The government has warned a local council against pushing ahead with plans to publish a monthly newsletter in defiance of ministerial guidelines.
As previously reported on HTFP, Wirral Council’s ruling Labour group had been forced to rethink its plans to launch the “town hall Pravda” after the opposition Tories called in the plan for review.
Now Local Government Minister Marcus Jones, pictured above left, has demanded reassurance from the authority that it will not press ahead with the proposed newsletter.
In a letter obtained by the council’s Conservative group leader Jeff Green, Mr Jones reminded Wirral that the publicity code for all councils requires any such material not be published more than quartrerly.
Mr Jones explained the code, set out by the Department for Communities and Local Government, was designed to ensure that “in each locality the indepdenent local media does not face unfair competition”.
Cllr Green claimed the newsletter will cost £270,000, and that a new £30,000 per year ‘news and content office’ role was being created in support of the venture.
He told the Liverpool Echo: “By concealing the existence of this letter from the committee, the cabinet has attempted to hoodwink the council and the taxpayers of Wirral into thinking all was going well with this vanity project.
“At a time when Labour councillors and their leader, Mr Corbyn , never stop banging on about austerity, we have a project that is not only costing £270,000 but is also opening the council up to an expensive legal battle with the government.”
In response, the council said it was launching the newsletter after market research carried out last year by Ipsos Mori showed that six out of 10 Wirral residents do not feel well informed about local services and community information.
A council spokesman added: “Cabinet was already well aware of the guidance contained in the publicity code but agreed that, such was the need for the council to communicate more effectively with residents, a departure from the code in relation to the frequency of this publication was justified.
“The DCLG letter was referred to at the call-in meeting [last month] and the council has since written back to inform them of our position and invite further discussion.
“The news and content officer vacancy was identified as part of a wider restructure of the council’s communications function. While the scope of the role will be broad, it does have a distinct responsibility for supporting the local economy by promoting Wirral as a place to invest, live and do business.
“They will contribute to the publication along with other members of the team, but it is totally inaccurate to suggest that they are being employed to ‘oversee’ its production.”
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The “code” in reality is to ensure that local councils continue to weakened and are forced to outsource much work that can be done more effectivelyor at a cheaper cost realistically internally. By providing a publication at a higher frequency than quarterly, advertisers can be more engaged and the legal requirements to ensure communication to all by the council is only bolstered. There are other councils that run their publications effectively with no cost to the tax payer – and they have individuals with sales targets to ensure this.
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The councils do have an issue over how to get their message across because of the dire sales of newspapers now.
Some weeklies once selling more than 20,000 a week now barely scrape 5,000.
And the sort of people who might glance at council news are not going to switch on the computer or tablet to read it on the web.
So although I certainly carry no torches for councils, I can see why they might want to get their side of the story over to a lot more people than newspapers can reach now.
But it must stick to the facts and be non-political, which ain’t easy.
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It’s not the job of a feather-bedded local council to spend taxpayers’ cash publishing newspapers.
Councils don’t have “stories to tell” – they exist to empty our bins and fix the street lights – everything else is self-aggrandising nonsense.
They should at least try to get the basics right before lashing stupid amounts of public money on their own propaganda sheets.
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Long time since local councils where feather-bedded……
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@short
You reckon?
I’d say that every household having to pay a couple of grand a year council tax under threat of imprisonment along with the annual multi- million pound revenue grant from the Government gives them a pretty good head start on your average local newspaper.
How they spend that money is up to them. Wasting it on town hall propaganda should be at the very bottom of their priority list.
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bluestringer, I sense that you have a problem with local councils.
Of course they have stories to tell. You think think that being told by central government to cut hundreds of millions over the next few years doesn’t mean that services have to change?
The fact is that when those services have to change (or get cut) the public needs to be informed in order to help minimise the risk and panic, especially when it comes vulnerable people and those who care for them.
The problem is that local newspapers no longer have the audience volume or reach and their websites are full of videos about dancing cats and tips on how to play Pokemon Go. Council content, even unspun, barely gets a look-in.
Things like bins and street lights may be the only things which affect you at this point in your life, but you need to learn about the other 99 per cent of what your local councils do.
