Acknowledgements: Thanks to Sam Hilton, Barry Grimes, Haydn Belfield, Jasmin Kaur, Lin Bowker-Lonnecker and others who wished to remain anonymous for help in providing input and reviewing the post prior to publishing. All errors are the authors’ own.
Summary
The Pandemic Prevention Network (PPN) focuses on using advocacy to influence UK politicians to sustain attention on pandemic prevention efforts, so as to better prepare for future, possibly more harmful, global disease outbreaks. This research was commissioned to help PPN understand what stakeholders could be leveraged to influence the UK Members of Parliament (MPs), though influencing MPs is only one of many possible routes to influencing policy in the UK, which is not covered here.
10 stakeholders were identified, ranging from the public, to business, to healthcare workers. Their influence over MPs and their expected support for pandemic preparedness were mapped based on a review of their existing initiatives and successes. While on average, some stakeholders (government advisory groups) have more influence than others (celebrities), applying this mapping to your strategy is not as clear cut as just picking to work with the highest influencer. Rather, picking a stakeholder to work with is a matter of strategy, and ensuring that their values and goals align with your organization to maximize your collective influence. It is our hope that this post will be useful to other advocacy organizations working on pandemic prevention in the United Kingdom and to better inform these efforts through our findings.
For a summary of the rankings and examples used, you may access it here.
About Pandemic Prevention Network
The Pandemic Prevention Network (PPN) was established to continue putting a spotlight on the devastation that pandemics bring. Unfortunately, politicians shift their policy focus very quickly once pandemics are less deadly, yet pandemic risk and need for preparedness has not reduced. In fact, the need for sustained attention on pandemic prevention has increased, as the world has shown that we are not ready for another pandemic. PPN aims to change that by sustaining political attention on the importance of pandemic preparedness and prevention through many initiatives, including public led advocacy campaigns to the government.
Target Audience
This output was initially created to support the research and planning phase of an upcoming PPN pledge campaign. However, other groups or organizations who are looking to learn more about the political landscape in the UK, especialy in the context of pandemic prevention, may also find this research useful. This research is aimed at anyone who wishes to better understand the existence of different stakeholders with political influence over MPs in the UK and the extent to which they would support pandemic-related reform so as to better prioritize their partnerships and resources accordingly.
Purpose of Research
The PPN pledge campaign was targeted at Members of Parliament (MPs) in the United Kingdom to show their commitment to keeping their constituents safe from future pandemics by signing a low-effort and low-commitment pledge in public. The pledge was strategically chosen to be generic (rather than asking for specific policy outcomes) for it to be non-partisan and have a low barrier to an MP choosing to sign it, in exchange for the press and media opportunities they will gain in front of their voters.
The larger aim for maximising the number of MP signatures we could gain via this campaign was to:
- Build the first All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) with focus on preventing both naturally-occurring and engineered pandemics in the UK.
- Start building political relationships and a broader MP network through which we can table for high impact policy asks for addressing biological threats.
To have a general idea of the groups that could impact MPs and promote the success of this campaign, stakeholder mapping was done to rank the political influence and potential support these groups would express for pandemic prevention as a way to determine how we could have leveraged them to achieve the goals of the campaign.
This was important to do in order to have a better understanding of the political landscape in the UK and who were the key players influencing decision-makers to achieve legislative reform.
It should be noted that the execution of this campaign was halted due to lack of funding received. However, the stakeholder map produced still has the potential to inform other similar campaigns and efforts, especially for other policy and advocacy organisations in this space.
Methodology
Our approach first identified relevant research on tactics and groups who have influence over the UK policymaking process. Specifically, we reviewed different pressure groups who could influence the UK MPs. Based on the research, the initial stakeholders and tactics identified include celebrities, government experts, non-government experts, public letter writing, pressure groups via protests, and national press. We initially did not have criteria for groups, but instead wanted to find as comprehensive of a list as possible.
