Fishburn Hedges

This article is part of the Lobbying Portal, a sunlight project from Spinwatch.

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Fishburn Hedges is a corporate communications company. It offers PR and lobbying services.

Background

It is owned by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, the UK's largest advertising agency, which is, in turn, ultimately owned by the global communications group Omnicom.

It has worked for some of the most controversial corporations, including Shell and British American Tobacco.

Origins of the company

Fishburn Hedges was established in 1991 as a corporate communications company specialising in public relations, advising companies on how best to communicate ideas and products to their target audience. Five founders of the company - Neil Hedges and chairman Dale Fishburn, together with Andrew Boys, John Williams and Charles Downing put up £150,000 to start up the company.

'The firm opened for business the day the Gulf War started and in the depths of the recession. But it made more than pounds 1 million profit last year and has picked up top clients such as Barclays, Rothschild and Eagle Star.' In 1996 Fishburn Hedges was taken over by Abbot Mead Vickers ad company for a reported fee of between £4 and 15 million.

The founders

John Williams, an independent consultant specialising in corporate marketing and reputation, was co-founder and its former Chairman, having started his career in consumer advertising with J. Walter Thompson. At Fishburn Hedges, he is said to have developed a particular interest in corporate social responsibility and also built a practice serving the not-for-profit sector. He worked for five years with Shell on their global stakeholder engagement programme.

He is currently Chairman of the governance and leadership think tank, Tomorrow's Company, a board member of Business in the Community and was, until recently, deputy Chair of ChildLine. Williams is currently a Commissioner with the Charity Commission, as one of the five non-executive Commissioners responsible for the regulation of 190,000 charities in England and Wales.

People

FH's people come from a range of backgrounds:

Typically our client teams will mix career PR practitioners with consultants who have professional experience in that client’s field. Our consultants include former bankers, advertising planners, authors, civil servants, trade unionists, stock brokers, charity fund raisers and, of course, journalists.

According to Fishburn Hedges’s own website: "all PRs should take note that purple type on their CV, a thorough knowledge of EastEnders and frequent pretence of sincerity goes a long way".

Lobbyists

Lobbyists at Fishburn Hedges include:

• Rupert Lewis. In 2006 Rupert Lewis joined FH from Bell Pottinger Public Affairs. Lewis is a former researcher for the Conservatives' current policy chief Oliver Letwin. He also assisted the leader of the Conservative home affairs team in the House of Lords, Baroness Anelay of St John's, as well as former environment minister Sir Paul Beresford.
• Laura Montgomery. Ex-Lexington Communications lobbyist and former Conservative Party staffer Laura Montgomery joined FH in 2007.
• Rory Scanlan. Worked in Ton Blair's press team during the 2001 and 2005 general elections.
• Jo Murray. The Labour Party's head of press and broadcasting joined Fishburn Hedges as associate director in April 2008. Murray had held the party's top communications role since 2005.
• Lucy Burns. Former researcher for Estelle Morris MP.

Staff

Staff listed on the company website are:

Andrew Marshall | Andrew Reid | Andy Berry | Chris Reed | Clare Looker | Daniel Mines | Elizabeth Bickham | Fiona Thorne | Lucy Burns | Marc Moninski | Morgan Bone | Neil Hedges | Nick Wright | Philippa Dale-Thomas | Rachel Jones | Ron Finlay | Sarah Croom-Johnson | Simon Burton | Simon Matthews | Suzanne Morris

PR Campaigns

The Fishburn Hedges website points to the following services it provides to clients:

• government relations and regulatory affairs to campaigning - aka lobbying
• reactive crisis and issue management to planned corporate positioning
• corporate ethics to corporate community involvement

It has used the following techniques:

Front Groups

Fishburn Hedges was the organizer of the tobacco industry front group Associates for Research into the Science of Enjoyment, or ARISE.

'Grass roots' involvement

The firm also operates a group called the Pre-school Learning Alliance. It describes itself as "a leading educational charity specialising in the early years". According to its website:

"The Pre-school Learning Alliance is the largest grass-roots movement committed to the education and well-being of children and to the value of education as the means to a better life for the community as a whole."

Fishburn Hedges says of its work with the Alliance:

"As part of our work with the Pre-school Learning Alliance, we combined a major conference on early years education and childcare, addressed by the Education Secretary, with the presentation by pre-school children of a cake to the PM at Number Ten as it was his birthday."

The VP of the Alliance is Graham McMillan — Director of Fishburn Hedges. The Alliance is partly funded by corporate partners including (in 2008) Tesco, Fisher-Price and Abbey Home Media, creators and distributors of pre-school children's programming for broadcast, audio, video, DVD and publishing channels. One assumes the corporate funders are interested in accessing markets.

Monitoring activists

Fishburn Hedges also takes a keen interest in activist campaigns if they prompt TV and radio coverage. When a customer (Steve Pardoe) alleged on his website that BT Cellnet "had been making unauthorised debits from thousands of people's bank and credit card accounts, then cynically fobbing off their victims," the campaign grew to attract mainstream media attention and so Fishburn helped out with some of that "reactive crisis and issue management" According to Steve Pardoe:

"BT Cellnet and their PR firm, Fishburn Hedges, visited this site on 16 February, the day before transmission, and later in the week. Fishburn Hedges' visit was presumably to gauge the extent and detail of media exposure of Cellnet's fraud.