Maybe a monthly newspaper would help you with that?
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“The sort of people who might glance at council news are not going to switch on the computer or tablet to read it on the web” – this is unsupported tosh! what makes you think this?
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Government versus bunch of self-important nobodies. Who’s going to win that, I wonder?
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I side with Paperboy and Oliver on this. Having worked in the press office for a London borough council, our main task was to promote council services, explain political decisions (the Poll Tax was a head banger) and answer queries from the press. Now that there is no critical coverage of council affairs, the local authority has a democratic duty to account for its services – in a fair, balanced and accurate way, of course.
And if it can’t do the proper thing by attending council meetings, the local press must at least challenge any “town hall Pravda” – just as it would for a dubious press release.
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web monkey. The web might be the future. might even be the present. But not nearly enough people are viewing web sites to make decent money. It is why we never hear on HTFP of the amount of money made by digital against old-fashioned print. Print is propping up digital, still!
Most people interested in council stories are about 50 or over, and believe me they are not obsessed with looking at computer and tablet screens for anything, let alone council news.
But they don’t mind flicking through a newspaper. The snag is the big companies wrecked newspaper sales, so relatively speaking far few people (probably 75 per cent fewer in many cases compared with peak sales) read newspapers, meaning councils have no means of getting their basic news across. I am not saying it is a good thing public money being spent on council papers I pay council tax too!), but you can understand a council’s thinking even if you don’t agree with it.
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@webmonkey I’m with you on the council’s thinking but not about the demographics or money-making.
Council websites are not just looked at by ‘people over 50′. They are aimed at people of all ages who require a service that a council provides whether that’s the registration of births, marriages and deaths – which covers the widest age range possible – school admissions, public transport, roadworks, social care, public health, trading standards, fire services and many, many more. These things affect everybody but not all the time. Hence my point to bluestringer.
As for news websites making money, there are more than enough people viewing them to make money from. I’ve discussed this many times on here before. It’s the business model which is messed up. We have large corporations flogging millions of page impressions to national brands in a bid to make a 25 per cent profit for the shareholders but at the expense of poor RoI for local businesses. If we had locally-owned consortia which were happy with a five to 10 per cent profit but targeted audiences relevant to local businesses, things would be very different.
Final thought… although the phrase ‘town hall Pravdas’ is getting a little stale, the concept doesn’t bother me. You know the political slant of a Daily Mail article compared with the Guardian, so why not a publication printed by a Conservative-led council or a Labour-led one? It’s simply vital for transparency and accountability that everything can be publicly challenged or unpicked via other news outlets, local bloggers, petitions, social media etc
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@Paperboy I think you’d be surprised at how many over 50s are making a transition to digital now, even my 85 year old mum has a basic understanding of an iphone and social media.
The over-50s age group is the same age group that spawned Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, this demographic has been one of the drivers of digital they aren’t befuddled dinosaurs, in fact now they are the same people who grew up with BBC computers at school.
Why do you think web hits increase year-on-year so dramatically? Is it to do with an improvement of the product? Not really, it’s more to do with the amount of devices coming onto the market, especially smart phones and people getting more conversant with the technology and getting on to view web pages (and news) in different ways from different sources.
I know that digital/print income is the big topic for the regional press at the moment, but if you look outside of that debate for a moment and just look at the hard facts digital is more cost effective and for looking for the latest news and information a much better media than print.
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Sorry, I meant to start my previous post with @paperboy. I need a sub!
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With you on your last par webmonkey. But why look outside the debate on print versus digital income? It is absolutely vital to jobs. I agree the web is immediate and exciting and if the public want it they should have it. I like filling it and using it, but that’s not the point,
The number of hits has increased hugely, but that will be no compensation if it cannot be turned into meaningful amounts of income.
Meanwhile paper props up web news.
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@paperboy Sorry but print doesn’t prop up web. It’s more accurate to say that the growth of web revenue is failing to keep up with the pace of the decline in print. That’s very different!
And, to be slightly pedantic, will you all please stop referring to web ‘hits’. It’s a meaningless stat! Whenever I see it, it reminds me of when papers publish ‘Inside your 120-page bumper edition’ on the front page. No one cares!
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