REGIONAL Development Agency One North East has defended its decision to spend £240,000 on a team to read newspapers.

The organisation was accused of wasting taxpayers’ money by hiring the media monitoring team to check news coverage of the agency by newspapers and websites.

The RDA is looking to employ an external company to “assist in the effective monitoring and evaluation of all PR activity”, according to a job description placed on its website.

The advertisement says the team will prove “the value of the PR team to the directors and board”.

Stacy Hall, One North East director of communications and tourism, said the work “could not be monitored cost effectively from within One North East”.

“The scope of our role at One North East means we are responsible for promoting the region both locally, nationally and internationally,”

she said.

“We are trying to spread the region’s image across the globe into countries like Australia and New Zealand through the Passionate people, Passionate places campaign, to attract more tourists to visit the North-East.

“It is vitally important that we are able to monitor what our spend in these markets is achieving as well as our investments into economic regeneration in the North-East.

“We have issued the tender over a three-year period to keep costs down, placing a cap on the amount that can be spent on this service. We don’t envisage spending all of the tender amount.

“As a publicly-funded organisation, we are committed to informing taxpayers how we are investing our budget in the most cost-effective way.

“The media play a key role in this and we need to monitor this coverage to demonstrate the effectiveness of our work.”

But critics remained angry at the decision to spend taxpayers’ money on public relations while the region suffered from the effects of the recession.

Conservative MP Alan Duncan, the Shadow Minister for Tyneside, said he thought the new contract was “nothing short of wasteful”, and branded the move “obscene”.

“It is an affront to people all over the region who are either losing their job or looking to see how safe their job is,” he said.

“One person hired at say £30,000-ayear could do this job to the level they needed, given that they are in effect an unelected arm of the Government.

But to do it for nearly ten times that amount shows they have lost any sense of perception.”