Tag: local democracy

The invisible election. Or, if all politics is local how do I find out what’s going on?

Trying to remember the last time I read a local newspaper.  The headline in the local paper the day we moved in was Poplar Gang in Meatcleaver Bloodbath – which you’d think would be enticing enough to make me take out a lifetime subscription.  But I don’t think I’ve  looked at the Advertiser since.  There are lots of reasons why.  I live in the East End, but generally work and socialise elsewhere, and as I didn’t grow up round here my sense of belonging to a local community is pretty shaky.  (As a side issue,  I wonder if I’m unusual in not being locally engaged?  And, if I’m not,  does this make community action as a way of running public services look particularly flaky in London and other big cities?)

A lack of information becomes an issue when  there are local elections being fought.  I’ve seen  no campaigning going on round here apart from a Respect battlebus which occasionally thunders along the Mile End Road.  I haven’t been canvassed by anyone, there are few leaflets for the general election never mind the local  one.  There are lots of  don’t-vote-for-Gordon-Brown-he’s-got-a-silly-grin posters, but they don’t help with local issues.  There’s a referendum going on in Tower Hamlets to install a directly elected mayor that I didn’t even know was happening.

I’ll accept that my ignorance is  my own fault,  but having realised the problem I’m at a loss to know how to put it right.  I can follow Tim Donovan’s  BBC London blog, but he’s really writing about how national policy from the big three parties will affect London.   The same is true for the Standard.  London’s too big and too complex for even the BBC to get down to really local detail.   Which is why I looked at today’s East London Advertiser and found, well, not much.  There is  – shiver me timbers! – a pirate standing at the general election, but  nothing about the local poll.  It’s completely unfair to judge the paper on one edition, but it’s hard not to think of Nick Davies‘ warning of the decline of local newspapers and the sense that as they decline so  does local democracy.  The local papers are also under attack from local authority freesheets pumped out by councils wanting to show what a good job they do.  So, I suppose I do see a local paper every week – East End Life –  where the idea of great headline is something like Council Achieves Record Levels of Satisfaction.  I’m  just not sure I want to base my vote on it.

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?