Council Communications Team costs over £1millon of taxpayers’ money

Rochdale Online can reveal that the cost to taxpayers of the Council Communications Team is over £1million per year.

The cost of staff alone in the current financial year is expected to be £833,000 and that figure excludes what the Council euphemistically calls ‘partner’ organisations, that is, organisations at arms length but still effectively council controlled.

The cost has increased by over 10% in the past two years despite inflation being less than 2% during the same period.

The Council Communications team is also responsible for producing Council ‘publications’ Local Matters and People Matters at a cost upwards of £200,000 per year. The publications carry council 'news' but there is no objective journalism, no dissenting voice, no investigation, only the PR spin, aka ‘propaganda’, the Council wants to project.

Such council publications are causing increasing disquiet as they pose a threat to democracy, so much so the Sunday Times ran a half page on the threat in yesterday's (Sunday 4 October) paper, the article began: “Local authorities are spending nearly £50m a year on propaganda freesheets that peddle a diet of mayoral tea parties, celebrity library openings and the glorious achievements of outsourced dustmen.”

The article went on to explain how these "propaganda" sheets threaten democracy: “Critics fear that in addition to costing the taxpayer millions, the council-run newspapers carry a more insidious price: the loss of democracy as they drive local newspapers to the wall, silencing the voice of opposition. Titles that have helped expose corruption in their local authorities are among those most threatened.”

Rochdale Council Communications Team members are well versed in media manipulation, the team control both news and council advertising spend and are not averse to linking the two by suggesting that bad news published about the Council may result in a lower advertising spend with the publication in question; another tactic is the withholding of important news until published by favoured publications.

The Council and its partners also compete with local publishers for commercial advertisers using taxpayers money, an increasingly familiar story which the Newspaper Society has spoke out about. Lynne Anderson, the Newspaper Society’s director of communications, said: “We don’t have an issue with councils communicating with taxpayers about the services they offer, but we now have newspapers from the town hall which take third party advertising and compete hand to hand with independent newspapers. I don’t need my council telling me how great it is all the time.”