Sporting Unreality in “Hackney Today”
Stop me if I’ve mentioned it before, but I really do resent the fact that local residents have to fork out for for the Council’s propaganda rag, Hackney Today. Enough is enough: it’s time to scrap this disgraceful newspaper and spend the money on something worthwhile. Like poverty. Or crime. Or the educational rationing that sees so many kids rejected from all of the five Hackney secondary schools they’ve applied for.
Anyway, what’s got my goat this time is this:
And because the Council is now run more efficiently, this hasn’t added a penny to Council Tax, with local tax rates frozen in Hackney for the past three years.
Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney, writing in Hackney Today, 21 July 2008
Now try this:
A Gazette investigation has uncovered millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money written off by Hackney Council.
Almost £40million of debt went uncollected in the last financial year, an audit of the town hall books revealed.
Hackney Gazette, 7 August 2008
And there’s the real story: if Hackney Council wasn’t so badly run, we might have benefited from a Council Tax cut. Or the missing £40 million could have been used to improve residents’ lives for the better.
Jules, as I’ve observed, is a statistics machine. He reminds me of the people I met in the voluntary sector who believed that quoting inspirational snippets was an adequate alternative to actually doing something for the people they were employed to help.
Oh well. At least we’ve got the Olympics to give us a shot in the arm in 2012. Jules says so:
Hackney is at the heart of where the Games will happen in four years’ time, and we are making the most of this by working hard to secure the best possible benefits for residents.
Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney, writing in Hackney Today, 4 August 2008
Well, five of them anyway - assuming that the Council staff and councillors just sent to Beijing at the cost of £30,000 all live in the borough. Here’s a table, just in from the Telegraph (Jules’s old paper), showing how much each of the so-called five “Olympic Boroughs” have just spent sending officials over to China.
1) Hackney. 5 staff. £30,000. (£6,000 per person)
2) Greenwich. 6 staff. £14,000. (£2333.33 per person)
3) Newham. 4 staff. £9,000. (£2250 per person)
4) Tower Hamlets. None. £0. (£0 per person)
5) Waltham Forest. None. £0. (£0 per person)
Value for money, eh, Jules? Oh well, at least you’ll be on the trip yourself. Here’s the Telegraph again:
The Olympic park site also spans parts of Hackney, whose council are spending £30,000 of public money on sending the Mayor of Hackney Jules Pipe, the Cabinet Member for Regeneration and the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games Cllr Guy Nicholson, the chief executive Tim Shields, the assistant chief executive Sue Primmer and the Council’s chief officer for the 2012 Games Charlie Forman.
Much as one could argue that £30,000 is great value for getting these people out of the country where they can’t do quite so much damage, this remark is rather telling.
A Hackney spokesman said: “Hackney’s key legacy opportunity from the 2012 Games is to ensure the media centres are transformed into a regional hub for media and creative industries after 2012, with the potential to create 8,000 jobs locally.”
In other words, despite saying only three days ago that “Hackney is at the heart of where the Games will happen in four years’ time”, Jules is off to China in a desperate taxpayer-funded bid to beg a few scraps for Hackney from the Olympic table. Because, quite frankly, we’re going to get feck all:
The borough’s business community fears Hackney may not receive the expected boost in tourism during the 2012 Olympic Games.And their concerns could be well founded after John Armitt, chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority, admitted in an exclusive interview with the Gazette that most visitors would bypass the borough.
With the man below in charge, is it any wonder?
Published on 7th August, 2008
Pravda on the rates (II)
A quick note of thanks to friend and local statistician, Dr Archer, for picking up on my analysis of council spending on propaganda.
Published on 12th May, 2008
Council propaganda and the Labour vote
Like Bill Dornan over at Foolish Interruption, I think that the nonsense written about the Evening Standard and the mayoral election is an expression of sour grapes.
