Spinning Out of Control?

 

You may remember the story in the Hartlepool Mail some time ago which followed up on Cllr Stan Kaiser's revelation that no fewer than 151 new staff had been recruited by the council in the previous 12 months. An excessive number, you may think but this wasn't the real story. The real story was that no one in the Council or its administration could say who these 151 people were or what they were doing.

 

At the time, it fell to Council PR stalwart, Alastair Rae to try and explain things. What he came up with seemed to make matters worse. Poor Alistair found himself admitting to the Hartlepool Mail that the only way the administration could actually find out who it had working for it would be to go through thousands of personnel records and then went on to declare that this would be too onerous a task to perform. In so doing, when The Mail was published the day after, the audible sound of several thousand jaws dropping all at once came close to stopping the town's tea-time traffic.

 

The most successful demonstration of public relations it certainly wasn't; but it did serve to highlight a fact of which many people in the town had until then not even been aware. That fact was that the Council actually had a Public Relations Department. What the people of Hartlepool did know, after seven years of a Blair Government, was that Public Relations in Government meant one thing - Spin.

 

Freedom of Information Act figures for local authorities in the UK show that in the financial year 1996/97 Hartlepool Borough Council spent £428,169 on public relations. Twelve years later, the newly published HBC budget for the financial year 2008/09 shows that the cost of public relations for the Council has now grown to £1,393,000, an increase of 321.4%. It should be noted that Hartlepool manages to spend considerably more per head of population on PR than some much larger local authorities and that the figure of £1,393,000 is ironically, the equivalent  of a 4.58% increase in council tax - the precise increase to be imposed on the town's council tax payers in April, 2008.

 

There are two questions here that need to be answered:

 

  • Why does the Council of a small town like Hartlepool even need a Public Relations Department.
  • Why have the costs of running that department more than tripled in 12 years.

 

The first question is an interesting one. On the one hand, it could be argued that individual Directors or Departmental Heads should deal with the press directly if the topic involved falls within their own particular remit. After all, each of these people is not short of more junior managers to which they could delegate the task. Perhaps also, it would be no bad thing for such direct contact to occur as reasonably frequent contact with the press would surely foster good relations between the press and the Borough Council as a whole. This must surely have been the way it was done at one stage - before the rise of PR and its associated spin within British politics.

 

" . . . what we have to decide is not whether the PR department is any good at what it does; but whether what it does has any place in the local governance of Hartlepool . . .".

A second argument is more fundamental. A PR Department essentially becomes a filter between the administration and the public via the public's main source of information i.e. the Press. With a PR Department, all information must pass through the PR prism before it reaches the Press and subsequently the Public. As a result of this process, the white light of truth is broken down into its many different colours while the darkness of untruths is split into its various shades of grey.

 

PR Departments don't normally lie - they simply see the truth from a different perspective. In time this makes life complicated as past half-truths collide with present half-truths to produce a heady mixture of total truths and complete non-truths.

 

Against this is the argument that I am sure most, if not all, Directors and Departmental Heads would themselves put forward which would be that that Directors and Departmental Heads simply don't have the time for such matters. There is also a 'corporate risk' in such an approach in that the more people who are allowed to interact with the press the more likely for inconsistency to appear. This is one of the fundamental functions of a Public Relations department within a public service - to present, not the view of individual managers, but a 'corporate view' that all within the organisation can live with and which, more importantly, shows the public service itself in a favourable light.

 

The second question is much easier to deal with if only because I confess I have been unable to think of any plausible answers; even answers that I could tentatively suggest without fully expecting my own reasoning to immediately disintegrate in front of me. I did think of putting forward inflation as being part of the reason for the increase in costs but the RPI for the period covered was barely 30% and I realised that If I did so you would laugh even before you reached the next full stop. Had the Council introduced a hair-gel allowance? Perhaps - but £1.37m?

 

So I'm sorry, I give up.

 

Like everyone else still connected to planet Earth, I can think of no reason for a small authority like Hartlepool Borough Council to have sat passively and watched its own PR budget escalate by such astronomical proportions. I have read too many Press Releases about  five-star performances, prudent financial management and last-minute avoidance of service cuts for any of this to make sense to me. And what of Scrutiny - that last bastion of audit meant to save us from cabinet style local Government? It appears that the kids have raided the sweet cupboard while Grandma slept.

 

The Magazine Hartbeat  is, so I am told, one of the principle reasons why the HTH Website came into being. This may well be so as the magazine itself is a very credible display of a Public Relations Department at its most active. It is indeed a sugar-coated publication designed to show the Council and its Administration in the best possible light - something that it achieves very well. We cannot therefore, criticise the Council's PR Department for not doing its job.

 

So, what we do have to decide is not whether the PR department is any good at what it does for clearly it is; what we have to decide is whether what it does has any place in the local governance of Hartlepool.

 

If there were any reasons remaining why this function should continue to be part of Hartlepool Borough Council's governing culture then there are now 1,376,000 reasons why it should not.

 

In fact, it would be better for all concerned if those who presently make up the Public Relations Department equip themselves each and all with a copy of their flagship publication, Hartbeat  and add it to their portfolio before catching one of the new direct trains to the smoke.

 

There, I'm sure, they will find kindred spirits with whom they can hold eternal conversations without ever really knowing what the other is actually thinking.

 

Andrew Manning