How do we fund Climate Change mitigation

 At present I am focused on funding improved policies for mitigating the effects of Climate Change in the housing sector.

In the UK drought and its associated wild fires destroyed houses and increased pressure on the NHS, among other issues.

But such expenditure may well be poorly placed.

The Building Research Establishment shows the annual costs to the NHS of poor quality and hazardous housing at £1.4 billion. This rises to £18.5 billion p.a. when wider societal costs are included (long term care, mental health etc.).

Peter Freeman, the chairman of the government quango Homes England, reports its own investment on behalf of the government. He says “Our partners include Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group and M&G. In March 2020, we announced a £10m investment in M&G Investments new Shared Ownership Fund. Homes England’s early participation catalysed £177m of initial institutional investment, a first step towards the fund’s £825m target capital raised. Over the next five years the fund will develop more than 2,000 new affordable shared ownership homes in partnership with housing associations across England. This deal highlights the commitment Homes England has to supporting the growth and evolution of housing in institutional portfolios.” Are such affordable homes part of new housing estates or monoculture crescents of old peoples?

Call all this money £20/40 billion by including savings to the NHS. Asking the NHS to invest in re-furbished dwellings to save all or part of £1,4 billion is going to be a tough ask but simply implemented.

Filtering air entering a building to remove 99% of particulate from vehicles (a main cause of lung diseases), cold, flu and covid viruses and much more would be a significant investment alongside insulation of roofs, walls and floors and removal of heat bridges. Mitigating Climate Change can also make the nation healthier.

The pledges from the financial institutions have not been included in the above resources and there are also Local Government funds available too.

The 2022 Queen’s Speech promised even more cost to the Treasury and another attempt to add further to the current mish mash of money, regulation ‘incentives’ and Climate Change mitigation (and confusion with global warming).

There is more but it makes the point. There are some dwellings that are of a high standard out of the 24 million homes in the UK but not many.

It seems that there is quite a lot of money floating around to do a stunning job and upgrade our homes against Climate Change. What is silly is that there are large sums of money cast across a lot of homes and therefore of little consequence at the sharp end. People are to a varying degree inspired by this largesse; some even do nothing at all!

There is a case for a comprehensive review of what money is being sloshed around and for what purpose.

Let's look at three examples:

There are other investments that can be included in refurbishment such as electricity saving devices including light bulbs, low power washing machines and solar powered and energy creating street lights. Other forms of cost reduction that can attract funding are estate wide battery storage facilities (of which more later) to keep the lights on at night and offer over capacity power to the National Grid or independent customers. Then there is the use of a local bottled water company selling estate harvested water. Providing automated street services such as lighting, street cleaning and grass cutting etc. has a value too and can attract funding. All these stakeholder provided services can be bundled up into a package that can be valuable investments and funded and managed by the private sector and will also help to slim down tax payer funded government.

The Public Private Partnership scheme whereby financial institutions fund capital assets and services are wide open to abuse and can be restructured to support the housing crisis.

Tracing the path of taxpayers, financial institutions and revenue streams in the housing sector needs to be closely managed. It needs the security and real life and real time auditing. This is an excellent case for using blockchains to provide immutable evidence of delivery and quality.

All of these issues are covered in Climate Change House which is available from Amazon:

http://amzn.to/3RgR4Vf

Sprinkle a little joy all over the place

 In its 2019 manifesto, the Conservative Party pledged to spend £9.2 billion on upgrading the energy efficiency of homes, schools and hospitals. This included Social Housing.

Starting in 2022, tens of thousands of homes are to be built on derelict sites as part of a nearly £2 billion drive generously paid for by the British taxpayer through its agent, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. 

There is more:

• The Decarbonisation Fund Homes of £3.8 billion over a ten year period;

• Home Upgrade Grants worth £2.5 billion over a five year period and a Public Sector

• Decarbonisation Scheme of £2.9 billion over a five year period.

The government does not have a Climate Change policy but it does waste a tonne of my money on a wide range of sloppy handouts.There is a need for a single coherent approach.

Here are some of the green gestures the Tory party has lauded as Climate Change mitigation.

On the 8 July 2020, the Chancellor announced a £2 billion Green Homes Grant, with vouchers of up to £5,000 to help homeowners upgrade their homes, and up to £10,000 available to some of the UK’s poorest families.

There is also a £1 billion programme to make public buildings, including schools and hospitals, across the UK greener and £50 million to pilot innovative approaches to retrofitting social housing at scale.

