As we reported earlier today, despite assurances and reminders, a number of questions posed to the Isle of Wight council, via their press office (every question to anyone in the council _has_ to go via the press office), related to the catering contract at the Ventnor Botanic Garden (VBG) still remain unanswered.
As the previous article was a news piece, simply reporting the facts, we thought we’d share our opinion on the situation.
The Royal Garden Cafe
To be clear, we have no problem with the Royal Hotel being awarded the catering contract at the Botanic Garden.
We’ve been lucky enough to eat there and were very impressed with the selection and quality of the food, as well as the service. In fact, we’d go as far as to highly recommend it.
In our opinion, it is a massive improvement to what was being provided before and only adds to the many great places that Ventnor now has to offer for those who appreciate good dining.
The council press office
Our beef on this matter is with the Isle of Wight council and the (in)action of their press office.
We can’t understand why the information is being held back. Surely the questions should be simple enough to answer?
On Tuesday last week, we received an email from the press office saying, “The full set will, I would hope, be with you tomorrow at the latest.”
A week later no questions are answered and a new email states “Will respond as soon as we can.”
A subtle but very important change to the response. Make of it what you will.
Communication?
At a time when many Islanders are concerned about the future of the Botanic Garden – the Save Ventnor Botanic Garden Facebook group has near 4,000 members – you would have thought that the role of any person in PR would be doing everything possible to allay people’s fears and suspicions – not build on them by not providing answers to relevant and straight-forward questions.
History repeating itself?
VB has been here before during the ‘consultation’ process on the Island school reforms back in 2008.
We hit a nerve by highlighting that The Leader, Cllr David Pugh, linked the loss of £7m funding for new school buildings with a need to “reduce our surplus places in our schools from 30% to less 10%.”
VB later proved that no such link existed and when we questioned it via the IWC press office, we were delayed for days with “it’s coming” emails.
Finally a statement arrived from the Head of Children services, Steve Beynon (now the Chief executive of IWC) which didn’t answer our direct question.
We continued to press to have the ‘Was Cllr Pugh, correct or not?’ question answered. Eventually the press office had to resort to a “we’ve answered your question” position, refusing to respond further on it.
A month and a bit later, VentnorBlog was cut off from asking questions to the IWC by Claire Robertson, who then ran the IWC Press office and is now overall Head of Communications at IWC.
With these delays in responses from the IWC being mirrored, is VB again due to be cut off for asking questions that are too awkward to answer?
Image: Chief Trent under CC BY 2.0
