pension333: Pickles fools publishers - he cannot enforce code on council-run papers

Eric Pickles, minister for communities and local government, and his sidekick, Grant Shapps, have been pulling the wool over the eyes of newspaper publishers.

It transpires that their revised publicity code - the one supposed to prevent the publication of weekly papers by councils - is nothing more than an advisory document.

Aware that their department lacked the power to enforce it, they have been pretending that district auditors can deal with defiant councils.

It now transpires that the Audit Commission has no powers to enforce the code (as I wrote last year) unless a council is guilty of a financial transgression by failing to offer value for money to residents.

Therefore, in the normal course of events, councils are free to go on publishing in defiance of Pickles's code.

Two London councils - in Tower Hamlets and Greenwich - have been doing just that. Yet it was these councils that were the major reason for publishers initially seeking to restrain local authorities from competing with commercial publishers.

So the freely-distributed weeklies, East London Life and Greenwich Time, continue to be published by councils thumbing their noses at Pickles and Shapps.

I understand from the Audit Commission that there is no question of district auditors taking action because, as a spokesman told me, "it is not, and never was, an auditing matter."

The opposition leader on Greenwich council, Spencer Drury, formally complained to the relevant district auditor, Sue Exton, in September last year.

He has heard nothing from her since. But I can reveal that she will not be taking any action, because she regards the issue as outside her remit.

Meanwhile, Tower Hamlets council is taking a similar line to Greenwich. It took legal advice and discovered that the code had no basis in law.

No wonder Malcolm Starbrook, editor of the Archant-owned weekly in the borough, the East London Advertiser, is frustrated and upset.

He has been battling for years to stop the council-run Life from competing so aggressively with his paper for readers and advertisers.

He doesn't believe that the council is offering its taxpayers value for money by distributing 99,000 copies of the 40-page paper to residents every week. But it is very hard, if not impossible, to prove it.

Now Starbrook has told HoldTheFrontPage he is considering an appeal to Shapps to look again at the code. "I want ministers to come out and be a little bit more pro-active," he said.

The mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, stands by his paper, saying: "It's by far the cheapest way of communicating vital news [to residents] and it plays a huge role in bringing our community together."

He says the council has reduced the cost of producing the paper and is "aiming to operate at zero net cost by the end of 2012-2013."

So what can Pickles do? Soon after my blog posting last February in which I said he had no power to enforce his code, I happened to bump into him at an Irish embassy function.

He told me I was wrong because not only did he have the power, he would use it. His bluster certainly convinced some councils to accept the code because several of them did terminate their publications.

But the main offenders - the papers Pickles himself called "town hall Pravdas" - have defied him. And it appears that he can do nothing about it. What a farce!

Sources: HoldTheFrontPage/Bexley Times/Newspaper Society/Telephone interviews

Roy Greenslade

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/feb/21/eric-pickles-council-run-newspapers

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