Star date: 18th August 2011

SALFORD COUNCIL'S PRE-CUTS HANDOUTS - Coffee, PR and, er, Conflict Management…

In March, the last month before the cuts came into force, Salford Council spent almost £70,000 on Marketing and Publicity; £8,500 on Public Opinion Surveys; £57,406 on Miller Homes, which is yet to build a house in Charlestown; £25,000 on the now folded Central Salford URC; and over £3000 on a coffee consultancy.

Salford Council also gave a grant of over £7000 to the Centre For Good Relations which specialises in showing councils how to "manage conflict"…

Full story here…

Salford Council has finally revealed (see here for background) its expenditure over £500 for March this year, the last month before the cuts started to bite. And what a month it was…

£3,366 was spent with the Your Coffee Consultant company in Manchester which promises "a bespoke consultation service…We work with you for the best solutions for your hot beverage service"…

Meanwhile, a grant of £7,362 was given to the Centre For Good Relations, which has been running workshops with council officials on `civic diplomacy'…"raising awareness of how issues become conflicted, and how positive actions to address disputes and conflicts are part of the repertoire of interventions available at local level". In light of recent events in Salford maybe they should go back to the drawing board…

The now folded `Beautiful, vibrant etc' Central Salford URC (see here) got a final pay off of £25,000 for consultancy/contract work, although most of the staff have been transferred to Salford Council. And Miller Homes, which was supposed to start work on actually building some houses in Charlestown ages ago, got £57,406 in `external fees' and `consultancy'.

On the fabulous `giving Salford's community a voice' front, the Manc run People's Voice (Who? See here) received more handouts totalling £14,628.
And the Salford based Salford City Radio got £15,207, while the Leeds based Radiowaves project got £16,450.

External Marketing and PR was still a huge Salford Council spend, despite having an in-house marketing and PR department and Life magazine… Twelve external companies picked up over £66,000 between them, including £19,343 spent by Children's Services with MEN Media, presumably on advertising.

Over at Salford Quays the funding continued to flow…The Lowry got £6000 for rent, on top of £90,777 in `professional fees; the Digital World Centre, home of Salford URC received two payments of £1,242 for `car park/rent'…

…And the Ear To The Ground (ETTG) company which specialises in `live events strategies' has done, er, a live events strategy for MediaCityUK. If this is what Salford Council commissioned ETTG to do, the payments totalling a whopping £88,540 seem very odd because Peel Media, which owns the site, is claiming ETTG as its own partner.

Media City spokesman Paul Newman publicly announced that "Ear To The Ground's track record in implementing and delivering major events and live communication strategies throughout Europe makes them the ideal partner to map out and explore the event potential of MediaCityUK…" We do hope this isn't Salford tax payers subsidising Peel Holdings…

Peel Media, meanwhile, got three ghost payments in March for Capital Grants. The expenditure grids, strangely, don't show how much they were for – there's just a load of #### signs.

It was the same for Countryside Properties which received two ghost loans in March worth some more #### signs...

And finally, Ipsos Mori got yet another payment, this time for £8,476 - for its ongoing opinion polls on the popularity of Salford Council…

See Council Expenditure for February click here

See Council Expenditure for January click here

See Council Expenditure for Dec 2010 click here

Click here to see full list of Salford Council expenditure over £500 for March
 

Image by Jorge El Capiduck