…can we please lay to bed the idea that the Evening Standard swung the election? – it’ll only encourage them. A tawdry rag it may be, a great former of opinion it is not. The idea It’s the Standard Wot Won It seems particularly strong in the Guardian’s own little world. The Standard’s “poisonous” campaign has been blamed by a few more Ken fans (all links just from the Graun, I can’t face digging out all the lip quivering stuff I’ve read). The irony, of course, is that the Guardian itself ran a string of vigorous, if somewhat hysterical articles (only vulgar rags like the Standard run actual campaigns you see) against Boris: the effete and frivilous Tory, the racist, the evil, baby-eating Tory bigot etc.
Bill’s absolutely right. What pretentions either paper may have of influencing voters, the fact remains that most people in London read neither of them.
What most people in London do read - or, at the very least, receive - is the propaganda freesheet that is shoved through their letterboxes by their local council. On that basis, I felt that these were the publications that had the power to influence the largest number of voters.
So I hunted out some statistics that would help me uncover whether there was any connection between the amount spent on these publications, or the frequency with which they were circulated, and the way in which voters in London boroughs voted in the last set of local elections (ie 2006). I found them here in a report about Ken Livingstone’s budget proposals for 2005-2006. In an appendix I found a chart that was chock-full of details relating to “London Borough publications funded by ratepayers”.
The idea was, of course, to prove that at a cost to Londoners of £3,300,000 per annum, Livingstone’s own propaganda sheet The Londoner was good value for money. It wasn’t: new mayor Boris Johnson scrapped it within days of taking office.
However, the information about the borough publications is fascinating. The table below is the data as presented by the GLA, minus the details about The Londoner and those for the Corporation of London’s thrice-yearly Cityview (which is anomalous in the sense of both audience and the fact that the Corporation isn’t controlled by a political party). I have added to that data details of the party that won the council in the previous local elections (ie 2002).
At first glance, these figures don’t seem too bad. If you look down the grey column headed CPCPH (Cost Per Copy Per Household), you’ll see that there’s no real pattern between spending and which party controls a borough. The Lib Dems and Labour are more likely to spend more per individual copy, but the Labour Party is also likely to get a better deal for the taxpayer - a competitive 6p per copy per household in Hackney, and no cost at all in Labour-controlled Hammersmith & Fulham and Hounslow (the freesheets were paid for by advertising). That said, it needs to be borne in mind that there were no figures available for Waltham Forest (then No Overall Control), Tower Hamlets, Brent (both Labour) or Islington (then Lib Dem).
However, by multiplying Cost per Copy per Household, by circulation, and then multiplying the new figure by the number of editions produced in a year, it is possible to work out how much each borough council was spending on freesheets. Here you will begin to spot a very clear trend:
Labour councils spent the largest sums of taxpayers’ money annually on freesheets. What’s more, those high spending boroughs retained control of their boroughs in the subsequent council elections in 2006. Only one Labour council spending £165,000 or less on propaganda - Barking and Dagenham - retained control. All the others lost overall control or fell to the Tories.
Of course, one could argue that this is slightly unfair. Some of those councils have much larger populations, so have to spend more money to reach all their voters residents. So, breaking down the figures to show the annual taxpayer cost per household, you get the following:
There’s a similar pattern. Only those Labour councils spending over £1.50 or more on freesheets managed to retain control. All the others were swept out of power in 2006 (though there is the anomaly of Lambeth, where Labour gained control from a hung council). It also emerges that the Tory controlled Barnet, whilst spending a relatively large £152,880 on freesheets, spent a reasonable 72p per head - far divorced from the outrageous £6.50 Greenwich was expecting its residents to cough up each year.
Even these figures only tell part of the story. There also seems to be a connection between how frequently council freesheets are circulated, and whether the ruling party keeps control after the 2006 elections.
Yes, you guessed it. All the Labour councils that retained control of their boroughs in 2006 were issuing between 11 and 26 freesheets to every household. No council issuing 10 or fewer managed to cling on.
So what can we conclude?
I’m not a statistician, but there are some facts we can deduce from the data.
1. Labour boroughs spent an average on £1.77 on council propaganda. Tory boroughs spent an average of 70p.
2. The Labour boroughs that spent most on council propaganda were likely to have retained control after the 2006 elections (though whether there is a causal link is unproven).
3. The Labour boroughs that spent least on council propaganda were likely to have ceded control after the 2006 elections (though whether there is a causal link is unproven).