The fourth round of the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme which aims to secure 12GW of electricity capacity opens with £285 million a year of funding for low carbon technology.

Then there is:

1. The Warm Home Discount gives £140 each year, mainly to pensioners and people who receive certain benefits. A small amount per house but a fortune overall.

2. The Winter Fuel Payment is a payment towards your winter heating if you're aged over 66 (you get more if you're over 80).

3. If winter is particularly cold, some households can get the £25 Cold Weather Payment for each week that it’s below zero degrees.

4. Fuel Direct can help you manage your energy bills if you get Income Support, income based Jobseeker’s Allowance, income related Employment and Support Allowance, Universal Credit or Pension Credit.

All of these projects carry with them an army of people trying to administer such schemes. So much for smaller government

Tomorrow I shall offer even more sprinkling taken from my book Climate Change House

House Prices Tumbling?

 There is now a lot of evidence that the buoyant housing market will not last, and house prices will reduce over the next five years. This is a conclusion in Climate House Change. It also notes that volatility also tends to drive away investors.

The prospect of future falling house prices is also politically a problem. Politicians tend not to be elected against house price instability scenarios. Taxing speculators is also a difficult option. There have to be alternatives to provide a known secure return in housing investment.

In addition, lower prices do not solve the need for accommodation; the demand for more homes will not fade even if the hyperinflation housing prices go away in the time it takes to build a housing estate.

The return we get from house price inflation is not good for the national economy. It is a case of higher prices but no productivity advantage. This need not be the case. Factory built houses cost less and are a productivity advance over bricks and mortar.

Instead of stoking inflation, it is possible to turn the investment in a house into a source of income. The idea that a house can generate energy, save water, reduce public sector costs such as social care, respiratory and allergy diseases and cut public service costs such as street cleaning, grass cutting and drone postal services is an eye opener. It grows the economy and cuts public sector costs.

And, by the by, it will be quite soon when climate change proofed houses are in much greater demand than other homes. And with inflation capped incentivise faster house improvements that make investing in renovation and re-building more attractive.

For the book:

The Financial Issues and Housing

 Today, The markets and mortgage rates are in turmoil.

It was not unexpected. I even commented on it in my book Climate Change House. Prescient or What!

There is considerable volatility that makes financing the housing sector problematic. However, the trend in inflation from houses has been with us for a long time supported by a perceived shortage of homes. One can only wonder at the bright green glee in the mind's eye as we behold the property money men.

There is every incentive for a wide range of powerful institutions to keep house price inflation growing. It is an asset that keeps investors from the smallest to the biggest, happy. This is an investment in inflation not in houses. It is not an investment in assets but even so does yield an income as people pay their mortgages.

There was some evidence that the buoyant housing market in 2021 would not last, and house prices may even reduce over the next five years. Volatility also tends to drive away investors.

The prospect of future falling house prices is also politically a problem. Politicians tend not to be elected against house price instability scenarios. Taxing speculators is also a difficult option. There has to be alternatives to provide a known secure return on housing investment.

In addition, lower prices do not solve the need for accommodation; the demand for more homes will not fade even if the hyperinflation housing prices go away in the time it takes to build a housing estate.

The return we get from house price inflation is not good for the national economy. It is a case of higher prices but no productivity advantage.

This need not be the case.

As I argue in the book, factory built houses cost less and have a productivity advance over bricks and mortar.

Instead of stoking inflation it is possible to turn the investment in a house into a source of income. The idea that a house can generate energy, save water, reduce public sector costs such as social care, respiratory and allergy diseases and cut public service costs such as street cleaning, grass cutting and drone postal services is an eye opener. It grows the economy and cuts public sector costs.

And, by the by, it will be quite soon when Climate Change proofed houses are in much greater demand than other homes.

Long after the impacts of the Ukraine war have passed, a big flood, fire, even a pandemic or social disruption caused by mass migration to avoid the effects of Climate Change with its consequential economic turmoil will have a knock on effect in the UK too.

By 2070, 19% of the world will be a barely livable hot zone. Just being outside for 4 hours will be a killer.

I thought it would be good to take a p\ragraph out of my book Climate Change House. It is quite pertinent after our longest drought, hottest days and the threat of unprecedented storms crossing the Atlantic.

It's not that we have not had them in the past, it's how much more severe they are as we get into more acute levels of Climate Change.

Homes are suffering increased problems due to Global Warming and the resultant frequency and severity of Climate Change.

