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Councils must relentlessly promote their achievements, the LGA has warned, after a wave of negative media coverage. Farces and foul-ups were seized on during what LGA officials say has been a slow news month. Market traders in Hexham have been told by Tynedale DC to ‘shout quietly', after complaints from office workers. Traders have complained the market has been selling meat, fruit and vegetables for more than 800 years. ‘There have been instances when the noise of the market became more than office workers could cope with,' said a Tynedale spokesman. Charity cake baker, Diane Tovey, was warned by North East Lincs Council that if she wanted to carry on selling her lemon drizzle cakes and scones from a table in her front garden to raise cash for the local lifeboat, she would need public liability cover of £5m. And two council workers in Oldham MBC have been suspended after being caught ‘romping' by 20 passers-by and a part-time police officer. Jackie Stanton, deputy leader of Oldham, said: ‘We are very concerned about these allegations.' In Scotland, SNP councillor Jahangir Hanif has been suspended after a film appeared on the Web of him firing an AK 47 Kalashnikov assault rifle in the Kashmir border region of Pakistan. But the LGA argued that in a sector employing more than one million, mistakes were bound to be made, and urged councils to increase positive media coverage. LGA media director, Ed Welsh, said: ‘What this shows is that it is more important than ever that councils should be generating stories which show the important work they do, and the value they deliver to taxpayers to counterbalance the negative coverage.'

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WHITEHALL

Farcical failures should not be only council media coverage

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