Journalist, author and CEO of Demos Polly Curtis talks to Rob Behrens about her career in journalism, becoming a board member at PHSO and the relationship between the state and individuals. She also discusses her book ‘Behind Closed Doors: Why We Break Up Families And How To Mend Them’, an investigation into the children’s care system and the lives of vulnerable children.
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Rob Behrens: Hello, this is Rob Behrens here welcoming you to Radio Ombudsman, number 28. We’ve been going for a long time and it’s a pleasure to be with you again.
I have a special guest this morning, the new and distinguished board member of PHSO, Polly Curtis. Polly, you’re extremely welcome, thank you.
Polly Curtis: It’s so lovely to be here, thanks Rob.
Rob Behrens: As we’ll find out, Polly has the most distinguished and interesting career. It goes across many sectors. You’re a journalist, you’re a media executive, you’re an author, you’re a social campaigner and many other things as well.
So, I’m interested to ask you questions about how you’ve moved from one to the other. I’m also interested about your frank views about the Ombudsman service and what you’ve found since you arrived.
Polly Curtis: Fantastic.
Rob Behrens: So, as is the tradition on this programme, we begin by asking people about their early years. I think you come from Camden. Is that right?
Polly Curtis: That’s right, I’m a North Londoner.
Rob Behrens: North London. And I’d be interested to know your background and the values that you got as a young person.
Polly Curtis: Thank you Rob, it’s absolutely lovely to be here.
I’ll talk a bit about my background. I grew up in Camden, big family, there were four of us, loud family. One of those houses that lots of people came in and out of.
My parents ran a party shop, they sold balloons and they had the slogan, ‘The best little party shop in North London’. It was in an amazing place to have a party shop in North London. It was on the border of Hampstead and of an area called Gospel Oak and Kentish Town.
Hampstead was full of pop stars and authors and extremely rich people. Jonathan Ross used to come in and buy everything for his Halloween party. But the people who spent the most money in that little party shop were all the people who lived in the acres of estates on the other side of the shop.
So this shop was sat in this little niche that served the full diversity of North London. And I think that was very much my experience growing up - a really socially mixed experience of London life where I knew lots of people from lots of different backgrounds.
That really shaped my world view I suppose, so in terms of equality, equity, fairness, I think I’ve always seen the systems that have power in people’s lives through that social economic lens.
Rob Behrens: That’s something that comes out of your book, the importance of people and how they interact with systems, but we’ll come on to that.
But when you were thinking about studying and your career, you weren’t immediately attracted to journalism I don’t think.
Polly Curtis: Oh, no way. Because journalism is something that clever people did, confident people did - people who came from different places and had different experiences.
So, when I was at university, I got a side-lined job on the student newspaper doing the travel pages. And it was because in my heart of hearts I was quite drawn to this world but also didn’t see myself in it.
I saw all the blokes around the news section and I was just like, ‘That’s not my world,’ but it was what I was interested in. I wrote some travel pieces and it was totally gendered. It was like, ‘Oh, that’s the kind of thing I can do, I can do features, features are probably where I fit in to it’.
And of course it absolutely wasn’t features. I’m a news person, I seek out stories and I get scoops. That’s what I did as a journalist when I was reporting.
And I remember graduating from university and having this massive crisis of, ‘What am I going to do with the rest of my life?’ And I actually had that crisis all through my teens as well - ‘What GCSEs am I going to… I don’t know what I want to do, I don’t know what I want to do.’
Rob Behrens: Just remind us what you studied at university.
Polly Curtis: First, I studied development studies with politics. Again, because I was quite interested in politics but saw it as something a bit out of my league.
I’d been travelling and I really wanted to save the world, so I did development studies. Over the course of my degree, I switched that and did politics with development studies in the end because it was the politics I was really interested in.
So when I graduated I was like, ‘Well, I do really, really like this journalism thing’ and I remember making a really conscious decision.
