Staffordshire County Council have once again outdone themselves in terms of profligate spending and managed to blow £230,000 on publishing their glossy magazine named Your Staffordshire (The Sentinel), a self-promoting brochure that includes interviews with Staffordshire celebrities such as Anthea Turner…
A £50 million council funding shortfall makes this costly move seem an even worse idea. Quite rightly, many are up in arms, particularly as the area has seen its front line services suffer in recent years.
Champions of the magazine are claiming that it will improve the lines of communication between the council and the county population, but most insist that there are other, cheaper ways of achieving the same goal.
The magazine is also available to download online so lots of people in Staffordshire will have access to it anyway, should they want it. And surely those without internet access could’ve simply requested a copy directly from the council, saving them from having 388,000 printed up? Not surprisingly, the county council are being criticised for lacking the all important green credentials, as well as for their wasteful spending.
To mass produce a brochure to this extent, whilst consistently failing in the eyes of the public and being under huge financial pressure seems to be the work of a council with very skewed priorities. If Staffordshire County Council truly wants to promote itself then it might start by cutting such unnecessary spending and ill thought-out schemes, and giving taxpayers in the area some value for money.