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Council press office in bid to ‘kill’ £700-a-day spin doctor story

A council press office attempted to “kill” a story about a £700-a-day spin doctor it hired, a regional daily has revealed.

The Barrow-based Evening Mail broke the news in October that the authority had appointed local government reputation manager Mark Fletcher-Brown at a time when unprecedented budget cuts meant 1,800 staff could be axed.

Now internal emails between Cumbria County Council communications staff have been made public following a Freedom of information request by North West Evening Mail reporter Caroline Barber.

The response to Caroline’s FoI request, which had initially been rejected on the grounds it would exceed the 20 working day time limit to find the relevant information, has laid bare the tactics used by press officers in their attempts to stop the story appearing.

NWEM1

In an email, the head of the communications department, Sara Turnbull, wrote that news of Mr Fletcher-Brown’s employment was the “last thing we need re. timing just prior to a budget”.

She added: “I’ve suggested to Mark that before we issue anything I’d like to see if I can kill the story. Mark wanted me to check that you are OK with this as a tactic.”

In response Dawn Roberts, assistant director of policy and performance, wrote: “Yes, we would like to be able to kill it.”

Caroline’s initial FOI request had asked whether Mark had tendered for the contract, who he reported to and whether his daily fee included expenses, as well as a query to see internal and external correspondence relating to his employment by the authority.

After it was rejected, she resubmitted the questions as two separate requests, which was successful.

The Evening Mail was then told any follow up questions or clarifications would also have to be submitted as an FOI incurring another 20 working day wait.

The newspaper rejected this and was then given a council statement the same day with the story, pictured above, running on Saturday.

Said Caroline: “As journalists, we hear organisations use the phrase ‘open, honest and transparent’ all the time these days.

“There didn’t seem to be anything open, honest or transparent about using precious taxpayer cash to filter what the public should know about how its money is being used.

“It’s ironic that a media professional charging £700-a-day to lead a communications team refused to communicate directly with the media.

“But despite the series of no comments and delays put in our path, we felt there was public interest in the fact that there was a deliberate attempt to keep information from the taxpayer and the story stood.”

James Higgins, Evening Mail editor, added: “Caroline is an extremely tenacious reporter and worked hard to get to the bottom of this matter. She is every press officer’s worst nightmare in that she will be dogged in her pursuit of the truth.

“Cumbria County Council’s handling if the matter was wholly unacceptable and it was absolutely right we exposed the truth on our front page.”

A Cumbria County Council spokesperson said: “As a direct result of employing Mark Fletcher-Brown we have achieved savings of £500,000 by reshaping the council’s communications team.

“This is far more than our original projections. At this time of national austerity it is our duty to the public to look at every service and identify where we can make savings that will contribute to the £214m savings that we need to make by 2018.

“We have been open and honest about the fact that this contract was for six months from the outset.

“When responding to questions from the press and public we have carefully reviewed and released all the documents and information that commercial and legal restrictions would allow.”

NWEM

31 comments

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  • April 1, 2015 at 7:35 am
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    It’s only going to get worse as newspapers contract – most councils/police/hospitals/fire brigades/ambulance services etc are actively hiding “embarrassing” facts from the public. All bodies funded by the public!

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  • April 1, 2015 at 8:06 am
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    While I would totally disagree with the line taken by the council in attempting to kill the story, I think the paper also needs to get a bit real – the person in question isn’t a “spin doctor” he is actually a professional consultant. A quick Google search reveals that he’s written articles for such publications as The Guardian and other publications who clearly regard him as something of an expert.
    And it has also to be said that while to poorly paid newspaper reporters (and their salaries really are a shameful level) £700 a day sounds a fortune, it is actually quite a low figure for this kind of consultancy work. Most of the major newspaper publishers will have used consultants in various fields of expertise themselves.
    And before anyone asks – I’d never heard of Mr Fletcher-Brown until today!

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  • April 1, 2015 at 8:29 am
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    Excellent work. The council doesn’t seem to have asked itself what business it has spending taxpayers’ money on a communications teams so large and costly that £500,000 can be trimmed from its budget without materially affecting its performance.
    Mr Fletcher-Brown (who has worked for 70 local councils, it says here; perhaps yours was one of them. More FOIs in order, perhaps?) wrote a very interesting, if a bit nauseating, article for the Guardian advising council on how to bury bad news way back in 2001: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2001/aug/30/localgovernment.comment

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  • April 1, 2015 at 8:37 am
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    Top class journalism, glad to see there’s still some of it around!