And actually, the one journalist I knew in my own network - a friend of my sister’s - took me out for dinner. She told me that actually journalism had to be really meritocratic because you lived or died on the story you did. So, actually, it was whether you were good at it ultimately and, yes, some people got there faster and were more confident but I really heard what she said.
And I remember really consciously applying to do a journalism course and going to myself, ‘I’m going to put the blinkers up like a horse. I’m not going to listen to all that noise, to my own insecurities and to all the swagger and confidence around me in this world, because I’m just going to give myself a shot at this’. And I remember thinking that image of let’s put the blinkers up, let’s focus.
That’s something I’ve always said to younger journalists - people starting in journalism - like just cut out that noise. The competition, it will make you feel really insecure, especially if you’re not from the worlds that have traditionally inhabited journalism and politics.
Rob Behrens: So, in your early jobs did you experience discrimination or stereotyping?
Polly Curtis: I think I’ve seen it and experienced it at every level of my career. I think it is still just baked in. And over the course of my career there’s been a revolution in how we understand discrimination and inclusivity I think.
In journalism I think it’s the inclusivity bit that’s really different because you’re so often in conversations with people who share a language and share experience. And so, I think inclusivity is the major challenge in journalism.
So I think I’ve seen it - I’ve definitely experienced it at some points throughout my career.
Rob Behrens: And how did you deal with it? That’s the theme on this programme, that we have very successful people, many women, who have different strategies for dealing with that.
Polly Curtis: Yeah. So, when I didn’t have power, I didn’t deal with it - I rolled with it. Power sounds very grand, but as I accumulated responsibility and power in the workplace - which is hiring and managing and directing - I tried to use it differently to change things as well.
I think I still feel guilty I didn’t do that sooner, and more, earlier in my career. I think it’s hard when you’re quite often the only woman in the room.
I think in the earlier parts of my careers I think I sometimes just rolled with what was going on and I feel guilty about that now. But then once I was in hiring positions, and then when I was in leadership positions, I’ve always put it quite explicitly at the heart of the strategies I’ve run.
It has to be at the heart of changing journalism because if you don’t reflect the audiences you serve, if you don’t understand the question that’s going to be in the audience’s mind, then you can’t serve them and you become more and more irrelevant.
So, I think I’ve always made it a central part through diversity strategies, through hiring, through working with industry bodies on initiatives to improve diversity. And then culturally in organisations to try and create inclusive workplaces. I’m sure I’ve not always got that right, but I think I’ve always tried.
Rob Behrens: You, a distinguished journalist on the Guardian. Do you have a standout story, scoop, that you reflect on? Or were there so many that you can’t remember?
Polly Curtis: Do you know what, there were a lot. I was definitely a policy journalist, so I did education, health, social affairs and then I was Whitehall correspondent working in the Guardian’s Westminster team.
So you don’t tend to in those roles do the - in the time I was there, there was the hacking story, there was Snowden, there was WikiLeaks. The Guardian did some extraordinary stories that I was involved in peripheral ways, particularly when I was doing political reporting.
But I think what I’m proud of is the quality of policy reporting that was happening at that time. Really getting inside debates so that you could expose things, look at what was going wrong in the system, but also try and drive positive change as well.
I remember, as education correspondent, going to other countries to see how other places were doing it and bringing those ideas back in to the dialogue here. Really trying to drive systems improvement as well as hold to account.
And there was a real nuance to policy reporting then which, sadly, I think – not in any means just the Guardian, and I think the Guardian’s better than most – has been squeezed out a bit in the pressures on news.
So, I think I’m proud of some of the themes I’ve followed. Going back to my early experiences, so in education, when I was reporting on education prior to 2010, that was when the stories around diversity in schools results were first really being talked about. So, I did quite a lot of early data journalism looking at how inequality played out in the education system. I’m quietly proud of that.
