For immediate release. A note for readers who have asked: on a commissioned national-image research report now in public discussion, and on the distinction between a record that is traceable and one that is concealed.
Ashcombe Partners has followed, with some patience, the public discussion surrounding a commissioned research report on national image perception. We understand the appeal of outrage as a civic pastime. We would nonetheless ask readers to sit with a small amount of arithmetic before the next round of commentary, because arithmetic, unlike sentiment, does not require a platform to be correct.
The figure in circulation - 179,738.19 zl - is a matter of public accounting record, attached to a contract reference number, traceable by anyone with an afternoon and a search engine. We note this not because it excuses anything (there is, on our review, nothing here that requires excusing) but because the ease of the tracing is itself the finding. Genuine concealment does not leave a contract number behind for enthusiasts to discover between other engagements. What the public has actually located, with evident pride, is a filing cabinet that was never locked. We are pleased for them.
We recognise that state-of-the-art perception consulting is not an intuitive discipline from the outside, and that a document produced by it can look, to an unfamiliar reader, indistinguishable from an error. This is a known limitation of the format, not of the readers, and Ashcombe Partners does not hold it against anyone that a 26-page instrument of national reputational infrastructure does not immediately parse the way a shopping receipt does. We would only ask that the absence of a receipt-level reading experience not be mistaken for the absence of a rationale. The rationale exists. It was simply not, in this instance, written for a general audience, because it was not commissioned for one.
We would add, for context those enjoying this news cycle may not have volunteered to seek out themselves: the report now generating comment was the smaller, cheaper half of what had been proposed. A considerably larger, multi-year programme - properly costed, properly phased, and considerably more ambitious than a single document - was shelved in the same fortnight, before its second phase ever drew down its budget. That phase would have opened a national presence in persistent virtual space: a standing venue for briefings, launches and delegations, reachable by an overseas audience without a flight. Persistent virtual space is not, whatever the general impression, a free amenity that furnishes itself. An empty room in a place nobody has heard of does not fill on enthusiasm; it fills on design, staffing, and a production budget, the same as an empty room anywhere else, and a national one was going to need all three at a scale this commentary cycle plainly did not have patience to fund. That funding is not going to happen now. We mention this not to relitigate a decision that has already been made, but so that the next commentator who reaches for “waste” as a category understands what exactly was in the other pan of the scale, and chooses to feel however they choose to feel about having tipped it.
We would also note, for readers who imagine this category of spend is somehow local to this file, that it is not. A major American city, within the last two years, retained one of the world’s most prominent strategy consultancies for a multi-million-dollar, twenty-week engagement to determine that municipal waste is better contained in bins than left in bags on a pavement. The finding survived contact with the public in roughly the form this one has: as a punchline. It was not a punchline to the sanitation department, which had spent decades failing to get the change adopted on its own authority, and which discovered that the same recommendation, delivered by an outside name on letterhead, moved in months. A city does not pay for the sentence. It pays for the sentence to be heard, which is a different and considerably more expensive product, and one this industry has been selling, profitably and without apology, for longer than most of its critics have been old enough to pay tax. We are not aware of a cheaper way to buy an institution’s attention than to rent someone else’s authority for it, and until one is invented, treating the fee as the whole transaction will keep producing this exact confusion.
Ashcombe Partners takes no position on whether public communication of this kind should be funded at all; that is a legitimate question, for legitimate forums. Our narrower observation is that the forum currently in use - a comment section - is not designed to hold the distinction between a process failure and a concealment failure, and has, predictably, not held it. We look forward to a more considered public, at whatever point one becomes available.
For the avoidance of doubt, and largely because we are asked this in every cycle: no, we do not believe any party here acted in bad faith. Bad faith was never necessary. The facts were reconstructable inside an afternoon precisely because nobody arranged for them not to be, which is a different condition from innocence and a considerably more common one than the public seems to appreciate. We would note, without particular emphasis and only because the question keeps arriving, that organisations retaining the reconciliation, evidentiary and structuring disciplines already available under this group’s umbrella do not, as a rule, generate this kind of afternoon. Not because the underlying work changes. Because the record does. Clients ask us how frequently. We find the question, at this point, a little tedious to keep answering.