Developing and Measuring Influence and Support
Once we had an idea of the general landscape, we assessed their influence on two dimensions. For each dimension, we used “Low”, “Medium”, and “High” to help categorize the stakeholders. The definitions for each are:
Political Influence
| Low | Medium | High |
| Never or seldom works directly with MPs | Sometimes works directly with MPs | Always work directly with MPs |
| Policy aspects are never or seldom changed, as a result of stakeholder actions | Policy aspects are somewhat changed, as a result of stakeholder actions | Policy aspects directly changed, as a result of stakeholder actions |
Support for Pandemic Preparedness
| Low | Medium | High |
| Limited knowledge on the topic of pandemic preparedness | General knowledge on the topic of pandemic preparedness | Extensive knowledge on the topic of pandemic preparedness |
| Little to no impact on the stakeholder if the campaign is successful | Some impact on the stakeholder if the campaign is successful | Large impact on the stakeholder if the campaign is successful |
Impact on policy making was determined by looking at two or more examples within each stakeholder and looking at whether that case study worked directly with MPs and whether the policy reform took place according to the concerns of the stakeholder. Seeing that MPs were the target political actors for the PPN campaign, this criteria centered around whether stakeholders would have examples of working with them. In the event that other politicians played a role in political reform, then the second criteria point remains relevant in its ranking. For example, one government expert is the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) , which had huge influence on the policy making process for COVID response and worked directly with MPs to achieve this, which helped push the overall stakeholder influence over policy to “high”. We discuss the determination of the political influence in more detail under each stakeholder.
We also assessed the stakeholder potential for support of pandemic preparedness by looking at the stances of the groups and individuals for COVID and/or health policies in the UK. Groups who had positive support for COVID policies and initiatives were deemed as likely to support pandemic preparedness, while groups who were actively opposed to measures would be categorized as having low support. We discuss the determination of the support for pandemic preparedness in more detail under each stakeholder.
Collecting Feedback
Once basic research was completed and mapped, we interviewed experts with experience and knowledge of UK politics for their feedback, suggestions for additional research, and recommendations for who else to talk to. We managed to interview:
- Sam Hilton who worked in the civil service as a Policy Analyst for 5 years, and worked in Parliament coordinating the APPG for Future Generations for 2 years
- Barry Grimes who worked as a Senior Caseworker for Roberta Blackman-Woods MP for over 2 years,
- An expert who worked as a Senior Parliamentary Assistant for the House of Commons for over 2.5 years, and
- Haydn Belfield who worked for an MP in the Shadow Cabinet as a Senior Parliamentary Researcher for 2.5 years.
This allowed us to expand our list of stakeholders significantly: we added pharmaceutical, healthcare workers, philanthropists, and split out non-government experts into academic and think tanks. We also had a suggestion to include other governments as a stakeholder, but decided not to since PPN would not be able to leverage that influence for their own campaigns. Other feedback included clarifying assumptions and information, and adding a separate map showing outlying examples for each stakeholder.
A final map was created based on the feedback and sent for final review and feedback from the experts who we interviewed, especially to ensure we did not misconstrue any information they provided
This post is meant to showcase a “near-final version” of the mapping exercise. We hope to collect additional feedback on the post and the research to feed into a final published report by Pandemic Prevention Network that we can share with other UK policy, and advocacy non-profit organisations who can benefit from the presented findings in their efforts for building a safer world against biological threats.
Results
We have identified a total of 10 different stakeholders, which is probably fewer than there are in reality, but a good place to start. These stakeholders include:
- healthcare workers - employees working with the UK National Health Services
- academic experts - individuals and academic labs that focus mostly on research, with an ability to provide advice to policy-makers
- government experts - individuals or organizations that are commissioned by the UK government to provide expertise on pre-determined topics
- think tanks - institutions that focus on research to influence policy making
- philanthropists - UK citizens/UK-born individuals who support a cause or causes in the UK and/or globally through financial contributions
- the public - a British, qualifying Commonwealth citizen or a citizen of the Republic of Ireland
- pharmaceutical companies - large pharmaceutical companies who have a major manufacturing, research and sales presence in the UK
- celebrities - UK citizens/ UK-born individuals who are famous within the UK and beyond
- pressure groups - groups who try to exert influence through campaigns, protests, civil disobedience, and other means meant to get attention on the issue in the public realm
- national press - media in the UK that includes printed news (online and physical), television and radio
Stakeholder Maps
Figure 1. General ranking of each stakeholder
Figure 2. Mapped outlier examples for each stakeholder
Figure 1 presents the average political influence and pandemic preparedness support for each stakeholder. Since each stakeholder is made up of numerous examples that don’t completely align on political support and pandemic support, we also made the map shown in Figure 2. The map is meant to showcase some of the diversity within each stakeholder group in terms of political influence and support we saw within each.
