Government ministers have threatened to take legal action against eight London councils over their local taxpayer-funded newspapers.
Ministers at the Department for Communities and Local Government say the papers, including Greenwich Council’s Greenwich Time and Tower Hamlets’ East End Life, are in breach of the local government Publicity Code.
The code regulates the frequency, content and appearance of taxpayer-funded news-sheet and is intended to stop councils competing with local newspapers.
On Friday the department confirmed action is being taken against Enfield, Greenwich, Hackney, Hillingdon, Lambeth, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest councils.
Ministers say each of the councils are breaking the code’s provision limiting council newspapers and magazines to one edition per quarter.
The boroughs have been given two weeks either to demonstrate that legal action is not necessary or bring their publications into compliance with the code.
Local Government Minister Kris Hopkins said: “Frequent town hall freesheets are not only a waste of taxpayers’ money but they undermine the free press. Localism needs robust and independent scrutiny by the press and public.
“Councillors and political parties are free to campaign and put out political literature but they should not do so using taxpayers’ money.”
Damian Hockney says
The argument that local authorities make about these state newspapers being sort of ‘factsheets to bring vital information to local people’ is of course basically untrue. They are indeed wannabe newspapers, and usually very wasteful, without any form of balance or holding to account and can damage the real thing. The key to all newspapers is what is (and is not) included, and sanitised Pathe-news type coverage of local authority matters is dangerous when it stands to crowd out or close genuine local papers. As a publisher, I have experience of this myself when the BBC as a body funded by enforced public subscription (a form of tax) launched magazine titles unfairly competing against our own private sector ones and advertised theirs for free on their programmes while banning all mention of rivals’ titles. Mercifully this attack on the private sector and our businesses and jobs was stopped after our lobbying.
However, there is also a problem with local newspapers, which have in many ways become less local, more selective in what they cover and every bit as biased as the local authority rags. Bad news is that paid-for newspapers are declining in sales (figures just out), but good news is that online traffic has grown enormously. There still may be fewer local newspapers in the near future, but local news online will grow…and that too has potential problems for credibility, sourcing and (again) bias. But state-run newspapers are always bad for news, and very bad if they end up as the only game in town.
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Mark Townend says
Local newspapers, as well as merging and becoming less local have largely abandoned daily publishing too, meaning “news” in print is more often than not fairly old. I suppose the biggest argument against the council free news sheets is poor value, with a desire to distribute a large print run out to as many residents as possible as a mission to inform, rather than any evidence of any real readership demonstrated by a willingness to buy. Of course private commercial enterprises can continue to pump out as much publicity as they like, whether pizza leaflets or their own pseudo news sheets peddling products, projects or opinions. However annoying, at least they’re not being subsidised by taxpayers.