Luton Council is continuing to spend thousands with a freelance PR consultant, despite the authority having its own communications team costing the public purse £275,000 a year.
The environment and regeneration department, headed up by director Colin Chick, who masterminded the Love Luton Festival, has spent some of the £38,000 paid to Michele Smith Communications since March 2011.
Budget cuts mean around a quarter of the jobs in Mr Chick’s department – at least 200 posts – are likely to be cut over the next three years. And 100 have already been cut over the past three years in a drive to save millions of pounds.
According to a Freedom of Information request seen by the Luton News, Michele Smith was paid thousands for work on the Love Luton Festival, the Godiva Awakes event, the Luton’s Best Awards, the council’s Diamond Jubilee event, and the council’s Think Luton project.
In 2010 our sister paper, the Herald&Post, reported on how the council had paid Mrs Smith a total of £167,000 over five years.
A spokesman for the council said yesterday that its seven communications and engagement staff carried out press and public relations, internal communications, marketing, advertising and sponsorship work.
The work carried out by Mrs Smith was not put out to tender because the cost of services provided did not exceed £75,000.
The Freedom of Information response showed Mrs Smith had billed the authority for more than 400 hours of PR cover or media and event support, at £35 an hour.
Ten days of ‘general communications and market support’ cost the council £2,572 at a daily rate of £245.
The spokesman said she had carried out “specialist work, some of which is private sector funded”.
They added that Mrs Smith undertook “tasks that staff within the environment and regeneration or communications department do not have the capacity to do, such as preparing bids and applications and supporting on specialist one off-events in respect to marketing”.
Asked whether the department would continue to use a freelance PR consultant in the light of forthcoming budget savings, the spokesman said: “The council will from time to time employ either additional or specialist resource on an ad-hoc basis where this cannot be met by the existing establishment.”