My last postal delivery of 2010 included Southwark Housing News, a sixteen- page full-colour magazine produced six times per year for all tenants and leaseholders.
Given that the Coalition insists that it is delegating to local councils the authority to decide what to cut, perhaps someone could carry out a serious research of what is spent on ‘promotion’ and ‘marketing’ and why?
How many meetings of how many officers does it take to devise the text and layout for each one of those of leaflets destined to sit unread in town hall foyers? Where is the evidence that anyone, anywhere, ever attended a service as a result of picking up a leaflet?
Who spends an afternoon’s-worth of Council Tax-payers money creating the wordsearch puzzle that adorns the back of Housing News – and how many entrants does the competition entice?
I’m not sure that the efficacy of the medium is ever thoroughly analysed. Too often, these productions are the publicly- funded outlet for a frustrated bureaucrat’s repressed creative tendencies; the means becomes the end
Nowhere is the profligacy of some spending departments better illustrated than in the propaganda process. This is not the Ratepayers’ Alliance speaking, it’s the voice of someone who believes that the essential job of defending local democracy is made ever-more difficult by such obvious and capricious waste. If just one council job is saved by a leaflet and magazine moratorium then that’s public money well saved.
