Tag: Haringey

Five reasons why money spent on PR is always worth it

Coming home on the tube yesterday I saw a headline in one of the freebie newspapers which said “Haringey Council blew £2m on PR”  The argument, depressingly familar to those of us who work in public sector communications, is that every penny spent on press officers means less for social workers, leading in this case directly to the death of Baby P.   Comforting myself with the thought that my source was hardly a paper of record, I googled the story this morning to see if any of the “proper” papers were running with it. I found this in the Telegraph, which repeats the argument pretty much exactly, making a direct link between the money spent on PR and the casework overload of the social worker in the Baby P case.

I am a PR consultant who works for public sector organisations (and therefore, obviously, am quite happy to grab cash and if possible food from the hands of widows and orphans), so I have a bit of a biased view of this one.  But I’m still pretty depressed at the frequency with which the PR = wasted money argument comes around.  I’ve spent most of my career in  publicly-funded bodies, and have always had at the front of my mind the fact that I am spending the public’s money on the projects I do,  so need to get value for money. (By the way, I appreciate the irony that I am now defending Haringey’s PR team, having criticised their performance over the Baby P case a couple of posts back – perhaps it means Haringey just aren’t spending enough…)

So, off the top of my head, here are five quick reasons why it’s worth public bodies spending public money on communicating with the public – and how depressing to have to trot them out yet again.

1.  There’s little point in spending very large amounts of money in providing services for the public and then failing to let them know how/where to access those services

2.  It’s good for local democracy to let people know how their elected representatives are spending their money.  Even if individuals don’t personally need to access all local services it’s good that they know that the Council does more than just emptying the bins.  If people understand how their Council Tax is being spent,  they can object if they want to, which is one way of keeping the link between local government and local people alive.  Comms budgets often pay for public consultations on contentious local issues.

3.  Media training doesn’t mean turning out hordes of automata who just parrot a party line.  It means helping people who are not professional communicators deal with the pressures of media scrutiny so that they can put their case as effectively as possible.

4. Press offices offer an invaluable resource of information and contacts for journalists – bet the Telegraph journo who sourced the quotes for this story gets lots of help from PRs!

5.  As a proportion of Haringey’s overall operational budget, £2.2m is peanuts.  I think I read that the total budget was somewhere north of £250m (I could always call their press office to check…)  So the PR budget represents just a shade under 1%.

If anyone wants to add more I’d be happy to hear them, and store them up for the next time this story comes around.

And finally, why is the PR industry so bad at doing PR for itself?

Not a considered response

I worked at the DfES (now DCSF) when the Every Child Matters programme was being put in place so I know the pains that were taken to try to strengthen child protection services in the light of Victoria Climbie’s death.  It is a far from perfect system but the tools are there for local authorities to use and the emphasis on putting children’s interests first now runs through every branch of the child-related public services.  So why is the response to Baby P’s death so predictable and totally enraging?  An enquiry announced, another debate about whether or not we are demonising social workers and (at least as far as I can see) no heads rolling, no-one held accountable, no-one accepting responsibility.  How well-paid, free of bureaucracy, supported by mangement and empowered to act do you have to be in order to realise that this is wrong?  And how on earth can you not resign immediately it becomes clear that it happened on your watch?

Trying to drag this round to being a comms issue; I notice that there is no statement easily findable about this on the front page of the DCSF site – you have to dig about a bit to find this, or the children’s commissioner’s site (although you can find a statement from the Deputy Commissioner welcoming the new enquiry).  Haringey’s statement is a click thorugh from a front page headline “Statement regarding government support for Haringey”, which implies to a casual reader that everyone is rallying round this authority which is having a bit of a bad time at the moment.

So, deep breath, rant almost over, red mist starting to clear… What has to happen before we get to the point where we can say “never again” with some confidence?  Is that possible – or are there some people who are just so wicked that their actions can’t be legislated for?  I really do appreciate how difficult the work of social services is, so what do we as a country have to do to support them to allow them to deliver better services?  Is it just a matter of better funding?  And if the response to disasters is always like this, how do we get people to swallow the tax-increases that might be needed to pay?