COUNCIL NEWSPAPERS

ANOTHER North Yorkshire County Council free newspaper has just landed through my letterbox.

It is issued 11 times a year, and delivered by the Royal Mail to 297,000 homes in North Yorkshire. That's more than three million newspapers. Is it possibly just a bit excessive?

While it may be argued that the cost to produce and distribute, at about £500,000, may be small for a multi-million pound county council and it can be funded by shifting a £400,000 advertising budget from a couple of council departments. But, just because other councils produce one, do we all have to?

With district councils producing their own newspapers, will it not be long before councils are joined by the non-elected, publicly-funded bodies adding to the door-to-door information?

Should the spending of public money to promote a public body be welcomed? Is there a dividing line between public information and propaganda? North Yorkshire County Council is blatantly using its newspaper (paid out of our council tax) to promote the swallow-up of local councils, including Hambleton and Richmond.

If there is a case for producing information, additional to the sending out of the annual council tax bill, perhaps the local council and North Yorkshire information could be compiled into one news-sheet. - Nick Harvey, Hunmanby, near Filey, North Yorkshire.