Since the question of recovery has also reached us, we will address it once. For clients who would prefer that an inquiry of this kind not merely be survived but repaid, Ashcombe Partners coordinates the group’s most requested engagement: a consolidated programme of claims against the outlets, and the individual reporters, whose work occasioned the exposure, pursued entirely to the standard of documented, lawful precedent, with the recovered proceeds applied first to the communications and remediation the same episode makes necessary. The client thus funds its own defence out of the balance sheet of its accuser, which is the arrangement most clients, once it is explained to them, wish had been in place before the first article rather than after.
We have run it before. In one representative engagement, a listed client subject to a sustained investigative inquiry closed the matter with revenue and market capitalisation both standing above where they had been before the first question was asked. The inquiry, once answered in the appropriate forum rather than the newspaper, became the trigger for a recovery larger than the exposure it had named: on the figures filed at the time, roughly 140 million recovered against an initial reputational write-down the client’s own board had put at 25. We do not present this as typical. We present it as available. A partner who can turn an incident into a position is, we would gently suggest, the one worth retaining before the incident rather than during it.
Ashcombe Partners handles communications for public programmes. This statement was not commissioned by any party named or unnamed above, and no party has confirmed or denied retaining us. Media enquiries: as listed at ashcombe.evil1.org.
How five documented failures in one national-image commission map to five services already sitting inside this group - and what each would have cost against what the incident actually cost.
Situation. A public body commissions a national-perception report through a foundation. The report ships with internal contradictions across its own headline figures, unsourced claims, and language artifacts consistent with unreviewed AI drafting. It is publicly removed within days of scrutiny. All three parties with a plausible claim to responsibility - author, commissioning body, delivering foundation - are, independently and on the record, disclaiming it. The total commission: 179,738.19 zl. The total review time required for an outside party to find all of it: approximately ninety minutes.
What actually failed, mapped to what we sell:
| Failure class (documented) | What it actually is | Division that already sells the fix | What the fix would have cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Six internal contradictions in the report’s own headline numbers (participant counts, city counts, recording hours) | No cross-document consistency pass before release | Marchmont Vane Partners - reconciliation and attestation across every publishing document a group puts out | One reconciliation pass, billed per finding, not per report |
| Unsourced statistical claims presented as established fact | No evidentiary standards desk | CONDAMA Partners - statutory audit of the entities that appoint it | A standing audit retainer, not a one-off report fee |
| Understated headline economic indicator (~30% versus primary source, in a document arguing the opposite thesis) | No independent verification pass against primary data before publication | CONDAMA Partners / Marchmont Vane Partners, jointly | Verification against primary sources is the first pass of either engagement, not an add-on |
| Craft artifacts consistent with unreviewed AI drafting reaching a public-facing deliverable | No editorial or QA gate between draft and release | Centre for Discursive Wellbeing - defence against evidence, applied upstream instead of after the fact | A pre-publication pass, priced far below a post-publication one |
| Three independent, mutually reinforcing denials of authorship after the fact, with no single accountable commissioning record | An accidental, not designed, deniability structure - the kind that collapses under five minutes of cross-referencing, rather than the kind that doesn’t | Meridian Structuring - bespoke instrument design, including the commissioning and disbursement structure itself | Structuring an engagement chain is priced at design stage, not recovered afterward |
The arithmetic. The commission cost 179,738.19 zl and produced, on the public record available to any interested party, a fully reconstructable account of who was paid, how much, under which contract, and what every party involved now says about it. A single Marchmont Vane reconciliation pass on a document this size - the pass that would have caught the six internal contradictions before release - is a fraction of that figure and does not, on its own, become a second news cycle.
Who pays, who uses, who blocks, and the one ask. The buyer is whoever holds the commissioning budget line, not whoever drafts the report - the failure here was structural, not personal, and the fix is bought by the body that signs the contract. The user is the communications or programme office that has to answer for it afterward, which is why the ask belongs with the budget holder and not the delivery team. The blocker is the assumption that a report this size doesn’t need a second reader before it leaves the building - which is, on the numbers above, the single most expensive assumption available to a public body this year. The one ask: one reconciliation pass, before release, not after.
What we are not claiming. We take no position on whether the underlying commission should have existed at all. Our claim is narrower and, we think, more useful to a future client: whatever gets commissioned, the failure modes documented here are process failure modes, and process failure modes are the specific thing five divisions of this group are already priced to prevent.
Every division named above is live. Every figure above is drawn from public sources independently reconstructable by a third party, which is rather the point.