A.O.B.
Don’t boast yourself into toast
Published: 08 August 2008
If you are a local authority chief executive, now is a good time to take stock of your council’s publicity effort, in particular to establish whether in their enthusiasm to hymn the council’s praises an over-excitable PR team risks making trouble for you.
Excitement is a valuable tool for catching the attention of stakeholders if that excitement centres upon tangible achievement. But left to itself, the PR team can get stuck in a perpetual fog of excitement, routinely hyping U-turns and nebulous aspirations as, well, exciting. Of course, that’s what Westminster politicians do, but in the country spin, empty spin, ain’t in.
And it may not be long before chief executives join Westminster politicians in the firing line as electors and Council Tax payers look for someone to blame for the hard times that are upon them. With advertising revenue decline forcing television companies to prune the fees offered to their star performers, how long before councillors start reassessing how much their chief executive should be paid?
It would pay a chief executive to take a fresh look at one medium of communication that we know reaches most residents (and voters). This is the expensive magazine that is delivered monthly to every home.
One central London local authority has cleared the front page (and two more) of the current issue of its newspaper to praise to the skies a new parking policy. This is billed as “huge step” that, after complaints, the council has changed its parking enforcement contractor. It takes three pages of hype to say the council is renaming its parking-ticket issuers as ‘civil enforcement officers’ and kitting them out in different uniforms.
These officers, it is promised, will not be rude and unfair like the last lot. But is the implication of all this waffle not that the council failed to its due diligence in hiring a lot of duds last time, did not keep an eye on them, and is now splashing out money on a questionable rebranding exercise?
The story might as well have been headlined ‘You readers are idiots’. This is not a time for a council chief executive to give hostages to fortune, and certainly not to pay an over-excitable PR team to give it for you.
Ross Davies is a partner in The Governance Partnership.