Against this more encouraging backdrop, the PR market continues to reflect the general uncertainty that is evident elsewhere in the economy.

Irrespective of your opinion as to whether the Government's retrenchment programme is right or wrong, vital or ill-judged, its impact has already been profound. The realisation that the country faces the most severe public sector cuts of modern times has undoubtedly shaken confidence, and made people rethink their plans.

Despite a recovery that increasingly seems unlikely to reverse back into a recession, the mood music of the coming months is going to be unpleasant. Reduced Government spending on communications, and reduced public sector communications headcount, will hit in-house teams and consultancies alike, in some cases severely. Government as a buyer of services or an employer of people is going to expect to get more for less. And that change will have an impact on pretty much every PR person, as the balance of the economy shifts, and the pain is kicked down from one level to another.

So where does that leave PR?

Well, I would say that PR's place within the marketing mix is stronger now than it was twelve months ago. If we think we've had it tough, then we can at least be grateful that we don't work in advertising. For the advertising community the past couple of years have been grim indeed, with spending slashed in a way that would make the IMF proud.

Its loss has, in many cases, been PR's gain, with clients cutting a tranche of what they used to allocate to advertising, and spending some of it on PR instead. They have done so because they realise that they get more value-for-money from a well-targeted PR campaign than they do from a bloated advertising one. That recognition of the greater value of PR works in all of our interests -the challenge now is to make sure that the money doesn't flow back the other way as the economy grows again.

Perhaps the biggest threat to our new place in the mix -and certainly the industry's biggest failing over many, many years- is our inability to agree on the measures of success.

AVEs rightly get a bad press. But we have only ourselves to blame for the fact that they are easily the most recognised method of evaluating PR. Looked at objectively, it is patently absurd that we should use a competing discipline to determine the value of our work. I am absolutely certain that no ad man uses PRVEs -they would find it demeaning and ridiculous to do so.

We are determined to address this issue once and for all.

Over the years, there have been a vast number of speeches made about measurement, matched only by an equally large volume of articles, guides and essays written, all of them from a pseudo-academic, utterly impractical perspective. That is why we will work with AMEC to publish simple, standardised practical methods of conducting evaluation. That is why we will then embed evaluation in the core of our members' activity by making it part of our CMS audit. And that is why we will add a mandatory evaluation section on every PRCA Awards entry form.

This work with AMEC will be exclusive -too many projects have failed because the number of partners involved has been too great, and the results accordingly too diluted. But having produced this standard, and integrated it into members' work and into our awards programme, we would urge the other relevant industry players -PR Week, Corp Comms, the CIPR etc- to do the same.

Having proved the organisational benefit we bring however, the other principal challenge we face is proving the legitimacy of the service we provide.

PR has a terrible reputation. We should just accept the existence of that fact, even as we dispute its fairness.

Our industry is castigated from both ends of the political spectrum -as a waste of taxpayers' money at one end, and as the mouthpiece for unpleasant regimes at the other. It is characterised both as fluff and as some Machiavellian art that turns base reputations into commercial gold. Those allegations are plainly wrong, but equally widely believed.

We have a genuine problem in communicating the ethical value we bring -and one that is all there more ironic given that in our professional lives we are so good at communicating.

Being able to prove the organisational benefit we deliver -the business case if you like- is irrelevant if we are seen as being in some manner a controversial and dangerous choice. It does not matter how good our metrics are, or how valuable our advice is, if we are unable to access decision makers and clients in the first place.

Making the case for PR.

We will make a sophisticated and comprehensive case for PR over the coming months and years, but some of the key points surely must be:

• PR is regulated
• It has entrenched, independently audited management standards
• It invests in the professional skills of its workforce
• It is open and accessible

All of these are core, key attributes, and ones which some other, more established industries are frankly unable to boast. PR simply does not exist outside the democratic world. Why? Because non-democracies either have no need for it, or no room for it.

In making the case for PR, we are definitely, by the way, not interested in the glittering baubles that appear to obsess so many people. I really do not care if PR is know as a 'profession' or as an 'industry' -though I know that some people are obsessive in their pursuit of the decoration. We can choose to expend our best energies in chasing style over substance; or we can deploy those skills in pursuing the definable, definite interests of the industry.

I know which choice we make.

Francis Ingham is the Director General of the PRCA