Cash-hit councils pour £56million into PR budgets

Town halls in London spent at least £56million on publicity last year despite taking the axe to their front-line services.

The bill included advertising, staff recruitment, public relations and council newspapers.

Newham, one of the most deprived boroughs in Britain, topped the list with £5.6 million - up £1.7million from the previous year.

The Olympic host borough spent nearly £1.5million on PR staff, £1.4million on recruitment and £2million on publicity material. The Labour-run council was one of four local authorities that spent more than £3million on publicity and PR in 2009/10. The others were Tory-run Westminster and Labour-run Haringey and Camden.

However, overall publicity spending by local authorities was lower than the previous year, when they clocked up £68million between them.

In Brent it fell by nearly half from £2.2million in 2009 to £1.1million in 2010, while in Hillingdon it dropped by £530,000, in Wandsworth by £450,000 and in Hounslow by £435,000. A spokesman for Newham said spending was so high because of the 2012 Games and that it had been "vastly" reduced since the figures were published.

He said: "Two thirds of next year's Olympics will take place in Newham and up to 60,000 journalists are expected to visit the borough. We therefore face unique challenges and our publicity spend must take account of this at a time when we face one of the biggest cuts in grant from central government of any council in the country."

Transparency campaigners have criticised a decision which lets councils refuse to publish details of spending on publicity in their annual reports. Labour-run Greenwich is the first to keep the details secret.

Croydon, Greenwich, Hillingdon and Kingston include spending on their town hall newspaper while Lambeth, which publishes a twice-monthly paper at a cost to the taxpayer of £190,000 a year, does not.