Councils are calling for a change in the law on public notices which could cost the local press industry £40m a year.
The Local Government Association, which represents local authorities in England and Wales, estimates town halls will spend £200m over the next five years in placing public notices in newspapers.
Now with Chancellor George Osborne’s package of spending cuts looming, it is calling on ministers to scrap what it calls the ‘outdated’ legislation.
It follows a survey of authorities which found the average council will pay its local newspaper £105,000 per year for printing the notices.
The LGA says the estimated £200m which local authorities may have to spend could fund the construction of 2,180 new council houses, pay the salaries of 3,000 care workers or employ an extra 2,000 refuse collectors.
LGA chairman Baroness Margaret Eaton said: “In this climate of cuts, councils have to make some incredibly difficult decisions about which staff they can continue to employ and which services they can afford to sustain.
“The Government has already instructed town halls to save money by advertising job vacancies online rather than in the press.
“It is contradictory to then force councils to continue the expensive and unnecessary practice of paying millions of pounds per year to advertise planning notices. This is money which should be spent protecting the vital frontline services on which people rely, not propping up the profits of the newspaper industry.”
The LGA survey found that one council spent £608,000 a year on public notices.
It said local authorities should be able to decide how best to keep residents informed and that the £40m a year cost of the notices represents 8pc of the local press industry’s profits.
Baroness Eaton added: “In this day and age councils can reach far more people for a fraction of the cost by putting the information online or distributing it directly.
“These rules stem from an age when the local newspaper was the cheapest and most effective way of communicating on a mass scale – but in the 21st century that is no longer the case.
“In these times of austerity, councils can no longer afford to prop up the newspaper industry and be held to ransom by legislation designed for a bygone age.”
Earlier this year, Scottish politicians dropped plans to allow local councils to place public notices online and not in newspapers.
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I worked for a licensed music venue where the local authority demanded that a licence renewal be advertised in “a local newspaper”. The “local” paper in our town had an outrageously expensive rate for public notices of this kind: about four times the normal lineage rate for small ads. We tried plan B: place the ad instead in a national paper that circulates in the locality, given that there is no legal definition of a “local newspaper”. The council rejected this idea, on the grounds that the paper was not “published locally” even though it was on sale in the next-door newsagent. In this day and age, “local” means either nothing or anything that is accessible here and now. So-called “local” papers rip off people who are obliged by law to publish licensing notices.
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It’s not the local councils forcing you to publish in local newspapers – it’s the government. Local newspapers know that they have a monopoly on these notices (or at least did until some councils started printing their own newspapers) and so were able to charge what they wanted. Councils and small businesses have to print public notices by law, so there newspapers knew they would not have to offer reductions in the same way they are discounting descretionary adverts. The government is now re-inforcing this position with the new publicity code that was created in league with newspaper publishers. it basically means councils (ie taxpayers) and private companies and individuals will continue to subsidise newspapers, unless the compunction to publish in newspaers is dropeed.
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