Remember in the middle of July, we brought you details of how much the Isle of Wight council has been spending on advertising with the County Press?
The headline was £215k+ for the full last year we had been given details for.
At the time, we asked the IW council to give a breakdown of what was statutory – ie that they are legally obliged to advertise in the local press.
After a couple of days, we re-prompted them and they kindly provided us some details pretty quickly.
What are statutory adverts?
So you know the difference, statutory adverts include things such as advertising traffic orders, road closures, facilities closures, planning notices, licensing orders, dog orders.
The IWC tell us that “these form the largest percentage of this total spend figure at 37% of budgeted spend (for 2009-10 this was a little over £65k).”
Further clarification required
The language used in their statement could do with further clarification.
We note that they’ve given the percentage compared with “budgeted spend,” so we’re not clear if this is 37% of the total money spent with the CP in the year, or just 37% of the amount of money that they had budgeted to spend with them.
Why bother asking? If the “budgeted spend” is less than the total spent, that 37% figure will reduce to a smaller percentage.
We’ll asked them for further clarification on this.
UPDATE 09:50 3.Aug.10: This clarification just in from IWC: “the spend is the total spend, all of which was ‘budgeted spend’ – ie met from budgets set aside for that purpose.”
Examples of spend
Helpfully, the council has given a couple of examples of the amounts of money that they have spent – £15k on the statutory notices for school reorganisation and £26.6k on traffic orders/notices.
The council also gave us further breakdowns of what is the make up of the money that they’re spending with County Press. We’re in the process of going through those.
