Shropshire Council spent £100,000 on self-promotion magazine
Wednesday 11th August 2010, 8:00PM BST.
Shropshire taxpayers forked out more than £100,000 to pay for a quarterly magazine about the work of their council, new figures revealed today.
Your Shropshire, which was delivered to about 129,000 homes in the Shropshire Council area was projected to cost £124,951 in the last financial year, the authority said. Only 15 per cent of the cost of producing the magazine was offset by advertising.
The release of the information follows a Freedom of Information requ- uest published on www.whatdotheyknow.com
But council leader Keith Barrow today said the cost of producing the magazine had been dramatically cut following a review. He conceded the magazine had been too costly in the past.
In response to the FOI request on the website, about the magazine’s editorial policy, Heather Jones, assistant information governance officer, said: “Your Shropshire is the council’s quarterly magazine, delivered to all households in Shropshire.
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“The winter 2009 issue was delivered to households at the beginning of December 2009.
“The aim of the magazine is to keep you up to date with what the council is doing and how you can get inv- olved. We also want you to get the most out of living in Shropshire, so there’s plen-ty of information about things to do all around the county, and where to get help and support.”
She said the magazine was available in various formats including large print, Braille and CD-Rom.
Councillor Barrow said he believed now that changes had been made in the production of the magazine it was now “cost effective” but he said it would still be looked at as part of a major review of the council’s services in a bid to save nearly £60 million over the next three years.
He said: “We have already carried out a review and cut the cost of it. We design it internally instead of externally and we have sold advertising space in it.
“The cost is down to about 14p a copy, which includes delivery, so we have cut the cost dramatically.
“Because there is so much happening with the council I think the magazine is value for money.
“We have to communicate with everybody but nothing, absolutely nothing is safe from scrutiny.”
By Russell Roberts
UK News
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this is such an easy cut, do you want a magazine or 5 CSOs on the beat?
a magazine, or free weekly food waste collections for the whole of south shropshire?
A magazine, or a care home for the elderly?
You get my drift, these are exceptional times, if they can cut frontline services like rubbish collection then they must cut this
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Well this is just another fine example of how economically Shropshire Council spend our Tax’s. like most people have said on here im sure there are better things to spend our Tax’s on
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They really *are* trying people’s patience, aren’t they?
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and they want to close libraries and lay off staff – this council is so out of touch its unbeleivable!
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Very difficult to comment on this story without swearing! So I won’t…
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when you say it like 14p a copy, its actually not bad, its a good read! i would happily pay 20 p to buy a copy! that said perhaps they could make it less councilly and more about community projects and partners
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From 77.5p per copy to 14p per copy with no real effort involved!
Just another example of why the government can demand cuts without there necessarily being pain to follow.
All those who have been squealing about doom and destruction as the government seeks to limit the huge overspends of the last government should look carefully at this. And let’s see how many other commentators can bring examples of waste and profligacy to our attention in their comments on this story.
I’m still interested to understand how the council managed to bring the work in-house to achieve the lower figure. I’m sure that they didn’t hire a load of new employees to do the work, so the assumption has to be that, as so often, the existing people paid to produce the work felt that their job was to farm it out to contractors rather than get on and do it themselves. So now that they have learnt that lesson, it would be fun to learn what they were previously doing whilst merely chasing the work that they had contracted out. (And I’m not sure that I can quite believe that the huge unit cost reduction was due to bring just the design in-house. Design does not account for such a huge proportion of a magazine printing job. There’s more to this than that simple explanation.)
Anyway, Shropshire Council, now you know about printing, how about all those other things that you print? There must be savings to be made there.
BTW: I have some knowledge of printing: this still seems too high a price to pay, you can reduce it by another 10% IMHO.
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The magazine is unnecessary. Shropshire want to cut redundancy payments to its employees (by a large amount). Far better to stop publishing this magazine – which usually goes straight to recycling bin.
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And queue… another round of public sector bashing… lets go… of course no other councils do exactly the same thing and how dare they communicate with us? for 14p im quite impressed, its actually 30 p just to deliver something with the royal mail remember let alone produce it
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Unfortunately Jimmy t, times are hard and in good times this is a ‘nice to have’ but its hardly a necessity when balanced with social services funding, bin collections, housing, contributions to policing etc. Every penny will count…
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Why deliver quarterly? Make it twice a year and I can cut down my green waste from this source by 50%. If you reduce some of the inflated articles it will reduce the overall cost even further!
