Liberal Democrats' Broken Promises in Brent: Spending Taxpayers' money on Publicity

Another of Brent Liberal Democrats broken promises was the pledge to scrap the Brent Magazine and reduce the amount of Council Tax payers money spent on Council publicity in general.

This is a particularly interesting one since if Paul Lorber knew the facts in 2006, when he was promising to scrap it, he must have known that getting rid of the Brent Magazine would actually cost the taxpayer. The reason is that by at least late 2005, the Brent Magazine had a modest operating surplus from the advertising it provides. As well as the damage to the reputation of the Council for scrapping these contracts, scrapping the Magazine would also forced the taxpayer to pay for more advertising in other journals.

In fact, when the Liberal Democrats won the largest number of seats (although only the third highest number of votes) in May 2006, they put out a proposal to the other parties to reduce the number of issues rather than scrap it altogether.

Since then, they have continued publishing the Brent Magazine once a month (as under Labour). They have also increased spending on Council publicity in general to far higher levels than under Labour.