PRCA / CBI Report Implies U.K. PRs are Already Paid More Than Enough

PRCA “floods the Internet” with U.K. PR econ-impact report footed by mostly U.S.-based Goliaths, with dubious “wins” and plenty of “misses.”

While much of the U.K. PR industry has lauded last week’s PRCA / CBI “landmark” economic impact study, I hold a different and — shocker! — inconvenient point of view, nonetheless based on more diverse data than perhaps the PRCA cares to acknowledge.

High-level synopsis:

  • MISSED OPPORTUNITY:
    • Instead of rallying homegrown U.K. PR firms to drive sponsorship of the study as a point of U.K. industry national pride, CEO Waddington recruited mostly U.S.-headquartered firms to foot the bill (and, arguably, call the shots on “taxonomy” / methodology). Numerous sponsoring firms hold U.S.-based Omnicom holding company affiliation and/or tainted AKOS Russian PR Association backgrounds.
  • OMNI-COMICAL:
  • POT / KETTLE:
    • The PRCA has struggled with recent, existential PR issues of its own, deeply impacting industry-workforce trust since 2022 (and the PRCA’s own financial performance), creating a built-in credibility gap as to the authentic purpose behind certain narrative stagecraft.
  • POUND FOOLISH:
    • Amid documented nose-dives in financial stability since 2023, the PRCA should be transparent about its own financial and economic trajectory as reported to U.K. Companies House, given its post-Ingham Era shift in standard fiscal year, now creating disjointed year-over-year reporting from 2023 forward (begging the question of whether this dis-continuity was generated intentionally in order to confuse / mislead).
  • LAME LIMELIGHTS:
    • The PRCA / CBI white paper lauds a smattering of cherrypicked PR case studies as indicative of “good PR,” with blatant PRCA-insider for-profit and partisan agendas.
      • Example: A Milk & Honey case study is featured in the PRCA / CBI report without disclosure that the firm’s founder / CEO is the current PRCA Board Chair, in seeming conflict-of-interest (using PRCA trade association resources to promote the board chair’s own for-profit firm).
      • A different case study in the report – lauding a grossly politicized U.K. campaign for leftist gender ideology – falsely claims in the CBI report that straight women in Britain compose “a quiet majority” opposed to the 2025 U.K. Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of a woman, when public polling data clearly shows  overwhelming U.K. citizen support for the Supreme Court’s decision to protect biological women. (The PRCA’s / Omnicom’s / PRWeek’s law firm of record, Lewis Silkin LLP, received backlash for its own commentary on the Supreme Court issue last year on a popular British blog covering the legal profession.)
  • LET THEM EAT CAKE?:
    • Alarmingly, the PRCA / CBI study overtly and repeatedly implies that PR industry rank-and-file folk are already paid enough money. (What say you, PR Industry?!)

I’m usually a big proponent of economic research intended to promote the PR industry’s quantitative, measurable impact and worth.

When done objectively (without partisan biases and pre-set yet veiled agendas) and with a focus toward boosting the whole of the industry (as opposed to only helping politically favored insiders and mega conglomerates), these kinds of reports can provide genuine value.

In light of the U.K.’s Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) track record of late (meaning, the past three years), however, I perceived with a highly skeptical eye its report released last week in partnership with the Confederation of British Industry (CBI):

“BEYOND COMMUNICATIONS: Understanding the economic contribution of the UK public relations sector.”

Turns out, my skepticism was beyond merited.

For starters, context is key.

The PRCA’s own financial / economic standing these days as the alleged largest global PR trade association remains in serious question and flux.

Four years ago this month – in July 2022 – the PRCA’s then-Board Chair, Sarah Scholefield of Grayling (of the then-Huntsworth U.K. PR conglomerate as founded by the now-disgraced “Lord Peter Chadlington, FPRCA” and rebranded since spring 2022 to Accordience) announced to the industry at the PRCA U.K. Conference that…

…the PRCA under Director General Francis Ingham’s long-term management actually was in historically excellent shape.

<insert poignant pause>

Yes, you read that correctly.

On 7 July 2022, Ms. Scholefield sang the late Francis Ingham’s praises at the PRCA UK Conference, specific to his then-role as the15-year director general of the PRCA.

In this legally obtained video clip which otherwise is nowhere to be found (below; Minute 3:30), Ms. Scholefield celebrated Francis Ingham – a former CBI staffer himself earlier in his career – as “modest” and further stated for the official record that:

“…the PRCA has never been in better health.”

She lauded, “a huge thank you to Francis…” in acknowledging what Ms. Scholefield then led the world to believe was his outstanding leadership of the world’s greatest PR trade body.

