before breakfast, and I've got a day job to do as well. So we have to be selective.

We are concentrating on the continuing themes that the Institute has had for the last four or five years. These are about improving the way in which our members and the PR business has access to really high quality education and training and improving the ability of our people to access those resources. We think that will feed through into a better educated, more successful, more effective profession. One of the preoccupations of some is how does PR get access to the boardroom? Well one way is by being more effective and being able to deal with the issues that the people in the boardroom want sorted. I think sometimes public relations people have been detached from those issues, particularly perhaps the consultancy sector.

Our second big theme is to try and develop a unified voice for the profession. We are in very close discussions with the Public Relations Consultants Association to look at how we can share resources. But we can't merge: one is a trade association and the other a professional body. But we can have a much much closer relationship and we are looking very keenly at that. We are also talking to our international colleagues and we have made big strides in the last few weeks, in co-operation with the Public Relations Society of America, and with some of our European colleagues, again to share approaches, share ideas, that will give us a unified voice for the profession.

So I guess those are the two principal priorities. Underlying all of that, must be an attempt to represent our members better and provide them with the kinds of services and advice and back-up that they want from their association.

Question: What are the biggest challenges facing the PR industry as a whole over the next twelve months?

Ian Wright: I think the single biggest challenge is about the management of reputation. I think that there is a battle about to be joined for who is in charge of the management of reputation. Over the last twenty years, the PR industry has grown up on the back of an understanding - that is sometimes rather dim, sometimes not fully formed. Potential clients, feel they need their products, their services, and their company, themselves defending, protected and promoted through editorial, broadcast and corporate mediums of all kinds. I think now we are beginning to understand that there is a much more holistic thing behind all of that which is about the reputation of the organisation, or the product, or the individual. That is the same in Local Government, the same in all NGO's. It's the same in not for profit organisations, as it is in corporate life, whether it be for the corporation, or for the brands or for a small company.

I think what has happened in the last couple of years is that some of our colleagues in other disciplines have worked out that this is very fertile territory. Whenever I am involved in a big deal, I find that my colleagues from other sectors - the lawyers, the bankers, the management consultants, are all as interested in what I am doing, as in what they are doing. I think over the next couple of years, at the very top end of the profession, we will see the management consultants and perhaps the lawyers and accountants begin to move in on our territory. That has already started in terms of the work. I think in the next year it will start in terms of one or other of the big accountancy firms acquiring a big PR consultancy or a big network. At that point a number of things happen. PR's skills base may well increase and its access to resources may increase. But it also has a really big impact for the way we work, the kinds of things we do and the kind of relationship we have with our clients. I think that's a big change which the PR industry has not yet really fully understood.

Question: One criticism of the PR industry is that it works - especially the young - staff very hard - and when the staff burn out you simply hire new ones to run ragged - how do you respond to that criticism?

Ian Wright: I would say there is a degree of truth in that. It was even truer in the 1980s and early 1990s when there were at least two or three major agencies which were widely regarded as sweat shops. It's a glamorous industry, people think it's glamorous anyway. It has an attraction to people to work in it so inevitably as it draws in good, intelligent, talented and vibrant young people. There will be those who wish to take advantage of that in terms of paying them relatively little and moving them on in their careers. I think the lesson of the other industries - such as the accountancy and legal professions where they have huge graduate intakes - is that if you want to keep your best people you have to look after them. You have to provide them with good salaries, good back-up, good packages. You've also got to provide them with really excellent training and career development. If we don't get better at that as an industry we will find that people will go elsewhere.

Question: So what's your message to PR consultancies which have a young staff that they are working from 8am to 8pm Monday to Friday and regularly working weekends?

Ian Wright: I think if the work is interesting and varied and the packages are good then people will work hard. If you are motivated then you will succeed. But if that's done solely as a sweat shop those people won't stay very long. That's not good for continuity, it's not good for the clients and its not good for the people themselves.

Question: How has the reputation of the political PR industry suffered from political scandals of the past such as lobbygate ?

Ian Wright: Well, I think it has suffered in a number of ways. I think first of all quite a lot of business people are now very sceptical. They know they have got to have some sort of relationship with Government but they don't know quite understand what it should be. Or they don't understand why they need to use consultants to help them.