Rob Behrens: That’s great. But one of the interesting things about you is many people would have been happy to have been a lauded Guardian journalist and that would be their career. But you’ve moved on and you’ve done a lot of other things in different types of media. You’ve gone to Huffington Post, you’ve gone to Tortoise, PA, you’ve done a lot of big jobs. What drove you to do these things?
Polly Curtis: Curiosity. I’m a bit of a magpie. I love the learning you get in every job and in every different team you work in, and then every different model you work in.
So, if you look at the different organisations I’ve been involved in leading one way or the other, they’re very different models like the Guard-
Rob Behrens: Yeah, I think you also went to the Red Cross-
Polly Curtis: I went to the Red Cross for a bit. So, when I left the Guardian I thought - I was very much a Guardian reporter - I bleed the Guardian if you cut me. And I thought, ‘I’m going to take all my journalistic skills and apply them to an organisation whose mission I believed in’. So, I went to the Red Cross.
I had an extraordinary year at the Red Cross as director of media because - another Manchester link - it was the year of the Manchester bombings, the London Bridge attacks and of Grenfell as well. We ran campaigns and operationalised support services around each of them.
So - had this extraordinary year, learnt a huge amount. But it also taught me that I wanted to be exposing things and telling the story.
It was a brilliant place to work but I went back to journalism and ran Huff Post in the UK.
It kind of comes back to that red top point Huff Post for me, I felt that in the digitisation of news we were losing quality news for broad audiences.
And a lot of quality journalism, for want of a better word, was going up behind paywalls. Creating these closed worlds where people have access to really great news, while everyone else was left to fight through the information on social media where it's really hard to understand what sources of information you can trust. The whole story and everything we know about the loss of trust and good sources of information, and disinformation and misinformation.
So, I thought in Huff Post what you had was a free-to-access, popular website designed around people’s lives that also did quality political reporting - quality investigative reporting. So, an amazing brand to reach different audiences.
We did some fantastic things with Huff Post. We closed our London newsroom - just moved the whole operation on to the streets of Birmingham for a week. The whole thing was about getting outside the bubble and asking different questions and getting closer to the audiences.
And we showed that you could grow your digital audience that way as well by providing quality news that spoke more loudly to the real issues that were affecting people’s lives - not the issues that we were talking about back in the bubble.
Rob Behrens: So that’s been one of the themes of your career - relating the powers of the state, or the implementation of the powers of the state, to the lived experience of people.
Polly Curtis: Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Rob Behrens: That’s a feature of everything that you do really.
Polly Curtis: Yeah, and I think that came through strongly at Tortoise. I was one of the editors – partners - who started up with Tortoise right at the beginning.
Tortoise is a membership organisation. The slogan is ‘Slow down, wise up’ and it’s built around events that bring people in to the conversation about news. It’s been going about three years now and it’s really successful. It does brilliant journalism and it’s really based around an idea about community and openness in reporting.
Rob Behrens: Slow news is there?
Polly Curtis: Slow news, yeah, which would have been antithesis to the scoop-y, deadline-driven journalist and reporter that I was earlier in my career.
But actually, I really learnt the power of not struggling to meet deadly- I mean it was a very fast paced environment - start-ups are very fast paced when you’re building something new. But the actual journalism - James Harding who founded Tortoise, who was editor of the Times, the director of news at the BBC, founded it with a brilliant commercial leader called Katie Vanneck-Smith.
Their whole thing has been to give journalists like me the time to go out and really thoroughly get underneath a story, which is how I came to write a book as well.
Rob Behrens: We’ll come on to that but another theme about your career is the combination of being a journalist but also engaging in the system itself. So, you’re now chief executive of Demos, which is chaired by my predecessor, so that’s interesting and good.
And you’re very recently appointed as a member of the board of PHSO, the Ombudsman service. So, first of all, is it possible to do both things? To retain your independence as a journalist but also be a participant in social policy implementation I suppose, or something like that?