We have developed a reference resource located here that goes into detail of how we determined the political influence and pandemic support. We provide case study examples that informed the ranking for each stakeholder.
Notable Outliers
For government experts, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies lies in providing scientific expertise for unprecedented crises for the UK cabinet. Seeing that pandemic preparedness and prevention does not fall within the scope of an emergency then it may not be under this group's jurisdiction to support such a campaign. With this reasoning, we have shifted the support ranking for SAGE to "medium" because while it may not have a large impact on this stakeholder, a pandemic-related campaign will still be calling on political reform that may ease their role in future pandemics.
Pressure groups differ in their advocacies and campaign efforts. There are groups calling for healthcare reform and this aligns with the efforts of pandemic preparedness. There are long-term calls for increased support and funding for healthcare services and staff, which is similar to what could be achieved to prepare for future pandemics. Such groups would have a high level of support for pandemic prevention and preparedness efforts seeing that their impact and outcome align with one another.
Lastly, the academic experts that were involved in the COVID-19 pandemic response had little influence on the government making policy during the pandemic, and thus their influence is low. Academic experts tend to have more influence in other areas of the government outside of emergency responses, where SAGE has the most influence.
Assumptions
We did not consider opposition (e.g. negative support) to pandemic prevention because even though there are groups who are currently against pandemic response (vaccination, lockdown, masks, etc.), they would probably not actively oppose pandemic prevention efforts due to the lack of immediate consequences. A response is different from preparation, and in fact preparation may prevent some of these opposed measures, like mask wearing and lock downs. Instead we assume that groups who oppose pandemic response efforts may not care about pandemic prevention, and would have low to no support for such efforts.
It should be considered that some issues that were supported by influencers and celebrities, such as the fight against malaria, may have already been on the government’s radar and would have already been discussed at their meetings even without the campaign.
The extent to which campaigns by organizations such as the British Heart Foundation impacted the vote of MPs is unknown, as the correlation between the presence of the campaign and the swing of the vote has not been properly established.
The assumption when searching for non-government experts and pressure groups related to the pandemic is that non-prominent groups would exert little influence over the MPs due to their obscurity. Therefore, the search for non-government experts and pressure groups was non-exhaustive. It is possible that the conclusions may change based on more significant research, or in the future when new groups are formed or obscure groups get more attention.
Discussion
Overview
Below are some possible strategies that one can adopt to influence the policy-making process in the UK. While it would be great to just say “work with stakeholder x to achieve result”, it’s not as easy, as influence and support for pandemic preparedness varies even within stakeholders. Therefore, we think it’s important to understand the goal of your campaign, the resources you have, and the timing of your campaign.
Working closely with groups that are aligned with your group’s mission is one theme we have been hearing across our interviews. Common interests help drive progress, whereas working with a group with conflicting interests may make it difficult to push forward a specific agenda.
Accessibility to groups is also important, we would think. If you cannot identify how to work with a high-influence group, then your campaign won’t make as much progress compared to working with a group that has less influence, but influence nonetheless. For example, if it’s a lot easier to work with an academic than the government experts, your efforts may result in greater influence with the academics.
Combination of strategies could be important as well. For example, protests are a critical tactic from pressure groups, but this is often done to raise salience in the press and on social media, and the two strategies of protests and national press coverage complement each other.
Timing has also been discussed as an important consideration for strategies. A government in upheaval has other priorities to focus on at that time. Furthermore, other world events may impact some strategies. Press coverage about pandemic prevention may result in less impact during a significant event, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, than when the coverage occurs in conjunction with other relevant events, like the Ebola outbreak in Uganda.
