Category: Communications disease

Boris Johnson used this phrase during his Mayoral bid launch at the start of September to describe the Mayor’s Venezuelan joint venture with the totalitarian Chavez regime. I wrote to the Mayor on 24th August to ask him a few questions about this as it clearly does not add up, see previous posting.

His response, sent by flunky Kevin Austin, says that TfL will get £15 million from the Venezuelans which will broadly cover the cost of the half price concession (if you accept TfL’s estimate that only 160,000 of the 250,000 entitled to the concession will take it up and that their additional travel will also partly offset the cost).

The Mayor’s office will only admit to direct costs of £16,000 associated with supplying services under this scheme – travel costs incurred by a TfL transport team in June. The Mayor wants us to believe that TfL has made no estimate for the cost of providing £15 million worth of services per annum. I asked for this and my request has been ignored.

The Mayor does admit to another million Pound ad budget of £975K for this deal. The Mayor tries to persuade us that this will be paid for by the Venezuelans but their money can only be spent once. It can’t ofset the cost of the concession AND pay for the ads. One or the other Mr Mayor.

This deal stinks. The oil money, which might better be spent on needy Venezuelans, will pay for the travel concession if you make some favourable assumptions maybe. It will not cover the £975K ad budget, other administration costs of the scheme, the cost of providing services to justify the Venezuelans £15 million spend or the original £100K set up costs. The real net cost of this deal to London is in the area of £5-10 million. Our lying Mayor will not admit this.

I was struck reading the Gazette this week by the double page editorial on the Childcare Affordability Programme. This is a heavily advertised LDA programme to spend £33 million on providing help to people on low incomes with childcare. I will write to the LDA to find out what proportion of this cash is being spent on advertising. You can’t have failed to see their beige ad with photogenic family on a sofa. This ad has appeared 6 times in as many weeks in the Gazette.

In six weeks the Gazette has benefited from almost 10 whole pages of display advertising from the Mayor and his bodies (LDA, TfL, etc). It must have been hard for them to turn down LDA’s request for some editorial. Two whole pages is somewhat generous. By printing a 9 column inch letter from the Mayor on the subject of child poverty this week along with with 3 half page ads, two from TfL and one from LDA, the Gazette is starting to look like the Londoner.

The Mayor spends about £100 million a year on comms so perhaps it is not surprising that it is hard to distinguish the Gazette from the Londoner.

It is a shame that only 4% of the childcare places created by the LDA have come to West London, see question to Mayor.

You might have seen this graphic on various posters around London recently and in full page ads in local papers. In early August the Mayor announced he was consulting on his variable CO2 based charging scheme for the Congestion Charge. This is of course an attempt by the Mayor to rebrand the failed Congestion Charge as a carbon tax and is effectively electioneering paid for by you and me.

As soon as I saw his announcement I thought “How much?”.

TfL provided the answer today, see their letter reproduced below (click to enlarge). To their credit TfL have managed to answer in slightly less than the 20 working days that the Mayor’s office treats as a minimum rather than a maximum. The consultation will cost £1.137 million. Most of the money is being spent on high profile billboards and newspaper ads whose real role is to present the Mayor as a green warrior rather than to find out what people really think.

In June 2006 a telephone poll costing £1,660 found that 64 per cent of Londoners think the most polluting cars should pay a higher congestion charge. The consultation asks only noddy questions. See full consultation questionnaire here. You might want to tell TfL what you think.

Do you remember that back in April the Mayor promised to give away 100,000 free Oyster cards to the first 100,000 people to apply, waiving the usual £3 fee that most of the rest of us have already paid?

See his press release. By 1st May the Mayor had reported rapid progress with this campaign, having given 57,000 cards away. See his second press release.

You could charitably argue the Mayor was trying to help the poorest in society deal with the swingeing increases in cash fares that came into force at the start of the year (£2 for buses and £4 for tubes). You might think that this operation had cost £300,000 in 100,000 lost £3 deposits for the cards. You would be wrong.

This exercise was in fact one designed to promote the Mayor in the run up to the elections next year. It was therefore supported by a torrent of advertising.

In doing some research today I came across the cost of the ad campaign to support this exercise – £792,966 (see answer to question raised by LibDem AM Sally Hamwee).

So these “free” Oyster cards cost us £10.93 each not £3! Just so you know.

By the way note that the Mayor can’t help hiding £5K of funding for left wing newspapers The Tribune and the Morning Star in this budget. The idea that these are effective tools for communicating to Londoners is laughable. Still, if you are spending £793K bigging yourself up what is £5K?

Today I finally received a reply from TfL on how much they spent on advertising for the Tour de France. The answer is £3 million. I wrote to TfL, who were driving this for the Mayor, on 21st June to ask how much the total comms campaign was costing but they have sullenly refused to answer up until now in spite of making the following pledge:

We will do our best to send you a full written response within 15 working days. If we cannot give you a full answer in this time, we will send you an acknowledgement and then a full written response will follow.

Now it is all old hat and there is not much to lose in letting us know.

The Sunday Times reported that:

London has paid £1.5m to stage the opening stage of the Tour de France and spent another £4m on planning, transport and security.

So the total for the Tour de France is at least £8.5 million or more than £2 a head for all the 4 million people who reportedly came out to watch. This does not include Kent County Council’s spending which was significant.

I have written to the Mayor to ask him to outline the entire budget. I am sure I will get an answer after 20 working days as usual. It doesn’t matter how easy it is to answer a question the Mayor cynically holds it until 20 days elapsed to stifle public scrutiny of his behaviour.

I don’t quite know how they managed it but apparently the London Olympic logo cost £400K according to the Telegraph this morning. Although the Telegraph story is accompanied by a photo of the grinning London Mayor nothing appears on the Mayor’s own website. There are two explanations for this. Either the Mayor is embarrassed, unusual I know, or the Mayor’s press machine has been slow to take up the story.

The £400K figure is hard to believe although they did use top notch brand consultants Wolff Olins. Apparently “LOCOG last night stressed that the logo was paid for by private money”. If the London Olympics is a private venture why are we spending £10 billion of public money on it?

You can see how the Wolff Olins guys managed to talk LOCOG out of the cash when you see the twaddle they spout about the project:

The emblem is 2012, an instantly recognizable symbol and a universal form, one already closely associated with the Games in London and marking a moment of change for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Neither an appendage to London nor the Olympic symbol, it brings the two together in an inclusive way. It is a brand which can be read and understood by people of all ages, around the world.

Echoing London’s qualities of a modern, diverse and vibrant city, the London 2012 emblem is unconventionally bold, deliberately spirited and unexpectedly dissonant. Comprising neither sporting images nor pictures of London landmarks the emblem is designed to signify that while the Games is hosted in London, it is not just for London, but also for the UK and for the world. That it is as much for the athletes as for everyone, regardless of age, culture and language. It is a brand to help take the Olympic and Paralympic Games into a new era.

They do talk a good game but what a load of bilge? Why does it not surprise me that the word inclusive creeps into this nurge? Is inclusive a synonym for unexceptional, bland, unidentifiable?