Politically, people are leaning towards improved protection and mitigation of Climate Change and it's now a significant influence and belief in human-created climate change ranks third among the most critical issues for the population at large. YouGov opinion polls also show climate change as a key concern among electors and 80% of the adult population think of housing as an issue.

In five years, 570,000 new homes were built between 2016 and 2021. Mostly these new homes are not climate change resilient. Current policies throw a woolly insulation blanket over houses (new and old) and call it renovation, refurbishment or Global Warming mitigation and when the days pass with temperatures close to, or above, 40℃ it becomes apparent that the need for climate change mitigation which is a much bigger and life-threatening problem.

Occupants are at risk of overheating in their homes (there are still an estimated two thousand heat-related deaths per year and increasing). Household heating in winter is very likely to decrease due to warmer winters, and summer air conditioning demand will grow but there will be severe winter weather as well from time to time.

Time and Money Part 1

Money! It’s the hard thing to consider in Climate Change House.

One of the key players in this subject area is the Green Finance Institute. Its objectives are: “To achieve the transition to an inclusive, net zero carbon and climate resilient economy, both public and private finance is needed.”

In an interesting press release in November 2021 it announced a new initiative:

“The need to unlock finance to retrofit homes in the owner occupier sector is now clearly recognised, and the range of products available is beginning to grow, with pioneering financial institutions launching and continually developing new ways of lending for energy efficiency upgrades.”

The idea of such an organisation is worthy. However, most of its thinking is focused on mitigating global warming and not Climate Change.

It is an example of the confused thinking among those that have come to global warming and its impacts late.

There are other such worthy organisations. ESG – short for Environmental, Social and Governance – is a set of standards measuring a business's impact on society, the environment, and how transparent and accountable it is.

According to the CBI, two-thirds of investors take ESG factors into account when investing in a company meaning ESG has the potential to grow a business while benefiting the environment and community.

Green mortgages a long way to go - Olga Lioncat

More than 10 mortgage lenders in the UK have launched green mortgage products since the beginning of 2021 alone, but this is a relatively small proportion of the UK’s £1.58 trillion mortgage market. According to the Intermediary Mortgage Lenders Association, 77% of lenders are planning to launch green mortgages that are cheaper or priced the same as a typical product. Acting as a central knowledge hub, the Green Finance Institute has launched the Green Mortgage Hub, an online resource collating publicly available information on UK green mortgages into an interactive table, alongside a library of articles, reports, tools and experiments related to the green mortgage market. The hub aims to inform and encourage lenders considering entry into the green mortgage market. It aims to be a trusted source of information for mortgage intermediaries, policymakers and NGOs focused on decarbonising the built environment (that is global warming mitigation but not necessarily Climate Change) management.

The Green Mortgage Hub has a list of lenders offering a range of services. However, there is the other side of the coin. The current forms of finance are a form of tax and it is difficult for a large proportion of the population.

In the book, I offer a number of other solutions and I will be exercising them here in due course.

Housing Planning - OOPs

Perhaps it’s now time to examine the institutions involved in developing our homes. These are not ‘homes of the future’. They are homes now for the future.

There is a lot of confusion around. It is important to examine the initiatives of the most influential organisations.

Key among the Chartered institutions affecting housing and Climate Change is the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI). The work of its members is heavily criticised as its members produce a conveyor belt of inappropriate planning decisions. Planning outcomes are reputation-crushing. The carbuncle housing estates attached to practically all villages are a classic case in point.

They are cast in a mould of £350,000 new houses supported by an infrastructure that sheds estate-wide rainwater into concrete culverts rushing towards the next flood pinch-point.

The RTPI website says “Planners can embed climate action in local decision making, faster net zero transport, improve urban greening, create affordable housing, smart cities and protect infrastructure from flooding.” The word ‘can’ is a real giveaway. As France, Spain and the UK enjoy weather over 40C it would seem the threat of such temperatures is not a big issue for planners. 

There is a greater urgency needed. 

Victoria Hills, Chief Executive of the RTPI, said: “Planners are a driving force in addressing the climate crisis….” Good. We look forward to it.

But there is not a solar panel in sight in new Bloor Houses (see left).

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is another example. It has set itself a professional challenge.

The ‘2030 Climate Challenge’ is a voluntary initiative for RIBA Chartered Practitioners to join and demonstrate their commitment to attempting to meet key sustainability targets on the buildings they design. 