Footnote: I never knew of Ms. Scholefield’s / Grayling’s own AKOS Russian PR association dealings and her resulting conflicts of interest (relative to her placing Francis Ingham under “investigation” only several months later seemingly due to his vocal and strident anti-Russia stance throughout 2022), until years later. This matter in and of itself is long-overdue for conflict-of-interest and potential undue-retaliation investigatory inquiry, in my view.

Alarmingly, only two months after Ms. Scholefield’s songs of pro-Ingham praise, in September 2022, PRWeek reported and then re-amplified across social media that Francis Ingham had been added to a “Russian ‘blacklist’,” and then, the following month, he was placed by Ms. Scholefield’s Board under “investigation,” as announced publicly to trade media (which was where Francis Ingham also first discovered this breaking news).

(I’ve since learned that PRCA Board and Omnicom joint U.K. law firm Lewis Silkin LLP was allowed to pre-screen this “news” coverage for publication in PRWeek, given that Lewis Silkin is PRWeek’s law firm, too… speaking of conflicts-of-interest.)

Such headlines undoubtedly would have placed any normal person under distress.

Far more so, for anyone who already had announced to the industry the year prior that he suffered from “appalling” life-long mental health struggles — despite being “bulletproof” and whatnot…

Grayling’s / Huntsworth’s Ms. Scholefield – in her infinite wisdom – began working in tandem with / in response to Sarah & Stephen Waddington’s close allies, like John Brown and Andy Barr (both men are on the Waddingtons’ Socially Mobile CIC “teacher” roster; Mr. Waddington also was then serving on John Brown’s now-defunct agency board for Don’t Cry Wolf as a non-executive director, thus advising Mr. Brown and others closely from the sidelines).

Ms. Scholefield kowtowed to larger Team Waddington pressures to place Waddington “foe” Francis Ingham under an unspecified “investigation” for months. (Thanks to PRWeek and PRovoke, the entire industry found out about the “investigation” weeks before Ms. Scholefield bothered to alert Francis Ingham in writing about it.)

PRCA Chair Scholefield intentionally withheld from Francis Ingham any specifics about what he was even being accused of… or by whom, thus inflicting months of exhaustive distress about what was even going on and who was targeting him.

(These facts are beyond substantiated, based on documentation long-since submitted and re-submitted and re-re-re-submitted to PRCA leadership past and present, in asking <begging> for a PRCA Investigations Review Task Force to evaluate this matter – a valid request that was, and continues to be, ignored.)

Months after his death, I found out directly from PRCA Board officials during a July 2023 face-to-face meeting in London (scheduled at my request) that a member of the U.K. PR trade press was allowed to serve and/or pursue serving as a PRCA investigatory “witness” against Francis Ingham. All the while, this so-called “journalist” was reporting away to her heart’s content about said “investigation,” with zero disclosures of her secret “witness” status, as if somehow a wholly unbiased and disinterested bastion of “professional and balanced journalism” as precisely lauded as such by larger Team Waddington:

(My e-mails of urgent inquiry on this dire matter both to this reporter and to her publisher of this U.S.-based but fairly London-centric trade rag – with both the reporter and publisher near-constant keynoters and panel moderators at U.K. and international PR industry conferences far-and-wide – have gone ignored.)

Psychological torture is a very real and ugly thing in the PR industry’s underbelly of toxic narcissism weaponized against political enemies, with very real consequences.

You know, like drinking oneself to death.

Mrs. Waddington now collects Francis Ingham’s former paycheck, as she has done apparently since Nov. 1, 2024 (including over an initial two months – Nov-Dec 2024 – with the PRCA’s membership having no idea she had already been essentially gifted the CEO role), seemingly according to plan.

That’s the Cliff’s Notes version of recent-year PRCA events.

Horrified yet? If so, then welcome to my world, and that of every PRCA observer equipped with an actual brain.

Last week, Team Waddington was at it again, keen to continue shape-shifting the PRCA’s “narrative” by yelling “Squirrel!” to divert the gaze of the industry from the PRCA’s recent and troubling past (and various Waddington roles and machinations within it).

This time around, it’s a CBI industry-research exercise, for which CBI Economics claims in its written disclaimer, “errors and omissions are the responsibility of CBI Economics” immediately after stating “CBI Economics accepts no liability…”.

Sounds about right!…

Although I have to give the CBI some grace here. I presume they are fairly clueless about all the PRCA’s palace intrigue these recent years. Had they known, and had they also realized that the late Francis Ingham was one of their own former CBI staffers, then I’m sure they wouldn’t have touched this agenda-in-search-of-“taxonomy” project with a 10-foot pole.

If there’s anything that CBI Economics should have been enlisted by the PRCA to analyze, it’s likely the PRCA’s own finances and viability.

And I say that as an American who wants to see a robust and successful U.K. PR industry, if only the PRCA trade association could find its own way back to re-discover those aims in good faith.