Limits and Challenges
Criteria Limitations
It is worth noting that the criteria set forth in the ranking of stakeholders may not always hold true for every circumstance. For political influence, even if a stakeholder does not work directly with an MP, they still have a chance of influencing them through their campaigning efforts or public posts that would garner attention from political actors. The same is true for the criteria mentioned for support for pandemic preparedness. Knowledge and impact on stakeholder may not be the only factors that would have an effect on this as support for such efforts may also be garnered through a collective public voice. To gain greater support for pandemic preparedness may be impacted by confounding factors that go beyond what was considered in this paper.
Who, Not How
While this research was able to shed light on who could be approached for support for a pandemic-related campaign, the best ways in which a partnership can develop to secure this influence was not examined.
Pandemic-Related Successes of Stakeholders
We found it difficult to search for case studies for each stakeholder that exemplified a pandemic-related effort that led to a policy reform. This could be an indication that a limited amount of work has been done by these stakeholders, specifically pressure groups, celebrities & influencers, and philanthropists to call for policy changes to improve pandemic prevention and preparedness in the long run. Furthermore, we looked at stakeholders being sympathetic response, which entails very different strategies than prevention. The policies and solutions for these two outcomes can look quite different, but this report is not granular enough to make this distinction between the actors.
Resource Limitations
We are both volunteers with the Pandemic Prevention Network, with limited time available to spend on this project. Furthermore, we do not have the relevant political background, so our product will not be as high level of research as, say, a political researcher working on this full time. We worked on this in our free time out of our desire to support PPN and its mission. To aim to compensate for this, we interviewed experts in the UK political fields to supplement our lack of expertise. Interviewing people with experience working in different UK political parties could improve the information gathered as it would be more representative of the UK political spectrum.
Since PPN did not achieve funding to support the continuation of its operations, additional tools to conduct polling or surveys as well as to conduct additional interviews to gather more data for this piece was limited. We mainly centered the content of this paper on what was publicly available and accessible without a paywall.
Stakeholder exclusion
Other governments, such as the United States, were not included as a stakeholder because the scale to involve such a group for a policy campaign would have significant challenges. While there is a potential for this stakeholder to have political influence, the extent to which they would support such a campaign that calls on political reform for pandemic prevention and preparedness in another nation is limited. Furthermore, unions were not included explicitly, but were reflected in the healthcare workers stakeholder. This was one of the biggest union members.
Averages are not reflective of the whole picture
Our maps showed single points of support and influence for each stakeholder in an effort to simplify this complex topic. We acknowledge that this may not completely reflect the reality of their stances. There is a spread in ranking for both political influence and support for pandemic preparedness which exists between the individuals organizations under one stakeholder category. This is to say that the map produced does not provide a definitive ranking for all organizations that would be categorized under each stakeholder group.
Suggested Campaign Strategies
Engaging constituents is a good way to get the attention of Members of Parliament. Their role centers around representing their constituencies and raising these concerns and interests in the House of Commons. MPs often hold “surgeries” in their office where locals can discuss matters that concern them. The UK Parliament encourages citizens to reach out to their MPs with their issues through letter-writing or making a personal appointment. The public voice matters to MPs as they view politics as a career and so would represent their constituents’ interest to garner personal votes in preparation for the next elections.
Knowing who to reach out to can center the campaign team’s focus on stakeholders who can potentially have a larger impact and sway than others. Making use of Figure 1 when planning for a campaign on pandemic preparedness and prevention can inform organizers that government experts and think tanks may be the first group to reach out. There is a potential that partnerships and support from these stakeholders will follow the Pareto Principle and yield 80% of the campaign’s success from 20% of the suggested partners. It should also be noted that reaching out to the groups categorized as “high” for support such as healthcare workers and academic experts could have a positive influence on the outcome of a campaign. This secondary group has evidence of working with MPs, garnering their support for their causes or research, and informing policy reform.