We want an easy movement of people between government, civil service and the private sector. We don't want them to bring a whole load of baggage about their friends. I think you've got to be very careful about that sort of thing. I think the political end of our industry has got to have very high standards and probably more obvious standards than perhaps is reasonable to expect, but they have got to be beyond reproach.

Question: Do you think the political PR industry needs clearer rules and regulations and terms of engagement?

Ian Wright: Yeah, I think so. I also believe there is a need for clarity about the way people engage, although I have to say, if you look at the Hinduja affair one of the striking things is that there doesn't seem to have been any consultants involved. It seems to be about direct links to the Ministers and officials concerned and I suppose in a way that is rather encouraging for the political PR industry.

I do think the political PR industry needs greater clarity but I have to say I think they do a pretty good job. I was at an infamous party last year where this bloke with a funny hat on was wondering around, who turned out to be an Observer journalist. I must say one of the rules of the game is never talk to a man who wears a hat indoors.

Question: Do you think there have been times when the political parties have spent too much time focussing on presentation and PR at the expense of policy?

Ian Wright: Well the great cry of the Tory Government under Major was that it wasn't the policy at fault it was the presentation. My instinct is that when politicians say that the presentation is at fault, not the policy the truth is that it's the policy that stinks. It's like saying 'it's a great policy but we can't get people to agree with it'. Come on, that means it's not a great policy. I think politicians often take refuge behind it but personally I think you've got to have good presentation, you've got to have clear presentation. A lot of these arguments are so complex that nobody outside a group of twenty experts in government and a few people in think tanks really understand them, or care. One of the reasons that the likely turnout at the next election is plummeting below seventy per cent is because it's so bloody complicated that nobody could be bothered to understand it and they think there's not much difference anyway. So I think presentation is important.

Question: Some people argue that constant spinning by the political parties undermines public confidence in the political process because people simply don't believe the hype anymore - would you go along with that?

Ian Wright: I think that's too glib. Political parties have always been spinning. If you look at Gladstone - he was an arch spinner - he used to twist the arms of the national papers regularly. Lloyd George was a great spinner. Churchill had Brendan Bracken to do it for him - a more senior spin-doctor is difficult to imagine.

If its presentation about a set of issues so the public understands them or so the public gets the point or so the reputation of a particular policy issue is protected then clearly that makes sense. It's when people try and spin for the sake of it that it's obvious that there's a problem. One of the difficulties is that a lot of politicians haven't ever done anything else. A lot of politicians have spent their lives in either think tanks or in areas that aren't really about the real world and their connection with the real world is at the very least tenuous. If more of them had come from outside and done jobs in all walks of life I think we would have less concentration on the spinning and more concentration on the message.

Question: Would you like to see the PR people in the political parties adhering to a PR code of conduct?

Ian Wright: Yeah, I think that would be very good news. I think that would be exceptionally helpful. One of the interesting things is that the Government Information Service people do. The Government Information Service has a very clear code of conduct and they adhere to it. I think some of the political party people would do well to set out their own code of conduct and work to it. Certainly when I moonlighted for a month during the General Election in 1997, when I worked for Paddy Ashdown - unpaid I would like to add - I was struck by the difference in my approach and that of one or two other colleagues who came in from outside to that of those who were full time party people. I think they did things to journalists that we would never consider trying to do.

Question: What issues would you like to see in the political parties manifestos that would assist the PR industry?

Ian Wright: Corporate governance and social audit. I think disclosure rules are very important. Rules that promote clarity and transparency are very important.

Of course, one of the most important things for a thriving PR industry is a thriving business sector and a strong economy. Why has the PR industry boomed in the 1990s? Because the economy has boomed. We need that kind of stability to ensure that our industry continues to thrive.

Question: What impact has the Internet had on the PR industry?

Ian Wright: Huge. If I think about how my world has changed in the last twenty years. First of all we had the coming of the word processor as a work tool. Then we had the fax, then the beginning of the technological age and email. Now frankly the Internet and the new email technologies have swamped all of those changes. It's a completely different game. We have the capacity to communicate in very narrow terms with a wider audience. We have the capacity to be up to date ourselves all of the time. The Internet can follow individual sectors very closely. As a medium it isn't at its most important. In terms of getting broad consumer messages out the broadcast and print media are important for our products, and for day to day business. But clearly the Internet is the single biggest communication development of the last decade. It will be the dominant backdrop against which all our work is done in the first five, ten years of the twenty first century.