According to filings at U.K. Companies House, the PRCA strayed from its “healthy” (per Scholefield) post-pandemic-recovery mode under Ingham, to full-on nose-dive territory post-Ingham-death, with the point of demarcation being when Sarah Waddington and Kirsty Leighton joined the PRCA’s Board in September 2023.

That’s fact, not an opinion.

We now await news about what on earth the most recent financial verdict is for Year One of the Waddington CEO Era (2025). I presume the PRCA will file at Companies House in September, since that’s when they filed a fairly ugly report last year:

Meanwhile, however, my friends at ChatGPT at least were able to cobble together and spit out this analysis several months ago, based on admittedly limited data available from the PRCA’s prior Companies House filings.

If anything about it is wrong, I hope CEO Waddington / Chair Leighton (or is it “Thatcher”?) will pipe up with any clarifications:

So, as it turns out, Ms. Scholefield wasn’t joking at the July 2022 UK Conference when she stated that post-pandemic, the PRCA’s “health” was surging under Francis Ingham’s leadership.

I mean, just look at the numbers cited above.

Even as much as Francis Ingham was indeed struggling with health issues in 2021-22 as I understood it, he still managed to pull the PRCA out of the pandemic slump, like a champ.  

Sadly, however, Ms. Scholefield’s idea of “rewarding” Francis Ingham for his job performance was to kick her director general to the curb (and, throw him under the bus for good measure), for no good reason. (If there had been a “good reason” to investigate him under substantiated claims, then why wasn’t Francis Ingham simply fired?)

Such questions aren’t going away, incidentally. 

But now on to the other mysteries of this just-released PRCA / CBI report.

The PRCA-enlisted sponsors footing the bill for this CBI study hail from Burson, Edelman, Finn Partners, FleishmanHillard, Hanover Communications, Golin Ketchum, Penta, and Portland.

Hate to rain on anyone’s U.K. PR parade, but aside from Hanover and Portland, ALL of these agencies are U.S.-headquartered PR firms, not U.K.

Repeat: These are not homegrown British-owned firms (but for Hanover and Portland, and even Portland is now owned – like Golin Ketchum and FleishmanHillard – by U.S.-based Omnicom.

For its part, when Omnicom isn’t busy touting the latest DEI propaganda to convince non-white males, biological females of all races, and everyone in-between that the real reason they’re not getting promoted or hired is because of their skin color and / or sex organs and / or desired sex organs, the world’s largest PR / ad agency conglomerate is otherwise engaged urging Americans to join the U.S. Army via its $4 billion contract while also trying to convince all of Omnicom’s U.S. Government clients that DEI was never a big priority at Omnicom in the first place.

Or something like that.

Omnicom itself has faced antitrust / alleged “cartel” / anti-competitive chicanery inquiries and investigations out the ying-yang at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in very recent years, including deep into 2025.

So, CBI Folks — Take note: Not exactly a 100% fair-trading and business-friendly sponsorship cohort paying your PRCA research bill, here.

PRCA CEO Sarah Waddington’s husband Stephen (Francis Ingham’s former London flatmate during Mr. Waddington’s Francis-Friend-Foe oscillation) has his own long, interesting history himself at the Kremlin-friendly Ketchum (Omnicom), so the roots of weird self-interest run more than just a little deep.

On this matter of London’s role as a U.S. mega-conglomerate foreign-agent portal:

Can we now finally have this long-overdue coming-to-Jesus chat?…

…that far too many of the industry’s U.S.-headquartered PR agency behemoths have leveraged London as their go-to way-maker market for years, to domicile agency outposts for rogue foreign-government “PR” contracts for which they then accidentally-on-purpose “forget” (?) to file foreign-agent reports to the U.S. Department of Justice as required, for public disclosure purposes?

Lest we forget, multiple firms on this PRCA / CBI-sponsor list have deep, for-profit histories with Russia, whether properly disclosed to the U.S. Department of Justice or not.

For example, Omnicom’s U.K.-based Portland is reported to have had contracts / sub-contracts with Russia among other controversial regimes.

It doesn’t take long to reverse-engineer that there is every appearance that Bell Pottinger may have been targeted for PRCA / U.K. PR market elimination by Omnicom and Omnicom-friendly competitors in 2017 for the very reason that certain seeming “cartel” interests wanted more share of the rogue-government (including Kremlin) PR contracting market for themselves.

Can you say, “international antitrust violation”?

This Guardian article was from September 2017, shaming the late Lord Bell as the poster-child of U.K. “reputation laundering,” when one or more members of the PRCA preferred-member class (Omnicom) have certainly spun their own “greatest hits” in that department:

How sad that today’s PRCA did not use this new, 2026 “industry research” opportunity to recruit U.K.-based and homegrown agencies to support this work of the CBI study. Given that the study’s scope was U.K.-only, it could have served as a rallying call for supporting and celebrating the abundant, burgeoning capabilities of U.K.’s truly talented entrepreneurial class in PR… the small and mid-size agencies and up-and-coming independents, too.

