Ben Bradshaw, secretary of state for culture, media and sport, stirred up a media storm with comments about ‘bloated' council communications teams and ‘completely one-sided' local authority newspapers.
Local media seized on this, pushing councils to defend positions. In the current culture of cuts this primed politicians to ask questions about spend on communications. With elections to fight and opposition point scoring there was a temptation to scale back given negative public perception.
However, our experience is that resisting temptation and continuing investment in effective communications can bring longer term rewards than slash and burn comms cuts.
With tough decisions being made, there's a temptation to shy away from telling people things they might not like to hear. Combine this with public suspicion of ‘spin', and exhaustive scrutiny of council spend, it's crucial for smaller authorities to be clear about the value and cost benefit of an effective comms team.
In Teignbridge our investment in communications was recently rewarded with a hat-trick of National awards from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. The 2009 Place Survey results around customer satisfaction and vfm provide strong evidence of the value and cost effectiveness of getting information out there.
Our comms team is part of the corporate hub, giving face-to-face access to corporate leadership, enabling them to keep up to date in real-time. So instead of response-driven ‘firefighting' sometimes characteristic of stretched comms teams, our team is a one-stop shop for comms responsibilities including corporate branding, internal communications, media relations, community magazine, long term campaigning & planning, multimedia and reputation management.
Grass-roots support comes from a corporate newsgroup, made up of representatives from each service area, which consults on communications issues, acts as ‘eyes and ears' and develops ambassadors who improve multi-way flows of information.
The Place Survey demonstrated the disparity between people's relatively high satisfaction with services and the place they live, and the much lower satisfaction with their council, despite it providing many of the services they enjoyed.
Teignbridge ranked 14th nationally for overall satisfaction and we attribute this in part to our investment in communications, making the links between councils, services and place.
Nicola Bulbeck is chief executive of Teignbridge DC
