Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone

<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.