Leighton Andrews latest review of local authority spending could signal the end for many printed newspapers in Wales.

Public Services Minister Leighton Andrews ongoing assault on local government continued yesterday with the announcement he is to set up an independent review of administrative costs across all local authorities in Wales.

The review could spell trouble for the local newspaper industry in Wales which is also under perpetual assault from the pesky newcomer –  the internet. 

With falling circulation figures and declining ad revenue – printed newspapers, the ones you buy from the newsagents and supermarkets, are on a slippery slope to oblivion, underlined in the starkest possible way only last week when Shotton paper announced it was closing down one of its newsprint machines  with the potential loss of 100 plus jobs.

The fact is those who buy ‘local papers’ are literally a dying breed and they are not being replaced, many of us now take our news in via digital and social media platforms using mobile devices to access the news, be it ‘local’ national or international its in our pockets and its largely free.

So how would a council spending review affect local newspapers?

Across Wales and the rest of the UK, millions of pounds of taxpayers money is diverted from frontline services to pay for obligatory but ineffective public notices in local newspapers.

Research shows UK councils are forced to spend £67 million a year on statutory notices such as planning applications notices for example, and thats despite the fact that in many cases only a minority of their residents see them.

In affect, council tax payers in Flintshire and all other Wales and UK counties are subsidising local newspapers to the hilt, of course you won’t read about it in said local paper, it doesn’t get ‘talked’ about that much.

We sent a request to Flintshire County Council under freedom of information rules asking for the previous four years total spend on public statutory notices with our two main newspaper publishers, NWN (Publishers of the Leader) Trinity Mirror (publishers of the Daily Post)

Between April 2010 and March 2014 Flintshire County Council spent a total of £324,091 of tax payers money on rather pointless little adverts tucked towards the back pages of our local newspapers, that’s around £81,000 a year over the four years.

Unfortunately when we asked the council for a breakdown of who they spent the most money with, we were fobbed off with the ubiquitous “section 43 commercial sensitivity” refusal, which is a bit odd, the refusal does call into question Flintshire County Councils transparency credibility given our sister site Wrexham.com has no such problem wrestling that information from their respective council: Wrexham Council’s Six Figure Media Payments For Statutory Notices

The Local Government Association carried out research into public notice spend last year, it showed 42% of councils are charged more by local newspapers to publish public notices than for other general advertising.

The individual costs of publishing a notice can be more than three times that for a general advert, reaching more than £20 per column centimetre in some publications.

In addition to the £324091 spent on statutory public notices between 2010 and 2014 by Flintshire County Council, who also spent £178538 with one of our local newspaper publishers for their own ‘Your Community, Your Council’ newspaper, nothing wrong with that and they have admirably addressed this expense by taking it onto a digital platform therefore reducing costs greatly.

There is of course one ‘school of thought’ that suggests the local authority/newspaper publisher relationship is indeed a fruitful and reciprocal one, handing over the equivalent cash to fund small team of reporters salaries every year in return for perhaps slightly less intrusive scrutiny or favourable column inches, while reporters from certain publications may on the face of it appear to gain greater access and insight into council dealings than others, would be, hypothetically well worth the return on investment. Of course, we are unaware of anything that would suggest these practices happen within Flintshire! 

Before we go and hang to council out to dry on this one for a crass waste of public money, it’s worth remembering this is a legal duty the Council has no option but to comply with, their hands are tied so to speak, yet 84 per cent of councils across the whole of UK believe there are less expensive and more effective ways to disseminate information contained in public notices, namely digitally and at a fraction of the cost.

So, in order to free council’s from the shackles of public notice spending, Leighton Andrews would need to seek legislative changes (that is if the actual legislation has been devolved from Westminster to Cardiff) in order for councils to publish notices however they saw fit.

Given Mr Andrew’s crusade to rid Wales of laggy bureaucracy and overly expensive administrative costs, there is just short of £2 million* of potential savings to be made from the abolition of council statutory notices, yet by doing so many small weekly newspapers could simply go to the wall and the jobs they support with them.

Will Mr Andrews be the one to pull the trigger on this waste of public money, he would however go down in history as the man who killed locally produced and printed newspapers in Wales? 

The Public Services Minister’s Westminster counterpart – Eric Pickles MP, has run a country mile (metaphorically) from the subject knowing full well he would be ‘crucified’ by the media in England if he dared touch the sacred laws however, given the dire straights Welsh local authorities find themselves in every penny needs to be pulled back, so we are told.

One of north Wales’s most famous sons (ye ok he was born in Derby but…) Sir Dave Brailsford pinned his Team GB cycling successes to the “aggregation of marginal gains” where every aspect of performance is analysed and improved, the trimming of £2 million of tax payers money on pointless adverts may seem like a small spec on the bigger picture, yet lots of £2 million ‘specs’ may make a massive difference going forward.

*based on the average spend of Flintshire and Wrexham councils parred over the 22 Welsh councils.