4. Over £3.5million was wasted on propaganda that could have been more usefully spent on actually improving people’s lives, instead of convincing them their lives had already improved. If you include Livingstone’s The Londoner this figure leaps to near the £7million mark, and would doubtless cross it if we had the figures for the freesheets issued by Tower Hamlets, Islington, Brent and Waltham Forest.
5. Hammersmith & Fulham, Hounslow and Harrow all proved councils can issue as much stuff as they like, at no cost to the taxpayer, if it is funded by advertising.
My personal view is that, in scrapping The Londoner, Boris Johnson has shown that in these belt-tightening times, there are better things to spend taxpayers’ money on than freesheets. I also think there’s scope for a campaign to abolish them or, at the very least, bring their expense down to the absolute minimum. That said, even if it were funded by advertising, who would relish this sort of thing landing on their doormat?
I’d also like to see some more work - using bang-up-to-date figures - to examine the link between Labour councils’ high freesheet expenditure and local election success. But until someone does that, my response to those who say “It was the Standard wot won it” for Boris will be that “It was Hackney Today (described by one local councillor as a cross between Pravda and Heat) wot won it” for our own elected mayor, Jules Pipe.
(Note: if you want a copy of my spreadsheet, you can download it here.)
Published on 10th May, 2008
A waste of time and money?
I know it’s an incredibly old-fashioned way of looking at things, but I reckon the best way to find out what people think is to discover where they are, then go and ask them.
Not everyone agrees of course. Whoever conducted this survey, which aimed to find out what young people in Hackney think about crime, preferred to ask their questions regardless of whether anyone was listening.
I’m the first to admit that I’m way out of touch with what kids in Hackney read, what they listen to, where they hang out, and what websites are popular. But I can bet you anything you like that not many of them are going to spend acres of time doing the following things:
- reading the Council’s propaganda mag, Hackney Today. (”Hey, Nish, you seen this campaign to save our local post offices? How cool is that?”)
- trawling through the Hackney’s Consultation Finder. (”Jase! Jase! Look at this! It says here that “Hackney Local Authority are currently preparing a series of planning policy documents which will form part of the Local Development Framework (LDF). The LDF sets out the future direction of land use, development and regeneration in the Borough.” And they want to know what we think about it!”)
- reading the Hackney Young People Empowered (HYPE) website. I’m willing to be proved wrong, and to hear that this very worthy and useful site is straining under excessive server load. But if I learned one thing when I worked with kids, they prefer to create their own spaces on the web.
Sadly, the mastermind behind the “Young people’s attitude towards crime” survey thought differently, and that’s exactly where they tried to drum up custom:
It was decided to design an electronic survey consisting of a variety of open and closed questions. The survey was posted on the internet, with the link being publicised through Hackney Today, Consultation Finder (Council’s website) and the HYPE website (a dedicated website for young people).
Surprise, surprise, the Council wasn’t exactly inundated with responses. In a period when crime is one of the most pressing issues facing young people in the borough; and in which several teenagers have been murdered; guess how many took part in this ill-conceived survey?
Twenty-three.
Nor did all of the twenty-three manage to answer every question. That was more like eleven.
So what did this triumphant bit of research find? I’ll cut through the crap and summarise it for you:
- Most kids are worried about crime;
- Five kids said they’d been victims of crime;
- Peer pressure is seen as a problem;
- Families are thought to be the best people to help keep kids on the straight and narrow.
I could go on, but it would be pointless. As the report points out:
In using this data, a note of caution is suggested by Consultation Team based on the low level of response received. The results therefore may not be truly representative of the views of young people in Hackney.
Of course they aren’t representative of the views of young people in Hackney. Apart from the fact hardly anyone filled in the questionnaire, there’s another tasty morsel tucked at the back of the report…
Only eleven young people said they lived in Hackney.
So, in return for a month-long consultation, we’ve got a report crammed with things we knew already, based on the views of eleven confirmed Hackney residents. And I bet it didn’t come cheap.
I might just find out how much it costs. After all, I know the right person to ask.
Published on 8th May, 2008
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