Polly Curtis: Well, yes, because I’m by no means in any way, shape or form a politician. I think in these roles I bring leadership - so knowing about running organisations and bringing organisations together. But I apply quite a lot of journalistic methodologies and that to understand systems, to understand how things interact to work together and to understand the ultimate impact on people.
And I think the thing that I’ve always been really, really interested in - I think the driving theme of my journalism is where power meets people. It’s where the state really most sharply interacts with people’s lives, so I’ve reported on that as a journalist.
At Demos we put people at the heart of all our research and policymaking. Demos is a think tank. We’ve been going for 30 years. We do a very wide range of research and policymaking, but the common theme is that we listen to people first, we put people’s experience at the heart of that.
And then with PHSO it’s at the other end of the system where the policy’s been made, and it’s been enacted and it’s had the effect on people’s lives. And where it’s gone wrong, and people have tried every course of remedy, it comes to the PHSO.
So, you’re seeing the sharpest, sharpest end of where things go wrong practically and mistakes are made. But also there’s something I’m learning from PHSO about some softer skills around the relationship between the state and individuals, and how we communicate and how we overcome problems together.
So I think there’s an absolute theme and I think my skills and approach are common across all of them. I just have to be very clear about the different outcomes I’m doing in my different roles.
Rob Behrens: I met a new group of Ombudsman employees this week who joined in July and August. And I asked them, ‘Was there anything that had surprised them about joining us?’ So I have no problems about asking you because you joined in May.
Polly Curtis: Yes.
Rob Behrens: But did anything surprise you? What was your general reaction to the organisation?
Polly Curtis: So, lots has surprised me because I’ve learnt so much just this past couple of days. We’ve been in Manchester and the casework team have been taking us through the whole process from when someone makes a call to the PHSO right the way through to conclusion and beyond.
So the detail, the care and attention and passion that goes in from this team of getting it right is really, really striking. And I think the amount of how much people care is just really evident in all those conversations and made me feel quite humbled to be part of this organisation.
Something that surprised me right at the outset - one of the first facts I learnt was that 80% of the calls that come through to PHSO, the initial approaches, are people just looking for help that is so far before or beyond the PHSO’s remit. I think it speaks to the point that we don’t have enough of a front door to the state - we don’t have enough of a contact point between people in the state.
It's really quite hard to navigate if you need help. And think about how we use Google and move seamlessly between email and maps and our bank accounts, or whatever it is. The state is the opposite of that - there are dead ends all over the place and conflicting messages.
And I think, thinking about the end users’ experience through all of that, it feels like a very practical embodiment of the concepts that are talked about a lot around lack of trust in the state and lack of belief that the state will actually make things better.
So that has been quite revelatory to me and has focused my mind on some important issues I think.
Rob Behrens: When I was in Catalonia on a visit, the Ombudsman there had been given a painting by a Spanish artist called Tàpies and he gave us, the Ombudsman Office, a copy of it. It was described by the artist as representing a warm organisation, not a cold legal service but something that embraced the needs of citizens, which I thought was very interesting.
Polly Curtis: That’s wonderful and Tàpies is a wonderful artist as well. I’m a huge fan so I love that.
Rob Behrens: Really reflecting what you’re just saying. But you’ve written a book about this which is called ‘Behind Closed Doors’. It’s a very searing account of the problem of breakup of families. Could you tell us something a bit about that and what you found?
Polly Curtis: So, this came out of my work at Tortoise. The editor asked a very simple question. He said, ‘Why are so many children being removed from their families now? Why are so many children being removed by the state and put into a care system that is struggling to provide a good life for them?’
And there are a lot of very simplistic narratives around this in if you go in to some communities in this country, they have impressions of social workers as child snatchers, as people who will come and take your children. In other parts of society there’s a narrative of feckless parents, abusive parents, useless parents who just can’t look after their kids.
So, the process for writing the book was to really go through the data looking at where this has happened, who it’s happened to, what points in time the increases really came, what was happening in the wider world.
