Category: Communications disease

Over the weekend the September copy of Livingstone’s £3 million a year Londoner arrived on my doorstep.

Livingstone is at his lying worst with a front page that declares “London’s buses now free for under-18s”. This is true so long as you are still in education. Because this is not a real local newspaper but a piece of political propaganda he does not bother to tell us how much this exercise is costing. It may well be good value for money and we may well think it is a good thing. But, Livingstone does not want us to worry our little heads about the costs of his projects so he refuses to tell us.

Another aspect of his lying is the game he plays with using trams in the plural. There is only one tram in London, the Croydon Tramlink. In his press releases and adverts Livingstone tries to kid us that there are trams across London. The use of buses in the plural is reasonable as you can pretty much get a bus anywhere in London. The use of trams in the plural is just a Livingstone lie.

West London does not want his tram but he hopes that by twisting language like this he will win the argument subliminally. What a creep. If you go to the TfL website they carry on this silly subterfuge with the Trams section of their website.

I have today complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about TfL’s current Oyster campaign which pluralises the Croydon tram.

<img id="image226" height=48 alt=homeonblue.gif src="https://philtaylor.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/homeonblue.thumbnail.gif&quot; hspace=8 align="left" This morning the ConservativeHome website ran this story from me highlighting how the London Mayor is spending £100 million on self-promotion.

The same story was picked up by the Standard this afternoon, see below. TfL really can’t help themselves, apparently they are about to spend another £435K on an advert presented by Tube managing director Tim O’Toole. Sounds like masturbation to me. Expensive masturbation too, especially as I bet this figure is just the production cost of the ad. The telly slots will probably cost £1 million. TfL spends £1.5 million per annum to have three full pages 10 times a year in the Londoner. Couldn’t they have used these rather than turning their boss into a media star?

Apparently Richard Barnes mentioned the £78 million figure when he was interviewed on ITV’s London Tonight on Wednesday.

Ealing Times covered the TfL ad waste story today. Follow link. They chose to link it to rising bus fares. Quite right.

ConservativeHome picked up on my TfL story at 7pm tonight having got it from the GLA Assembly Members who seem quite happy to comment on it without acknowledging where it came from.

Richard Barnes, our local AM for Ealing and Hillingdon, put out a statement on this stuff today which is where CH got it from. He got it from me (see previous post)

Today I got a response from the Met regarding their advertising spending and the role that the Londoner plays in it. I am grateful to Des Stout in public affairs for laying the picture out so clearly.

MPS Publicity1.htm

It appears that the Met spent £2.1 million overall of which £250K was given to the Mayor for the Londoner.

Of this relatively small budget it is worrying to see that almost a quarter was devoted to a fairly blatantly political campaign. In January the London Mayor announced an acceleration of the Safer Neighbourhoods programme to coincide with the pan-London local election in May. The Met spent £485K in February and March to promote this commitment (which was unmet in many areas including Northfield). Every Labour campaign leaflet I saw referred to these teams. What is more the figure is considerably more than the £300K figure quoted to me Commander Hitchcock over a month after I asked him for it back in early February.

Since I found out that the Mayor paid for the Londoner by taxing the “GLA family” (see previous post) I have been chasing the poor old family to explain why this spending is not prominently explained in their own annual reports. I have had the first of three responses from TfL today.

ReSpendingontheLondoner.doc

I challenged them to explain their spending on advertising and how giving £1.5 million to the Mayor for the Londoner fitted into that. In their last set of published figures TfL said that they only spent £5.2 million on publicity. Their letter says that the real figure is £78 million. It appears that their voluntary declaration of publicity spending is designed to deceive rather than to inform.

I have passed the correspondence on to Richard Barnes, the Assembly Member for Ealing and Hillingdon.

<img id="image229" height=200 align="left" alt="LSCP Ad.jpg" src="https://philtaylor.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/LSCP%20Ad.jpg" Back in March I blogged about the London Safety Camera Partnership. I was chasing them to find out how much they were spending on their then current advertising campaign that was trying to convince young males that speeding would have consequences, eg losing your licence, costing you money, losing your job. They spent £800K on the campaign. In responding to my request for information they let on that they were actually doing research to find out the effectiveness of this spend. A suitable case for follow up I thought.

It took me three e-mails and a phone call and a further e-mail to get a response. I wrote on 20th June, 4th July, and 24th July and finally I called them on 7th August. They have sent me a copy of the research today. The date on the report was 23rd May so it was not as if it wasn’t in their hands. The conclusion of the report was:

“Attitudes towards speeding, speed cameras and the consequences of speeding have not changed but we would not expect to see a change this quickly.”

In other words if you spend £800K on ads you will have no effect. Maybe if you spend many millions over a long period you will!

No wonder it took 7 weeks for them to fess up.

The Evening Standard has tonight taken up this story which I highlighted here earlier in July (see previous post). The numbers in the story come straight from two letters I got out of TfL.

• TfL letter 26th June
• TfL letter 5th July.

I originally e-mailed this stuff to the Standard but they did not take it up. I got in contact with the Taxpayers’ Alliance who were more successful than me in getting the Standard’s attention. Well done to James Frayne at the TPA.

I must admit I have got it all wrong about the Londoner, the Mayor’s £3 million self-publicity exercise. I received a letter from him this morning detailing how the Londoner is funded. Apparently the letter was prepared on 11th July but not sent out until today due to an administrative error.

See letter: London Mayor 11-7-2006.doc

According to the Mayor spending on the Londoner was contained within its 2005/6 budget of £2,882,800. I had previously imagined that income from advertising charges for the 3/4 pages of display advertising from GLA bodies in each issue was in addition to this budget and that the budget was a GLA budget. I was wrong. Apparently the GLA only contributed £632,800 towards the Londoner. The rest comes from tax on the GLA “family”.

Transport for London are taxed £1,500,000. In other words £1.5 million of road safety projects are on the shelf to make way for this wasteful spending.

LDA are taxed £500,000 to pay for it. I really do not see how spending £500K on the Londoner helps promote London’s economy.

The Met have to make a contribution of £250K. Would they rather spend this cash on coppers? I would.