Is it wrong for ordinary hard-working people to line the pockets of expensive consultants?

By Mik Barton on Mar 10, 08 10:44 PM in Media

What's so despicable about spending money on PR?

If you take any large organisation and analyse its spending you can almost guarantee finding something to single out for criticism. Find someone to complain and you've got yourself a news story.

It works particularly well with public sector targets, where the spending in question has come from our taxes.

In days gone by there used to be a period (nicely scheduled for the 'silly season') where Birmingham City Council's accounts were opened for public scrutiny and a few individuals did a good job of digging. Nowadays of course we have the Freedom of Information Act.

You can bet that with any organisation the size of Birmingham City Council - it claims to be the largest local authority in Europe - you can always find a huge figure to provide suitable ammunition. The statistics will generally have enough zeros after the pound sign to make all sorts of things sound extravagant enough to feed a juicy news story. "They spent how much on bottled water?"

Consultants are always a good target. The assumption, for the purposes of a newspaper article, is that these are wealthy individuals who get paid far too much for nothing more than giving advice. In most cases journalists won't have to look too hard to find someone who can be quoted saying "we don't need to pay someone to tell us what to do, we just want to get the job done".

The truth however is that any business actually does need someone to do some planning. You do need to research your market. There are all sorts of areas where expert advice can be invaluable.

In the public sector, where performance is not meant to be measure by profits, justifying the expense can be a little more complicated. Yet, where public money is at stake, making sure that money is spent efficiently or wisely is perhaps even more crucial.

The Tax Payers Alliance is quite right to expose areas of waste in public spending, but I wonder if all their so-called exposés really do deserve the headlines. Why should the money spent on pensions for council employees be automatically labelled as waste for example?

Their target this weekend was the West Midlands Police, where (shock horror) £1m a year is spent on PR.

Fiona McEvoy, spokeswoman for the Taxpayers' Alliance, said the spending represented a waste of valuable public money.

"Ordinary hard-working people pay taxes in good faith for frontline police services and safer communities," she said.

"Now they are having to line the pockets of expensive consultants who can charge thousands of pounds for just a few days of relatively unnecessary and fruitless work."

Some people might argue, given the chance, that conducting a survey of what local people want the police to do was a good idea. Finding out the views of 'ordinary hard-working people' is neither unnecessary nor fruitless. But I'm guessing.

Even more than picking on ordinary hard-working consultants, what upsets me most is the way PR is singled out as if it is clearly the most wasteful way to spend money.

If you read the figures in the article quoted by the TPA of the £1,047,454 wasted they can only pin down £33,000 for specific criticism: just over £30k on conducting surveys of what people wanted and £1,500 on financial advice. I'm sure many Post readers will view spending such a tiny amount on financial advice when you have a budget as large as West Midlands Police to be excellent value for money.

So I'm not quite clear where the headline "Police spend £1m on PR" came from.

Perhaps the initials PR just fitted the space available for the headline? Or could it be that PR practitioners still have to work on their own PR (among tabloid readers at least)?