And then putting that data aside and going out and listening to people. So spending hours and hours and hours in people’s front rooms, in social work contact centres, in court rooms, in the corridors of family courts where people are sat waiting to see what’s going to happen to their family, and listening to their experiences of that.
And I think ultimately what I found is a system that has had so little care and attention and investment put into it that we now remove children before we’ve really done anything to support that family to stay together.
Social workers have so little resource they can call on to support a family to solve problems related to mental health, substance misuse, poverty. Poverty, it’s the number one driving factor of this, that kids are being removed into a system that is absolutely failing them and not good enough.
And the economic folly of it is just mad. The care system costs so much more than investing earlier in the cycle, investing in families. But it’s like we don’t trust families anymore, so it comes back to that point of trust between the state and families.
Families don’t trust that the state will help them because they haven’t for so long, and the state doesn’t see the strength that exists with families, it only sees the risks. Social workers are so horrifically held to account when mistakes are made but there’s no incentive in the system to sit with understood risk to give families a chance to grow the strengths that they do have.
Rob Behrens: I think it’s a superb piece of research and writing. First of all, because there’s no magic bullet in what you’re suggesting - you’re saying this is multifaceted, it’s complex.
Secondly, you listen not just to the users of services but the suppliers of services, and you give a very balanced account of the dilemmas of all the parties.
And thirdly, it’s about the real-life stories of many people who deserve a lot better than they get. There’s an impartiality and an empathy there which really illustrates what Ombuds should be doing in their work to make sure that they listen to everybody and they’re evidence-based, so I recommend it.
Polly Curtis: Thank you. Something I came to really strongly believe as a result of doing that book is I fundamentally believe that there are very rarely goodies and baddies in a story. There are baddies in this story, there are parents who kill their children and they usually have a story to tell as well but they do very horrifically bad things.
But the vast majority of people in that system are not bad people and they’re not trying to be bad people. I think that’s true in many, many contexts.
It’s made me think about whether there’s a more compassionate way to do journalism that still holds to account, but gets to a more nuanced version of the truth by not falling for simplistic stories about goodies and baddies.
Rob Behrens: I think one of the big problems of public policy now is that we don’t learn from the experience which is repeated time and time again. And that’s a feature of your book but many other things as well, particularly in the health service, so thank you for putting that on the table.
Polly Curtis: So that point about public policy is a thing we’re really passionate about at Demos as well. We see a situation where policymaking has been made into two broad ways over the last 20 years. One is partisan, so inherently divisive and very short term, so not tackling the really big issues, the systemic issues, the issues when systems interact and make things go wrong, but being very driven at immediate results.
Or technocratic, which is evidence-based and absolutely important, but misses out on the human experience. So, what we drive for is a different approach to more participatory policymaking, so putting people at the heart of policy. We think you should get to the point where no policy has ever started without the proper listening to the end user in the appropriate way.
Rob Behrens: A very long time ago Shirley Williams wrote a book called ‘Politics is for People’, which was criticised as being bland but, on the other hand, it does get to a fundamental issue which needs to be addressed.
We could go on talking for a long time but I’m being pressured to end.
I want to end by saying to you we have 500 people plus who work here, we have 100 new people many of them young graduates. What would be your advice to those people about developing their careers and their interests as they move forward?
Polly Curtis: I think in the work that I’ve seen at PHSO and the thing that I’m actually really inspired by is the compassion in the work, and the compassion balanced with fairness and impartiality. That’s really, really hard to get right.
And sitting with the teams yesterday and hearing about the individual cases where they’re trying to balance the right level of empathy, that acknowledges the hardship people have experienced and manages their expectations of what the Ombudsman can do but holds the authorities to account - getting the balance between all those things, that’s something that I learn from and will take away in my activities in daily life I hope.
Rob Behrens: Polly Curtis, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much on behalf of all our listeners, have a good day. And to everybody, the sun is shining here in Manchester, we hope it’s shining wherever you are, and we look forward to seeing you soon. Goodbye.