More from the coalition plans for Government. It includes the following proposal:
"We will impose tough new rules to stop unfair competition by local authority newspapers."
Bring it on, say I. It is an abuse of power for a ruling administration in a Town Hall to entrench themselves through spending vast sums on propaganda. They should be restraints including a a requirement to show such spending represents value for money. My own Council of Hammersmith and Fulham has been criticised for producing a newspaper. But I think the basis upon which we have done so means we would fulfil any reasonable rules against unfair competition from excess subsidy.
Andrew Gilligan (who I rate very highly) doesn't see it that way. He brackets us together with Tower Hamlets which spends £1.1 million on their newspaper East End Life (a figure he mentions) and our newspaper H&F News, which made an profit on production costs in the last year and after staff time and office costs were included cost £148,000 (a figure Andrew does not mention.) This is down from £175,000 the previous year.
But isn't £148,000 still too much, I hear you cry. Of course we would like to get the cost down as low as possible. However I think any rule that said it was unfair would have to consider the alternative on all the statutory requirement to place advertising for licensing, planning and highways announcements in the printed media - which would end up costing more. That statutory requirement is very out of date - who reads planning application ads in their local paper? The Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt should remove the imposition of that cost on local councils. Doing so would making it harder to justify producing Council newspapers.