Code of Recommended Practice on Local Authority Publicity

Earl Cathcart Excerpts

Wednesday 30th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, as the daughter of the proprietor of three local newspapers in Hampshire and Surrey, I grew up with the words “threats to local newspapers” ringing in my ears. In those days, in the 1960s, as the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, says, it was from commercial radio. The threats have been talked about ever since. The threats now are from websites. I do not believe that the younger generation listening to this debate would believe that the threat to local newspapers is actually coming from council newspapers. I do not recognise the world that the noble Lord, Lord Black of Brentwood, spoke of when he said that councils are increasingly secret. Actually, over the past 20 years, when I was involved as a councillor and latterly council leader in Somerset, councils opened up their meetings considerably; they were no longer held behind closed doors. We live in a world now of much greater openness. Indeed, a lot of future exposure is likely to come through the world of the Huffington Post and WikiLeaks, not through the traditional print media.

I do feel nostalgic for print and I understand why the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, made the impassioned speech that he did. I hope that local newspapers continue to fight another day, but I am not certain that they will. Technology is moving so fast that that produced on paper is almost irrelevant. It saddens me that the Government have chosen this moment to renew a code in these terms. It extends a code that was already adequate to counter what my noble friend described so well as a situation from days gone by, when party political publications masqueraded as newspapers. That is not the case now. The code covered it, the code is complied with and councillors understand very well, as do council officials, what the code means.

I am disappointed that our Government have chosen to micromanage in this way. When we talk of unfair competition in addressing this, it seems very strange. The rest of the time we talk about competition and a free market being healthy. I understand the difference, which is that it is taxpayers’ money producing a council newspaper, but the rest of the time councils are urged to be as commercially viable as possible. However, it is not that that offends me, it is the micromanagement. Are we really going to have a code that dictates content? The noble Lord quoted competitions. I can remember my own council newspaper running competitions along the lines of, “Get to know your local area. Can you recognise where this is?”, with a photo of the local area. The next time it was published it would talk about the projects that were going to happen there. That is a competition and it certainly should not be caught by the code.

Frequency is certainly not a matter for central government; it is a matter that the council will decide according to its finances and, indeed, according to its residents’ wishes. Councils have been urged for ages to take into account their residents’ wishes, and survey after survey that my council did always came back with a request from residents for more information in a more digestible form. The public are very happy with the appearance of newspapers; that is why newspapers have evolved as they have. There is nothing wrong with a local authority taking on what is a very popular appearance and publishing its material in that form. It is not by chance that a newspaper has evolved into the form it has; it is because that is the form that the public like.

Finally, I do not like lobbyists any better than anybody else, but we need to be careful about this in the code. A lobbyist might be taken to be a person who has particular expertise in publicising a fairly technical issue. In the 1990s I remember that quite specialist help was needed to deal with what we were forced to do then, housing stock transfer. Noble Lords will be able to think of other very specialist issues now; say, flood defence and managed retreat, which you need quite specialist people to talk about. Would you not be allowed to employ them in your newspaper to write an article? So there is even a question hanging over the question of lobbyists. I wish that the Government would think again and quietly drop this proposal.

[Earl Cathcart]

My Lords, when looking at the two Motions before us this evening, I asked myself, what it is that most council tax payers want from their council? I believe that it is the provision of good or excellent services as cheaply as possible. Taxpayers want value for money; every pound spent wisely, especially in these straitened times. I should declare that I was a local councillor for a number of years. My district council, Breckland in Norfolk, is in the top quartile for performance—indeed, it has beacon status—and it still has the lowest council tax in the country; about £60 for a band D house. As a taxpayer, that is exactly where I want it to be: it is good value for money.

The code deals with two main issues; new or tougher rules for local authority newsletters and the use of lobbyists by local authorities. Dealing with the use of lobbyists first, I ask myself the question, as a council tax payer: do I want my council paying tens of thousands of pounds to an outside firm to lobby MPs, public officials, political parties and government Ministers? The answer is an emphatic no, for two reasons. First, councillors and officers of the council already have open-door access to their MPs, Ministers and public officials. Why on earth do councils, therefore, need to pay good money to lobbyists to do their job for them? This leads me to my second point: it is a waste of taxpayers’ money, money that would be better spent in improving or maintaining front-line services.