It includes targets for annual energy use, embodied carbon over the building's lifecycle and annual water use. It provides a stepped approach towards reaching net zero. They are not quite sure if this means net-zero emissions to ameliorate global warming or do these ambitions also reflect the dangers of Climate Change?

The challenge is not mandatory, it is a commitment to show leadership among members’ projects and attempt to meet the targets.

The first reaction to such an ambition is to identify that it focuses on mitigating global warming rather than Climate Change alleviation. It is probably unfair to single out RIBA as an exemplar and there are many other similar organisations in the same sort of fix but RIBA is a relevant example.

A Housing Crisis

There is a housing crisis.

But what do we mean by ‘housing’? What is the stock of housing in the UK, and how close is it to meeting population needs?

There is an almost hidden part of the ‘housing stock’. It is the underused and decaying portion, much-hated by the population at large according to YouGov polls. It is dealt with here as well.

In 2021 the Guardian pointed out that house prices appear to have defied economic gravity over the past years. 

The lockdowns triggered by the pandemic led to a 10% fall in GDP, the largest fall in 300 years since the Great Frost of 1709. Yet the latest data show house prices have grown at the fastest annual rate – 13.4% – in 17 years. Are we in the midst of another housing bubble?

One might add ‘or is this a market response reflecting the dearth of houses’. So, how many houses are there?

How many homes?

To house 67 million people, there were 24.7 million dwellings in March 2022, but 0.9% were empty. Some are plain grotty . Many are just too expensive to live in. Many leasehold flats have maintenance charges of £1,200 a year - more than double in 2007.

As of 2019, more than 3.12 million owner-occupied houses were built before 1919. By contrast, approximately 1.5 million owner-occupied dwellings were produced from 2003 onwards.

Most houses are not Climate Change ready. What can we do?

For more see Climate Change House available from Amazon. 

 The last century has been the warmest on record, with the increase in temperature occurring “extremely unevenly” around the world.

Governments and businesses are not doing enough to prevent global warming and the UN secretary general, said that some governments and businesses were “lying” in claiming to be on track for 1.5C.

For example, the insurance industry has moved slowly to reflect the predicted level of risk. While many regional insurers have adapted to the new climate, large firms are not doing enough. For example, reinsurance firm Swiss Re relies heavily on a single measure, catastrophe models that consider only certain kinds of natural hazards (lightning strikes and earthquake shaking) and leave out major atmospheric events (drought).

Driven by CO2 and Methane production, global warming is a huge cloud hanging over the homes of us all. Climate Change is to bring ever more intensive heat waves, drought, cold, storms, floods, fires and even winter droughts more frequently than ever before. Frequency and ferocity mark out these Climate Change events.

For more see Climate Change House available from Amazon here: amzn.to/3RgR4Vf

Drought in Doncaster

Building houses to the current standards adds environmental damage

Nearly a quarter of the world’s population experienced a record hot year in 2021. A year later, the UK had record-breaking temperatures, fires and drought, before the school summer holidays.

Globally, the extraordinary weather events are a catalogue of deadly proportions and, from a Sky News article, something like a wake-up call close to an environmental armageddon.

Building houses to the current standards (with a few exceptions) just add to the problem of environmental damage (Buildings generate nearly 40% of annual global CO2 emission). Its use of resources and energy needs to be addressed. But, additionally, there is a need for restoring and maintaining older properties with similar demands.

Global warming has an evil twin: Climate Change.

Climate Change sets the backdrop to all that has to be done to solve the housing crisis.

It also offers a background briefing for my book Climate Change House

It is available from Amazon amzn.to/3RgR4Vf 

Cut government to pay for cost of living crisis - here's how.

 As the dust settles on the cost of living round-up, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng can now focus on the mass of money sprinkled around the economy to aid climate change mitigation (there are other areas of government that also have sprinklers too).
Each of the schemes needs managing, monitoring and policing. Where do these people come from? Who pays for them, their offices and expenses?

It is worth looking at some of these schemes.

The government’s 95% mortgage guarantee scheme for homebuyers with 5% deposits on properties worth up to £600,000 (until the end of 2022) offers the prospect of “taking the market into overheated, dangerous territory”.

In its 2019 manifesto, the Conservative Party pledged to spend £9.2 billion on upgrading the energy efficiency of homes, schools and hospitals. This included Social Housing.

Starting in 2022, tens of thousands of homes are to be built on derelict sites as part of a nearly £2 billion drive generously paid for by the British taxpayer through its agent, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng.

