£100,000 saving on communications

WARRINGTON Borough Council is to slash its communications budget by £100,000 next year, as part of its drive to achieve savings of £14 million.
This was revealed by Cllr Hitesh Patel, (picture) executive member for Personnel and Communications, at a meeting of the council.
He said: “We want our council to be open and transparent and so we need to spend some money on communications to let council taxpayers know just what exactly we are doing to improve the borough.
“I can assure you that that money is being kept to a minimum, and we will spend less on communications than the Lib Dem-Tories did when they ran the Town Hall”
Cllr Patel was responding to a request from the Liberal Democrats for a guarantee that spending on communications would deliver efficiency savings.
He retorted that the Lib Dem controlled Great Sankey Parish Council was spending £4,000 a year on paper newsletters.
By contrast, he said, Labour-run Warrington had scrapped the Wire paper magazine, saving £64,000, and replaced it with a more environmentally friendly and less costly e-newsletter service.
Cllr Patel added: “I urge Lib Dem run parish councils to follow the lead of the Labour run Town Hall and take better advantage of e-technology to reduce the amount they spend on paper and printing and deliver better value for taxpayers.”
Lib Dem leader Cllr Ian Marks pointed out that the decision to scrap the Wire magazine was, in fact, made by the Lib Dem/Conservative administration in its budget 12 months ago.
He said: “I welcome its relaunch in digital form. We launched an e-magazine for business when we were in control and this has proved to be extremely useful and popular.
“It isn’t the first time that Cllr Patel has chosen to talk about parish council business at the borough council. He is out of order to do this. The borough council is able to launch the Wire electronically because it has harvested a large bank of email addresses to which it can send the publication. A parish council is not in a position to do this.
“All councils, whether borough or parish, need to spend some money on communicating with the public. Studies by organisations like Ipsos Mori have shown that the reputation of a council is closely related to how much the public understands about what a council does.”

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