But no. Couldn’t be done!  

Aside from CEO Waddington’s chosen sponsor line-up, the PRCA-CBI report begs the question:

So what?

The report lauds “PR as a highly productive sector contributing £7.1 billion to the UK economy and supporting over 95,000 full-time equivalent jobs.”

It’s almost like these folks never attended an AMEC Conference in their lives!

  • £7.1 billion IN RELATION TO WHAT?!
  • 95,000 FTEs IN RELATION TO WHAT?!

What’s the relevance? 

What’s the significance? 

What’s the meaning for everyday PR industry business owners and the U.K. workforce?

Where is that bit by the PRCA to say, “...and here’s what we’re doing next as a result of the data…”?

The U.K. ADVERTISING sector is clearly kicking PR’s share-of-comms-budget cottontail, from here to Sunday, if you bother to look at the ad sector’s own numbers for a comparison / contrast:

Whatever bragging rights the PRCA thought it generated via the CBI data, I think Sarah Waddington owes Sir Martin Sorrell that long-overdue apology about now.  

Nowhere in her CBI report or various white papers does CEO Waddington use these data points to set new, bold, meaningful, and measurable objectives by the PRCA trade body for U.K. PR industry growth, such as raising PR’s quantitative share of U.K. comms budgets from X% to X% by X year.

Or U.K. PR average salaries from X to X by X year.

Or quantity of U.K. PR jobs from X to X by X year.

Or metrics tied to U.K.-based PR firm growth / expansion / receivables from X to X by X year.

God forbid someone show up as accountable for industry growth based on actual numbers.

Based on the much-ballyhooed “Gross Value Added” figure, it seems quite clear to me that the PR industry rank-and-file workforce is grossly UNDERPAID as a full cohort.

But nowhere in the PRCA’s report is any case made whatsoever that those with little power in these organizations should be compensated more commensurately with the quantified value they generate.

Gee, can’t imagine why!

Maybe it’s because the (mostly U.S.) agency-behemoth SPONSORS of the CBI report don’t want word getting out that they are grossly under-paying their own people?

The messaging here clearly reeks of, “Be happy you have whatever paycheck you have — and shut up about it!,” to PR’s vastly female workforce who leave (or, are kicked out of) the industry in droves, once 1) their age and 2) their more-than-deserved-and-overdue-yet-oft-denied pay-grade reach a certain undesirable level to the mega-conglomerate dudes over in the U.S. pulling the levers of power + joint law-firm contractor, including rights and privileges of telling the PR trade rags precisely what to print:

I could say quite a few more things about how this CBI Report – while clearly well-intentioned by the CBI itself – is a turd-in-the-punchbowl for the PR industry, masquerading as an innocuous yet ornate, sculpted, fruit-infused, edible, soothing-and-cooling ice ring.

This fact brings me to my closing point:

I’m sick of the gaslighting and the performative nonsense + left-wing tomfoolery coming out of the PR industry association world, on both sides of the Atlantic.

I make no defense of my homeland’s industry in the U.S. in this regard, either.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that the PRSA trade association’s hot-mess status in America has received no free pass whatsoever from the likes of me (or even from others who — as a sheer matter of career survival — are notably less verbal and tend to vote with their feet, as I believe the PRCA is also finding out the hard way).

After all, the current PRSA Board Chair (Kirsty Leighton, MBE’s U.S. industry association counterpart) is this lady (hold your applause until the end!):

What’s seriously heartbreaking for me (and I truly mean that), is — after years of witnessing PRSA’s plunge into all-out incompetence and corruption — how much I believed in and valued and advocated for and – yes – even fought for the PRCA, after I first joined in 2019.

But now, since January 2025, I’ve been forced, based on principle, to pause my PRCA membership until such time that someone with the last name “Waddington” is no longer on the PRCA payroll to engage in this level of disinformation-for-hire that I’m seeing on repeated plug-and-play, while politically aligned Waddington sycophants of the U.K. industry flap-and-clap, on-demand, like trained circus seals… as if the PRCA’s past three years’ track record of driving a once-respectable U.K. industry trajectory into the dirt is somehow a virtue and validated by “data.”

It’s more than a smidge intellectually insulting.

And, it models the polar-opposite behavior of what the industry should espouse as “fit for purpose” to the industry’s clients, who hold the purse strings and are looking for credible, quantitatively competent leadership to steer their reputation-management strategies for actual business results that bear scrutiny.

Mary Beth West has worked in the public relations industry for more than 30 years.

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