The Audit Commission was asked in digital britain to review the state of council publications, newspapers etc. Their report to Stephen Timms has emerged on their website (despite carrying an embargo for Monday 25).
There is something in it for everyone but overall it damns expensive council newspapers with faint praise. The Commission rightly defends councils’ need to communicate. But the Audit Commission’s core role is assess value for money and impact of spending on council performance:
We cannot draw strong conclusions at the national level about the value for money and impact of communication spending from the data available. There is not a significant relationship between levels of recorded communication spending and a number of different outcome indicators drawn from the Place Survey or earlier Best Value Performance Indicators. Some commentators have cited relationships in a single year, for example between how well-informed residents feel and the extent to which they think the council provides value for money, as evidence of the importance of council communication spending.
However, there is no relationship between changes over time in key variables, undermining any conclusion that council communication spending has a demonstrable causal impact. Frequency of periodical publication is also not significantly correlated with key outcome measures such as satisfaction with the way that councils run things.
I remain of the view that it is wrong for a branch of government to publish something that looks, smells and feels like a newspaper with editorial (eg ‘how well we are doing’). It isn’t good for democracy, especially at a time when traditional local media is in decline.
Councils do have to communicate – it’s vital that local people know and understand what the council does for them. But Councils should focus on equipping local people with the skills to communicate for themselves to hold local services to account – the sort of thing talk about local does. That’s the modern way of doing it – not the C19th newspaper.
( Thanks to Kevin for the tip)
auditcommisionreport auditcommissionletter
William Perrin
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I wholly agree with your view “it is wrong for a branch of government to publish something that looks, smells and feels like a newspaper with editorial (eg ‘how well we are doing’). It isn’t good for democracy …”
But I would go further, Will: Councils themselves should also move aside from “equipping local people with the skills to communicate for themselves” and make space for local community training providers to flourish.
Modern councils should not simultaneously be assessors, funders, providers and inspectors of needs and services – including equipping people with skills. So C20th.
I may be taking a risk here, coming between a pair of perrins, but it sounds like a community development issue and local authorities do that, in my view quite legitimately. Often ‘making space for community training providers’ is not going to be enough, just as it’s mistaken to hope that community action without intervention will be sufficient in many localities. There may be (and often is) a facilitating or enabling role to be played. The values and principles have to be right of course, and the degree of nurturing and support will vary. But a first step would be a few councils recognising that local sites can make an important contribution to what they’re trying to do strategically and with democratic accountability, rather than pretending they don’t exist and hoping they will go away.
I live in Wales and all the Council information goes out bilingually (English and Welsh) which adds massively to the costs, so making any Council Newletters published in Wales even less value for money. It’s not just the Newsletters, it’s all the forms you need to fill in, all the information leaflets – absolutely everything – which must just about double the cost. However, having actually worked for a Local Authority, I know for a fact that the Welsh media stuff gets very little use at all. In the libraries in Wales, each individual library must have a section of Welsh language books in fiction and non-fiction (covering a range of topics). There are more and more of these Welsh language books being published nowadays, so as more new books are delivered to the libraries, older material has to be withdrawn from stock on a regular basis to make space for the new stock. Most of the Welsh language books that are withdrawn and discarded have never actually been used. This is because so few people actually borrow the Welsh language material, whether it is fiction or non-fiction. Welsh speakers who use the libraries, will generally borrow mostly English language books (especially fiction as they say that it makes for lighter, more enjoyable reading). Many of the avid Welsh speakers do not actually use libraries as they are not happy with the amount of English language stock kept – so they do not use the libraries on principal. As a Welsh speaker and a library user (I don’t borrow the Welsh stuff), I know for a fact that most of the Welsh language books are discarded within about 2 years having never been used. What a shocking waste of public money this seems.