Lower the barrier for MPs to support your campaign by renting out a room or space in the House of Commons and inviting MPs to attend your event. This was a suggestion given by one of our interviewees as a way to improve the possibility that an MP will engage with your campaign. Other than encouraging constituents to write letters to their MP to sign a pledge, they can also call for their MPs to attend your event which may be more convenient for them to stop by and take a picture which can then be posted publicly as a sign of their support. By lowering the barrier for MPs to support your cause and bringing your campaign to their doorstep, there’s a better chance for the campaign to garner support from target MPs, stakeholders, and constituents.
Conclusion and Further Research
This output was created to supplement the campaign of the Pandemic Prevention Network. We mapped different stakeholders who have political influence over Members of Parliament in the UK and determined the extent to which they could be supportive towards pandemic prevention and preparedness efforts. With this research, we also hope that target groups could be better prioritized so that PPN could work with those who have higher political influence and support for our cause. On top of that, stakeholders who may have not been considered as viable partners for the campaign (such as think tanks or pharmaceutical companies) could be revisited as a potential partner who can help garner more support for pandemic-related policy work.
While it is difficult to have a prescriptive plan of how to influence policymaking in the UK, we think that different approaches can be taken depending on the desired outcome (pledge vs policy input), concurrent political events, and time frame.
This research is just a start. If any organization or individual wishes to build on the initial research we’ve done, we would suggest the following topics to research and possible next steps:
- Conduct interviews with organizations under each stakeholder category to get their perspective on where they would fall in the ranking of political influence over MPs and support for pandemic preparedness
- Research on the best ways these stakeholder groups could be approached to garner their support for a pandemic-related campaign
- Research on additional case studies for each stakeholder category to justify or repudiate its current ranking and diversify the outliers present
- Interview Members of Parliament or their team to share their thoughts on groups and sources that would be interesting to work with for pandemic-related reform and their stance on working towards pandemic preparedness in the UK
It is our hope that this research could be a resource for groups or organizations who are relatively new to the political landscape in the UK and would like to understand the stakeholders they could work with for pandemic-related reform. While more work needs to be done in understanding the best ways to influence policymaking, having a good foundation of the potential players involved in the fight against future pandemics is essential in knowing who your allies will be.
Questions for audience
We’d love feedback on our work! In order to make this stronger and more useful, we would like anyone who has thoughts to answer any of the following questions in the comments below:
- Do you see flaws in the data presented above? If so, do you have ideas of how to address them?
- What is the weakest argument presented here? How could we make it stronger?
- How would you use this information?
If you have feedback or questions that you don’t want to share publicly, you’re welcome to fill out this form.
Note
We invite you to share this research with any UK policy efforts that this could be facilitative for.
Really interesting post. I paricularly like the framework you lay out, and hope it is useful to other advocacy groups. However, I am concerned with the conclusions you have come to for the reasons outlined below. I have focused on the area with which I am most familiar with (expert academic advice to government) but given the amount of errors I have found I have low confidence in the accuaracy of the rest.
On a high level, I'm interested on why your goal was influencing MPs specifically (rather than eg: cabinet ministers, their SPADs, or influential journalists). My impression is that most MPs have little real influence on policy, but I might be wrong here.
I will now list parts of this post and the linked mapping PDF which appear wrong or questionable to me.
This is not really how the process worked. SAGE was appointed by the government and their advice went directly to the cabinet. Perhaps occaisionally the committee directly worked with cabinet ministers but for the most part their advice would first go to civil servants (eg: Patrick Vallance as Chief Scientific Advisor). MPs, including senior ones such as the Leadeer of the Opposition, would not see their advice before it was public. Their influence was due to the mandate the governement gave them, rather than any political process SAGE undertook.
You talk about how SAGE does not have any responsibility for pandemic preparedness. While true, other expert advisory bodies (most notably NERVTAG, SPI-M, and SPI-B) do have this responsibility, and most SAGE attendees from the pandemic are also on one of these other bodies.
SAGE attendees are academic experts, I'm not sure why you've got them under government experts that "rely on external scientific advice". Its the attendees themselves, and their groups, doing the science the vast majority of the time!
Public Health England, NHS Test and Trace, and the Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) have all been discontinued with all their pandemic-relevant work being transferred into UKHSA. The JBC wasn't activated in 2020, it was created.