The "Corporate use of codes of ethics: 2004 survey" was put together by Fishburn Hedges and it reportedly shows "that responsibility for how corporate codes of ethics operate is increasingly being taken seriously by directors and boards in Britain's biggest companies." Given the Fishburn Hedges approach, it is difficult to know if this is true or the result of a "pretence of sincerity".

Specific campaigns

Specific campaigns Fishburn Hedges has carried out include:

1. "We have helped clients to win competition cases. We worked with J Sainsbury during the “Rip off Britain” furore to ensure that it came out of the Competition Commission inquiry into the major supermarkets with a clean bill of health. For William Hill, we helped to persuade the competition authorities and the Trade & Industry Secretary to block the proposed merger of Ladbrokes with Coral."
2. "We have helped to reposition Powergen with government not only as a respected industry voice but also as leading the way on the environmental and social agenda."
3. FH’s clients have included two of the big five supermarkets: Sainsbury’s and Asda. Whereas the supermarkets have been criticized by food campaigners for being part of the obesity epidemic gripping the UK, FH has been attempting to portray its clients as part of the solution. FH says that the main focus of its activity has been to make sure that Sainsbury’s “is recognised as a leading player in the national debate about nutrition and healthy eating.” The then head of FH’s public affairs Graham McMillan adds “The food industry needs to get on the front foot, and play a prominent role in the [obesity] debate rather than sticking its head in the sand or being defensive”
4. In 2004, the partially privatized secretive government defence company Qinetiq hired FH to generate interest in its products amongst security, commercial defence, aerospace, aviation, transport, health and energy industries.
5. In July 2007, Starbucks UK awarded its PR contract to Fishburn Hedges. The coffee company was under fire - the company faced union-busting allegations in the US. In 2006, Oxfam ran a campaign against it for blocking trademark applications by coffee-growers in Ethiopia. Over 90,000 people sent a message to the company from a Myspace page. The year before, the company had been labelled “arrogant, intrusive and self-centred” by a survey of 8,000 consumers.
6. In 2005 the Electoral Commission hired FH for around £100,000 a year to “increase voter engagement”. Angela Salt of the Commission said at the time: “We need to demonstrate that politics is personal. People must be engaged; we need to show them why this matters”. A misguided statement perhaps given FH’s role in helping clients, like Starbucks, who have been the target of political activism.
7. Transport for London also paid FH a massive £100,000 a month for advice on Ken Livingstone's congestion charge. The total fee amounted to more than £2.4m over two years (2001-03).
8. "Our work for Unilever, one of the world’s largest food companies, has included communicating its approach to sustainable development to government, opinion formers, NGOs and the media. By working towards best practice, Unilever has added strength to its voice on all the major UK/EU policy issues facing food, farming and fisheries. The programme has included: working with Forum for the Future, the NGO led by Jonathon Porritt, which has advised on the development of Unilever’s Sustainable Agriculture Project." Forum for the Future is actually a paradigmatic example of a front group and not actually an independent non-government organisation. According to documents lodged with the Charities commission in 2006 its income from business "as a proportion of total income" increased to "47 per cent of overall income (compared to 42 percent of total income in 2005)". In the circular world of PR, the Forum is itself a client of FH, which in turn runs the Forum's website for it. Tetra Pak, the carton manufacturing company owned by the Rausing family, is a "retail sector partner" of the Forum. The company is also a client of Fishburn Hedges. These connections make it unclear whether the companies involved with the Forum are actually its clients, since they seems to make use of its services for what could be described as lobbying purposes. The Forum's ”business partners" are largely drawn from the UK’s FTSE 250 and include major multinationals such as Alliance Boots, Cargill, Unilever, BP, GlaxoSmithKline, ICI Scottish & Newcastle and Vodafone – all of whom are not known for their environmental sustainability.

Clients

The company's list of clients include some of the UK's and US's biggest controversial corporations. FH handles Shell's "Global reputation management programme"; the Bank of America's "Media relations strategic counsel and public affairs internal communications"; Barclays "Personal finance media relations programme and business banking media relations programme"; BT’s public relations programme with BT Retail; Serco; and IBM.

Client list in 2008

Lobbying clients declared in 2008:
ABPI | Atos Origin | Aviva | British Dental Association | Capital One | Carbon Trust | Construction Skills | Digital UK | ERSA | EEDA | Investors in People | Job Centre Plus | JPMorgan | Laing O’Rourke | Norwich Union | Pension Protection Fund | ResCare | Sainsbury’s | Starbucks | Tetra Pak | Virgin Trains | West Midlands Passenger Transport Authority / West Midlands Metropolitan Authorities | WRAP

Client list 2007

Amway | ASDA | Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries | Bank of America | Barclays | British Library | British Marine Federation | Barrow Cadbury Trust | Carbon Trust | National Express | National Treatment Agency | Powergen | Pre-school Learning Alliance | Royal College of Nursing | Scottish Widows | Shell International | South Bank Centre | Transport for London | TetraPak | Unilever

Affiliations

• In 2008, Fishburn Hedges was reported to be a member of the Global Financial Communication Network, (GFC/Net), a "financial and corporate communications network linking leading independent public relations consultancies in major financial markets around the world."

• Fishburn Hedges is one of the main backers of Editorial Intelligence, with chief executive Ron Finlay an adviser to the project. Editorial Intelligence goes further than perhaps any other organisation in blurring the lines between journalism and PR.

Contacts

77 Kingsway, London WC2B 6SR

External Resources

• Fishburn Hedges UK Clients and Staff 30.11.03 to 3.05.04
• Fishburn Hedges UK Staff and clients, 1 June 2005 to 30 Nov 2005

Notes

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