There is more:

• The Decarbonisation Fund Homes of £3.8 billion over a ten year period;

• Home Upgrade Grants worth £2.5 billion over a five year period.

• Decarbonisation Scheme of £2.9 billion over a five year period.

On 8 July 2020, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a £2 billion Green Homes Grant, with vouchers of up to £5,000 to help homeowners upgrade their homes, and up to £10,000 available to some of the UK’s poorest families.

There is also a £1 billion programme to make public buildings, including schools and hospitals, across the UK greener and £50 million to pilot innovative approaches to retrofitting social housing at scale.

The Building Research Establishment shows the annual costs to the NHS of poor quality and hazardous housing at £1.4 billion. This rises to £18.5 billion p.a. when wider societal costs are included (long-term care, mental health etc.). Who should pay? Why the NHS of course, from its annual budget.

Here I have already identified 20% of the billion expected to be spent on the cost of living crisis.

Additionally, there are inspectorates, and planning establishments galore.

They too can be shipped out from under the government's largess.

I cover this quite thoroughly in my book Climate Change House where there is much more and there are some reforms that can take public sector bureaucracy away from the taxpayer.

picture Getty Images

Mitigating the cost of oil

 There were over 150,000 home sales in 2021, after dramatically falling to 32,450 in May 2020 during the peak of the coronavirus (COVID 19) crisis.

It is reasonable to imagine that between 15 and 20% of the housing stock is sold each year and that is a pretty good start at moving the housing stock into Climate Change mitigation in short order.

Financing the renovation of these houses, most built in the middle of the last century, is not hard. It will mean that financing this development will have to be part of the cost of the house (and will be a consideration for building societies).

Part of these renovations will include harvesting solar electricity, heat and water taking houses out fuel demand altogether.

The mechanism will be in the reform of stamp duty to cover the cost of renovation at perhaps 10% of the price of the house.

Renewing 10/20% of the UK housing stock each year and at no cost to the public purse would be both a huge boost to the economy and employment.

Furthermore, the associated ability to have distributed energy production (without the need for huge power grid cables marching over the countryside) with energy saving and nationally distributed storage (batteries) will be a boon.

Revenue generated from second sales will be useful for adding climate change mitigation investment. This can be as fundamental as stormwater protection, drought alleviation, end-of-street power storage (long lived big batteries), community mesh wifi infrastructure and so forth. There will never be enough climate mitigation investment in the home and in the community but is a significant start and at no cost to the Treasury.

Its all in the book: amzn.to/3RgR4Vf

Power speaking to the Powerful

 Barratt Homes, the UK’s biggest builder, announced in October 2021 that it was going to build a “flagship zero-carbon concept home. All of its new homes will be zero carbon from 2030. This is to be welcomed especially because it is well thought through. Barratt may be the biggest builder, but there are many more builders needing to come up to the mark soon. Ten years in a crisis is a long time. There is a housing shortage and a climate change threat. In that time, 20,000 people will die just from heat waves.

Over the years, house prices in the UK have rocketed. So much so, it’s hard to imagine a time when buying a new home costs less than £3,000. If you could afford to buy a home after the war, it was probably brand new. That was around £65,224 in today’s money, and the average salary was roughly the equivalent of £339 per week.

A home should be an affordable, spacious refuge from climate change. A home office is a place for families to take advantage of the internet and the Meta Universe and thrive for a generation. In Climate Change House (amzn.to/3RgR4Vf), I look at these great alternatives and provide references to offer wider perspectives to the reader.

The UK housing industry can easily commit to development that includes added green energy for 600,000 houses over the next three years. Its efforts can make housing a productive part of the economy and an early market to support world-leading technologies. It can be new jobs, new assets and a bonus in national productivity.

It can also commit to solving a considerable part of the Social Care shortfall, creating supportive accommodation for the elderly and frail and upwards of 25,000 new dwellings for the homeless and challenged families in Britain.

At the same time, I show how in the space of a year 15,000 industrial batteries (and at least as many again each year) can be installed, at no cost to the Treasury, to offer a reserve of power to the nation.

These are among the solutions outlined in Climate Change House.

Climate Change House - a new book

We cannot ignore Climate Change it is bigger than all-out war.

In 2022, the house had to protect us from heatwaves and droughts, wildfires, torrential rain and flooding.  But our housing was just not up to the mark. It did not protect people from the record 40.3-degree day and stifling nights lasting for weeks on end. And then we saw television pictures of homes destroyed by fire and flood.