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  • April 1, 2015 at 9:11 am
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    Having worked in journalism and PR I can see both sides here.
    On the one hand I applaud Caroline for her tenacity, on the other I think the story probably bends the truth a little.
    Observer50 is right, it is good practice to bring in communications consultants. Yes, in the short term it may mean an initial outlay but in the long term it can make a huge difference to the operation of a department.
    The story hinges on the authority being a public body, but where the tax payer’s money is involved there should be even more onus on organisations to look at how they can make improvements which achieve long-term savings.
    So to paint a picture of a ‘spin doctor’ being employed at a time of local government austerity is, I’m afraid, not the whole story.
    Then again from the perspective of Caroline and the newspaper who cares? They have their story, it’s factually correct (if a tad misleading) and involved the application of a standard of journalism seldom seen in these straitened times.
    It is a great story, but as is so often the case in journalism, it isn’t the full story because it simply doesn’t need to be to serve the newspaper’s purpose.

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  • April 1, 2015 at 9:35 am
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    £700 isn’t much in real terms, Lawyers can charge hundreds per hour depending on experience. I recently paid £500 as an individual for 6 hrs of 1:1 training, one person quoted £1000 for 6 hrs. If consultancy is worth the money, improving quality, there is no story. When was the last time any one from editorial was sent on a training course? Probably 6-8 years ago. When you work out the travel costs, hotel, trainer, no work done for 2 days, I bet it actually worked quite a bit of cash

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  • April 1, 2015 at 9:56 am
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    I’d be intrigued to know how Cumbria County Council managed to strip £500k from its communications budget – and how such a largely rural authority has such a budget which can implicitly withstand the loss of such a sum.

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  • April 1, 2015 at 9:59 am
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    It’s a good enough tale – so why wasn’t more made of it? The main headline is crowbarred into the bottom of Page 1 so that readers can be ‘treated’ to a yawn-making photo of a bunch of people taking off their hats! Shurely shum mistake? After all the paper’s commendable efforts to winkle out the facts on this ‘scandal’, you’d have thought it would have been a P1 wipe-out. Even without the unnecessary competition for space, the P1 is much too busy. Keep it clean and simple.

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  • April 1, 2015 at 10:07 am
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    Well done to Caroline for doggedly pursuing this clear public interest story and also to her editor for backing her and running the story.
    These days too many of these hard-hitting stories are strangled at birth.

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  • April 1, 2015 at 10:23 am
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    With regards whether the sum is fair or not, I always find it baffling that a council should have to hire consultants externally anyway. Call me naive, but you would think they should have access to any public sector experts who can pass on best practice.

    You would think there’s be people working at government departments or other councils who could come in and do a few hours with the staff, rather than have to fork out stupid money to someone to tell them how to use Pintrest.

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  • April 1, 2015 at 10:23 am
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    Fine work.

    Love these public sector spinners thinking they can kill off stories.

    Will they ever learn?

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  • April 1, 2015 at 10:36 am
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    Given the quality and the agenda of newspaper management, Observer50, as catalogued in comments on this site down the years, the fact that they too use consultants like this does little to strengthen the point you seem to be trying to make. And this was public money being used to stop the public finding out about the spending of public money. Of course it’s a story. The fact that it’s all too common doesn’t make it any less important: rather the reverse.

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  • April 1, 2015 at 10:49 am
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    They threw a decent story away with a terrible layout. Who wants a front page of grinning fund-raisers? (it happens every day and isn’t front page news folks!!)

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  • April 1, 2015 at 10:51 am
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    The PR bod was only doing a professional job, like the hack. Sounds a fair contest. Shake hands everyone.

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  • April 1, 2015 at 1:02 pm
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    Ture PR Guru.

    Must be men/women against boys/girls in that battle these days though, seeing as a lot of pr bods are experienced journalists and most journalists are about 15.

    I miss the odd PR tangle. There was one guy who’d been hired to do PR for a half a billion pound project on my patch and he thought he was too cool for school, talked very slick, but the beautiful thing was he used to run away at the mouth without realising it, if you just let him talk he’d slip up and give you something. I had at least two front pages out of him, great stuff.

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  • April 1, 2015 at 1:23 pm
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    Great work by the reporter and paper – excellent use of FOIs rather than ‘fishing’ – top marks! And it goes to show you’ve got to be prepared not to take ‘no’ for an answer.

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  • April 1, 2015 at 5:03 pm
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    Well done, Caroline. We now all need to know how spending about £84,000 could possibly save £500,000 by ” reshaping the council’s communications team.” Half a million pounds saved by a “reshaping” – crikey! What the heck is the budget of the communications team (and how many of them are there)?

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  • April 1, 2015 at 5:13 pm
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    I have experienced first hand Mr Fletcher Brown’s tactics at restructuring a communications team which included, in no uncertain terms, suggestions that one might be better off looking for a ‘promotion’ else where!

