By Roz Morris, Managing Director,  TV News London Ltd

Have you checked your crisis management plans recently? And – most important – do you have crisis media management built into these plans?  Who will be your spokespeople in a crisis and have they been trained to understand how to talk to the media?

Are you able to react fast enough to get your side of the story out in an age when minutes count in terms of favourable or unfavourable reactions blasting across social media?

NatWest Group – lessons to be learnt

There are lessons for all businesses and organisations in the recent unprecedented crises affecting two of the UK’s most prestigious banking brands.

As the resignations of the CEOs of NatWest and Coutts have shown, decades of reputational prestige can be destroyed in days, and not reacting fast enough can lead to damaging stories spreading like forest fires.

No refuge in secrecy

In today’s media world, there is no longer any refuge in secrecy. If you avoid disclosure, as Coutts did over its reasons for closing the bank accounts of Nigel Farage, then having the truth pulled out into the open by the complainant himself is not at all a good look, especially as this conflicted with the publicised reasons given for the closure and led to apologies and top-level resignations.

The best advice when you are in the media spotlight is to be as open and truthful as possible. How do you do that in your best interests? Admitting mistakes early is a good idea. Plus being prepared always pays dividends.

Preparation is the key to survival

The key to surviving a media storm with your reputation intact is preparation. First you need to have a crisis management team and a crisis comms team ready to be activated when problems arise. They need to have prepared plans and be familiar with the most common crises that could affect your organisation. They should have draft statements and Q&A’s already prepared which can be worked on if the real thing does happen.

A whole month of NatWest crisis

How did a complaint from a bank customer become a national story lasting for weeks?  It was at the end of June that Nigel Farage first complained that Coutts, which is owned by NatWest, had ‘de-banked’ him. The BBC then reported that this had occurred because he did not have enough money to meet the financial standards demanded by the prestigious private bank.

However, as we are all now aware, this turned out not to be the case when Mr Farage obtained an internal Coutts report which made a number of allegations about his political views and said that these ‘did not align with the bank’s values’ on xenophobia, Donald Trump and inclusivity etc..  It became clear that for Coutts it wasn’t the money, it was his political views that they didn’t like.

Next speculation grew that the CEO of NatWest, Dame Alison Rose had been the source of the BBC’s inaccurate information about Nigel Farage being ‘de-banked’ purely for financial reasons. After 31 years with NatWest she apologised and had to resign after admitting she was the source of this inaccurate confidential information and so broke basic banking confidentiality rules.

Farage caught NatWest napping

The board of NatWest Group and its Chair Sir Howard Davies appears to have been caught napping by the ‘Farage Crisis’ and were apparently complacent to ignore his complaints until he brought them into public debate.

It is commonly accepted that a key part of a chairman’s job description is to restore order in a crisis. However, the Chair of NatWest, Sir Howard Davies, a former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, and former chair of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), took three weeks before making a public statement. 

He declared ‘full confidence’ in chief executive Dame Alison Rose, only to reverse his view only hours afterwards after an emergency board meeting ended with the announcement of her resignation at two o’clock in the morning. A day later a second senior executive from the NatWest Group, the CEO of Coutts, Peter Flavel, also resigned.

All in all, this is a sorry saga of arrogance and miscommunication. There’s an old saying that the fish rots from the head. Perhaps as some journalists have pointed out, we shouldn’t be surprised by this particular sorry saga given that banks currently rate among the lowest for satisfactory customer service. Arrogance and miscommunication by banks are common complaints from long-suffering bank customers who find themselves ignored by highly paid bank executives.  However, ignoring the media in a crisis doesn’t work and can make a problem worse as the Farage v Coutts saga has shown.

Truth is stranger than fiction

Recently I worked on a crisis management and crisis media communications exercise with a university. The crisis scenario involved a van driven by a disgruntled former student mowing down a bus queue. This was devised three months before sadly, an incident even worse than this actually happened in Nottingham. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

What’s the worst crisis that could happen to your organisation? If you’d like help in working on your crisis media management and expert advice on giving interviews during a crisis, contact TV News London on info@tvnewslondon.co.uk