We knew it was going to happen and we know that in the next few years such summers will happen progressively more often and more ferociously.

Are we prepared? Is there an overarching coherent policy shaped by the government to mitigate such deadly events? Will the existing housing stock be renovated fast enough? Will the desperately needed new housing be able to face up to the next 30 years of global warming?  Can they be built fast enough and at affordable prices?

At the same time, housing estates are being bolted on to unwilling communities. Houses are, even now, constructed with huge CO2 emissions and designed for a lifetime of global warming gasses spewed into the air decade after decade. Flats are given planning permission without even a place to store a bike or charge an EV car.

This book takes a deeply researched look at such issues and spreads them out before us. It then goes much further. It examines existing and new technologies that can be deployed to build new properties and regenerate existing homes to make life tolerable for this and next generations. 

Comprehensive and often prescient this is a manifesto in mitigation of climate change and, as if by magic, it will not cost the Exchequer a penny!

The book is published today and is available from Amazon and all good book shops.

amzn.to/3RgR4Vf

A new direction

Over the last few months, I have been writing and not about PR.

I have been concerned with the response to Climate Change as it affects some important areas of life. At present, my concern is another crisis, Housing.

There is a book in the offing.....!

AI in PR Management

I am very sorry not to be at the CIPR Big Data Conference today, because I am unsure how acceptable my thinking could be.  My thinking threatens PR practice as we know it.

We will soon move to a capability that can predict the nature of client relationships as they morph and change.

Hocus Pocus I hear you say.

Let me explain.

It is possible to collect data from search activity from Google, user activity in Facebook and Twitter, new and changed content in Website and much much more.

It can be collected about an organisation, its competitors and industry and national and local content and much, much more.

we can match this information to time, dates, authors, and followers. I leave it to your imagination as the many sources that can be used.

This is PR Big Data.

In no time at all, it becomes too big to maintain on a PR consultancy PC and has to be kept in 'in the cloud'. in a form that allows for heavy-duty computing. A resource like this is available from Google and  IBM and many more.

The first activity is to apply Big Data Analytics to clean the data and get shot of spam etc.

Now, with clean data, we can start to process the content for use in PR.

We need to identify who the contributors are, what subject area do they focus on, how often, when and where from etc. Are these contributors regular contributors or, from responses do they have a particular interest or focus on the subject being written about the organisation (re-tweets etc).

From their contributions, we can identify their attitude to the client industry sector, social issue, political leaning and much more (and such capabilities already are in use today).

This so far is simple deep data mining and not Artificial Intelligence.

But now comes the interesting part.

We can now start using AI.

AI analysis will evidence who leads the conversation and about who and what aspects of the discussion is about the client and competitors. It will map the history of subject interest and who clusters around this subject and who leads the conversation.

This can be offered in time sequence and thus a picture will emerge of the Client Relationships, the nature of the relationships and which relationships need to be addressed because of opportunity or misunderstanding.

In addition, the data will show how fast issues that affect relationships are developing and is this relationship improving or declining. Additionally, the analysis will show the rate of change in the up until today by month, week, day, hour and minute.

Now comes the clever bit.

Because there is a history emerging from there data (and there is by now a ton of it), it is possible to predict what will happen next and to asses the likely hood of such predictions coming to pass.

In addition, the Consultancy response to such activity will emerge and the AI programme will begin to predict what the usual response (social media, conference, event, meeting all the tools we know about) for each movement in the database. AI will then begin to offer advice based on the historic activity and its effect (AI is very good at identifying actions and effects over time).

There is also a very big role in issues and crisis management.

Stop there. How on earth does the practitioner cope with all this information. A spreadsheet of such content would be a dazzling array of meaningless numbers.

We need the means to create a visual display because we can process visual clues faster than numbers and can process more information.

Here is where Virtual Reality comes into its own. It can show the data and how relationships have been developing over time. In addition, it can show what is probably going to happen (with a prediction of certainty) and, of course, it can offer a solution based on past practice. It will show such content as it were in a galaxy of stars that presents a picture of the organisation's (changing) relationships.

Now, the strategic PR person can draw up plans and employ the Communications Agency (call it marketing if you like)  to implement the plan.

Big data and AI changes PR.

What of the consequences?

The sentient Consultant with this kind of capability will be of a different order to most other Agencies and practitioners without such tools will be at a competitive disadvantage and so too will their clients.

Things like monitoring, evaluation, landscaping etc all become subsumed into an AI form of practice.

Welcome to today!