You have ranked government experts as highly likely to support your campaign. However, most of them are civil servants and therefore cannot take a public poltical position or lobby MPs on behalf of a pressure group.
You said yourself that SAGE was very influential! SAGE is full of academic experts, including from both LSHTM and the University of Oxford, both of which you singled out.
I am confused how being on a panel means your impact is medium when that panel (SAGE and its subgroups) is high impact.
This is a very strange and narrow set of academic experts you have chosen.
What about the Great Barrington Declaration?
I'm confused who exactly you are referring to here. SAGE does not have a permanent membership (except its chair, the UK Chief Scientific Advisor) but experts (normally academics) are invited each time it meets. They are chosen to have the relevant expertise for the specific emergency.
At times this was true, but is overly strong. Here is a few things that were heavily influenced by academic experts.
Hi @JoshuaBlake - thank you so much for taking the time to read the post and especially providing this feedback. This is incredibly helpful in providing additional context and information which we would like to add to the post/report. We would like to address and clarify some of the points you’ve brought up:
1. The post focuses on influencing MPs because the campaign that was aiming to garner support from the public. Since MPs have the opportunity to listen and represent the ideas of their community, they would be a bridge between their constituents and the government. Knowing that MPs can propose new laws, raise issues, and ask questions to government ministers, having the support of and raising awareness to MPs has a potential impact on future pandemic-related policies. While there may be other politicians or stakeholders that could have been influenced, we kept the scope of this narrow to have a more focused topic to research on. It could be a good recommendation for other future research or articles to look into and compare the political influence of the stakeholders you mentioned to gain a better understanding of how to influence on policy in the UK.
2. You’ve made a fair point on the process of counselling that SAGE provides to the government. Seeing that they do not directly influence MPs, then their relation to policy-making would stem from their influence on the cabinet as you’ve mentioned. Having a campaign supported by SAGE could indirectly influence MPs to support as well from the perspective that it would give credential to the campaign. With this, ranking them as medium for political influence still stands as while they seldomly/never work directly with MPs, policy is still heavily impacted by their guidance.
3. Including NERVTAG, SPI-M and SPI-B to the stakeholder map could provide a greater number of examples to compare against for the ranking of government experts. This could be included in an edited/future post or report.
4. You mention that SAGE is the same as academic experts. While you're right that SAGE is made up of academic experts, their influence is different from academic experts who are not on government panels, of which we wanted to make the distinction. The Parliament themselves acknowledged that the influence of academic experts outside of SAGE was limited during the pandemic, and thus potentially poor choices were made at the beginning of the pandemic due to the narrow focus of SAGE.
5. Thank you for noting the discontinuation of JBC. Since work has been transferred to UKSHA, perhaps it would be better to replace JBC with them and determine the ranking based on its current responsibilities and role.
6. For the Great Barrington Declaration, noting its international reach, it would be difficult to place and determine the influence that it would have over UK politics. We aimed to focus on more local groups to better gauge how we might rank them. Would love to hear any thought processes you might have for including such international initiatives and how to determine the influence it might have over MPs.
7. Placing academic experts as “low” for political influence was based on the articles we came across and read. Seeing the examples you gave on how these experts influenced decisions such as rapid testing or reopening, we would love to look into those articles. Would be great if you had the links for these, and we can look into adjusting the ranking for a future post.
8. The impact of any one group is difficult to quantify and will depend on the person, the policy issue, at a minimum. We collected the information based on reports we found from various government and public sources (see here for the summary of the examples), supplemented by review from those who have worked in or with the government sector. While we tried to inject some nuance into the report, considering the complexities of government and influence, but realize that it's difficult to do it well.
Again, we would like to express our thanks to you for taking the time to read the article and write your feedback. We understand that there are shortcomings to this article given information accessed, and limited background and context of UK politics. However, we still stand by the potential of the information compiled to be helpful and act as a starting point for other organisations who might be new to the campaigning space in the UK. Having constructive and helpful discussions on how these perspectives can be improved, can be a great step forward in better understanding how to influence MPs and policy.
-Alex and Nikki