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Create a pdf and mail it out electronically with an email sign up on their website for anyone who wants a copy. Printing costs reduced to zero. Free internet access in libraries for people who do not have internet at home. There is no excuse. Shropshire Council need to join the 21st century.
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What about people who dont have access to a computer..cant get to a library and arent computer literate? Dont assume everyone in the ’21st century’ can log onto the internet, open their emails and open a PDF!
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thats a very good idea julian – e-news
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OK, once at the library, the staff will happily show you how to open an email, so because of the 5% of people who cannot get to a library (I have picked a stupidly high number so that you cannot use that as an excuse), you are saying they should continue to use 20th century methods to communicate with us?
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“I have some knowledge of printing”
That’s nice. How much knowledge? Do you know how many pages, what kind of paper, how many pages in colour? Do you have any idea of the scale of increase in paper prices recently, which will only accelerate, along with severe shortages?
On the other hand I do agree that councils – just like most private sector large organisations – can certainly reduce costs by focusing on unnecessary expenditure. I also feel strongly that they should do that long before even looking to cut essential frontline services and jobs.
At least one local council has got these priorities seriously upside down in the not too distand past.
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That’s a fair point.
Whatever the page count, reduce the pagination. Include less info and photos or use a smaller font and get all info into less space.
Whatever the paper, reduce the grammage and use lick coated instead of full coated or uncoated instead of lick coated.
Only one colour needed to get the message over; forget the 4 colours, spot colours, varnish, etc.
I know about printing because I have a higher qualification in printing and was a paper trader, (within merchants, mills and independently), for many years until a couple of years ago. Paper may be shooting up in price, but as demand drops and mothballed mills come back online, it will go shooting down again. It’s been an inevitable cycle for many, many years.
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Incidentally Eric Pickles has just discovered that someone in his department (Communities and nice things) has been lashing out on head massages and charging them to us.
Gives a whole new meaning to ‘these people need their bumps felt’ :)
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“We have already carried out a review and cut the cost of it. We design it internally instead of externally and we have sold advertising space in it.”
I am freelance designer by trade, you would have thought that doing your own self-promotion with and in-house design in place you would have done that anyway before the review.
I know for a fact they have a very capable in-house design department so why outsource to an agency who would probably charge double the hourly rate plus the mark-up on print and management fee???
Send it here, I’ll cut your costs and the poor management out the loop completely!
Ive haven’t even seen the mag and agree with all the other quotes regarding the focus on where exactly the spending cuts should be made.
Sort your priorities out.
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wow the pravda hey , north korea will be taking notes on this type of properganda, why not used the local media? scared they might actually print both sides of the story instead of just the councils?
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I recycle mine. Just tear the pages into 6inch squares. collect together, put a hole in the corner thread a piece of string thru the hole and tie with a knot and hang up where you know where. We must all do our bit to reach our Council’s re cycling targets.
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Here we go again, more public sector bashing. Smacks a bit of sour grapes Shropshire Star. I agree every penny needs to be accounted for especially to preserve frontline services, but is there another agenda here? Would you prefer the Council to pay substantially more to the local press to keep the residents of the county up to date with the work of the Council. How much would that have cost? Would you have run a headline saying Council spends X amount of pounds on self promotion with the Shropshire Star?
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they need to think smarter make every pound work harder, there is cheaper ways of communicating these days that print media, this is showing that for the shropshire star! I mean the council website is rubbish, surely £100k on the website would be a better spend they should be leading the way dragging shropshire into c 21!
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omg these people dont live in the real world, they could just use modern technology like text elerts, e news letters and websites for a fraction of that cost and think of the environment too, saving all that paper and ink
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shameful
that would pay for several nurses/carers/binmen
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Yet another waste of the hard up taxpayers money which could have gone to far better use !!
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Over here in canada our local council publishes something similar, a pdf version is also available on their excellent website – and they have all the local busnesses advertise in it which creates revenue and actually the magazine makes a profit because of the advertising. It has everything in it form local swimming times, to bin collection information, communicty info and how the council are doing, projects, how they are spending money etc. Comes out 4 times a year. If the magazine really is important and people read it advertisers will be all over it, your councils should certainly at least break even on it’s production
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why not do it electronically and then produce say 15,000 copies (10% of shropshire) which can be collected for free from shire hall if people request it, because personally im plagued by junk mail and i dont want any more i will go online to find out what the council are doing, but some people may request a copy, there should be a choice, opt in / opt out option but certainly with the modern era the council should aim to be a “paperless office” by 2020 or something like that, paper is expensive as well and environmentally harmful so use less and print less and invest the savings in the website and enhancing rural broadband speeds
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