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  • April 1, 2015 at 5:24 pm
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    Some people on here appear to have lost touch with reality.
    They condone £700 a day – every penny taxpayers’ money, and fail to grasp the fact that the council wanted to kill the story!

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  • April 1, 2015 at 6:01 pm
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    You lot banging on about ‘saving £500k by reshaping the council’s comms team’ clearly doesn’t mean it’s been saved from within comms itself.

    Albeit still an over-the-top assessment of the changes being made, it’ll mean that the restructure is expected to save the council that money in other areas.

    They may have absorbed some work already being undertaken by some services themselves, cut sponsorship and coverage of certain local events, adopted digital processes for certain issues and even cut a few members of their own staff in the process.

    And, aside from the ridiculousness of the emails, £700 a day is an absolute snip for any kind of consultant!

    Finally, yes, it’s a big pat on the back for the reporter and a lot of self-satisfaction from news editors and subs (if they still exist) up and down the country, but the reality is this will be forgotten about next week and it’s unlikely to have sold any extra papers.

    When a council has to save £214m by 2018, there are going to be much, much bigger stories coming than how they’ve ‘wasted’ or ‘tried to cover up’ spending less than £100k. That’s when your readers will really care about you getting to the bottom of the various cuts and changes as they will be affected by them directly!

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  • April 1, 2015 at 7:20 pm
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    I’ve just knocked a million off my budget. I wrote down £1m and then I rubbed it out. Simples!

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  • April 2, 2015 at 9:25 am
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    Oliver, are you a council press officer by any chance??

    £700 a day is crazy money for a public body that’s looking to slash funding, market rates or no.

    Big organisations have the wool pulled over their eyes all the time with the belief that the more something costs, or the bigger name someone has, the better they are at their job.

    My firm pays a marketing agency in London for most of its big slogans/ideas and some of them are straight out of Alan Partridge.

    Look at the Olympics logo too – 100k for something that looks like a Chihuahua threw up on a piece of African art.

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  • April 2, 2015 at 2:45 pm
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    Jeff, I managed to escape the madness after 14 years as a journo so, while I’m not a press officer, I am now in the public sector.

    If you think £700 a day is crazy money in the world of consultancy, you have no idea how things work either side of the fence.

    How much do you think consultants charge to do work in the private sector? If you expect a consultant to come into the public sector and do a similar job, you have to pay the going rate. Whether it’s a private company with 5,000 employees or a county council with 5,000 employees, if the goal is to find ways to streamline the ‘business’, the going rate is the same!

    As a consultant, you are only as good as your last job. Your going rate varies depending on the task at hand but, fundamentally, how well you have performed previously and how in-demand you are.

    The more in-demand you are means you are more likely to be worthy of your daily rate. Simple market economics!

    It sounds like your firm isn’t willing to pay the top rate for the best people!

    In terms of the story at hand, £700 a day is cheap! It might even turn out that a £1,500 a day consultant could have found more savings, more quickly, but that’s another story!

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  • April 2, 2015 at 4:12 pm
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    What an awful design. So cluttered to the point that what is a good story – the fact that the council wanted to kill it more than the £700-a-day – is completely buried. Why do papers insist on those awful images. The editor needs to take a fresh look.

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  • April 2, 2015 at 4:58 pm
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    By the way, for a PR man his website is awful.

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  • April 3, 2015 at 8:48 am
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    Press officers are a law unto themselves lately. Take the police press officer who sent a release out saying there had been a dog attack, but refused to reveal where the attack happened.

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  • April 3, 2015 at 7:55 pm
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    I have some sympathy for the consultant. It seems like a couple of silly comments made by other people have caused him some embarrassment.

    As for the rate, I’ve worked with some fantastic consultants who are worth every penny and I’ve worked with some who are little more than confidence tricksters. The unanswered question is: which one is he?

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  • April 5, 2015 at 5:14 pm
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    Good story. Abysmal page design, headline and strap. If you’ve put that much effort into a story, and it’s about your readers’ money, why undersell it like that?

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  • April 7, 2015 at 12:25 am
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    Good to see some digging being done in part of the CN group. Now find out how much it is costing for the head hunter to replace the MD!

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  • April 7, 2015 at 1:07 pm
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    Ex-chief sub, from one ex-chief sub to another, how many extra copies of the paper do you think it would have sold with a different design? I can tell you… zero! The days when all that mattered or made a difference in any way are long gone.

    In an area where less than 20 per cent of the population can be bothered to even vote in the local elections, are the readers of this story really going to be outraged for any longer than a few seconds after they’ve read the headline?

    Mind you, you’re right about the amount of effort put in. What editor in their right mind allows an intro like that, let alone on a front page? Cumbria County Council… snore!!!

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