The Department of Communications That Cannot Explain How It Communicates

Birmingham City Council employs six press officers and logs thousands of enquiries, yet says it cannot show how many it answers, how quickly it responds or what standards apply.

There are some occupations in which keeping records is probably advisable. Air traffic controllers generally make a note of where they have sent the aeroplanes. Banks tend to remember who deposited the money. Hospitals usually record which patient has received which operation, rather than relying upon somebody remembering that Mrs Jones definitely arrived with two kidneys. I had also assumed that the communications department of Britain’s largest local authority might keep a reasonably firm grip upon its communications. It appears I may have been asking too much.

Birmingham City Council has answered a Freedom of Information request about its press office, and the result reads like an administrative comedy written by people who do not realise they are appearing in it. Between 1 January 2024 and 29 June 2026, the Council received 3,257 media enquiries. Those enquiries were logged on the Vuelio media monitoring and public relations system. Six full-time press office posts were employed throughout the period, consisting of a Press and PR Manager, four Communications Executives and a Press and PR Officer. Staffing costs ranged from £237,000 to £337,000 a year, with another £88,000 recorded during the opening part of the current financial year. The Council identifies Eleri Roberts as the Strategic Director responsible for the function, while political responsibility rests with the Leader.

That Leader is Councillor Roger Harmer, the Liberal Democrat councillor for Acocks Green who was elected Leader of Birmingham City Council in June. This means the ultimate political responsibility for the communications operation now lands upon his desk, presumably somewhere between the bins, the commissioners, the finances and the dozen other unexploded devices bequeathed to the new administration.

So far, everything sounds reassuringly organised. Thousands of enquiries, six members of staff, specialist computer software, a Strategic Director and a Council Leader sitting at the top of the arrangement. It has all the outward appearance of a functioning communications operation. Then one asks the rather vulgar question of what happened to those 3,257 enquiries, and the beautifully decorated civic carriage immediately loses all four wheels.

The Council does not hold information showing how many enquiries received a substantive answer. It does not know how many received only an acknowledgement or holding response. It does not know how many received no response at all. It holds no average response time and no record of the longest time taken to provide a substantive answer. It says it holds no written workflow or internal procedure governing how enquiries are logged, allocated, escalated, answered, declined or simply left unanswered. There is no recorded target response time, no service standard, no performance report and no management information concerning response times or unanswered enquiries.

This is not merely the absence of a glossy booklet entitled How We Talk to the Press. The Council also says it holds no written guidance on when media enquiries should be referred to councillors, cabinet members, political offices, the Chief Executive, senior directors, statutory officers or government commissioners. It holds no guidance on whether officers may suggest wording to elected members, no guidance on whether an enquiry can be declined because it is politically sensitive, and no separate guidance governing the treatment of newspaper journalists, broadcasters, freelancers, bloggers, citizen journalists, Substack writers or former columnists. It also says it holds no reports, audits, reviews, complaints or lessons-learned exercises concerning the performance of the press office since January 2024.

Perhaps the press office is magnificent. Perhaps its members rise before dawn, answer every journalist within minutes and spend their lunchtimes helping visiting industrialists understand why Birmingham is the finest place on Earth in which to invest. Perhaps Eleri Roberts presides over a communications machine of such dazzling efficiency that other councils gather outside the Council House merely hoping to hear it hum. I would be delighted if this were true. The difficulty is that the Council’s own answer supplies no evidence by which anyone, including its own management, could establish that it is true.

At the opposite end of the possibilities, the entire team might spend its days reading newspapers with its feet on the desk, carefully clipping money-off coupons and waiting for the next photograph of a councillor opening a cucumber-sandwich event at which the crusts have already been removed. I do not suggest for one moment that this is what happens. The point is that, based upon the information the Council says it holds, its leadership would struggle to prove it does not. I hope that any coupons collected are at least being used responsibly.

A press office is not a decorative civic parlour that exists only to circulate cheerful pictures, promote awards and announce that something marvellous has happened near a ribbon. It is the front door of the Council. Journalists approach it with questions on behalf of the public, but the people knocking may also include national broadcasters, international newspapers, businesses examining Birmingham as a place to invest and organisations trying to understand whether the city is competently governed. Some enquiries will be trivial. Others may concern matters of enormous public, financial or reputational importance. A system that records an enquiry but apparently does not record clearly whether it was answered is rather like a fire station recording the telephone call but not whether anybody sent the engine.

There is also the practical issue of responsibility. Who owns an enquiry once it enters Vuelio? Who is dealing with it? Which department has been asked to contribute? Has a holding answer been sent? Is a deadline approaching? What happens when the officer dealing with it goes off sick, takes leave or leaves the Council? A communications system should allow somebody else to pick up the file and immediately see what has happened. Yet the Council’s response provides no assurance that outcomes and response times are being consistently captured, monitored or reported.

The absence of performance information also creates a wonderfully comfortable world for everybody involved. Nobody can be accused of answering too slowly if response times are not measured. Nobody can be challenged over unanswered enquiries if unanswered enquiries are not counted. Nobody can be judged against a service standard if no service standard exists. It is accountability by disappearance: the fewer things one records, the fewer awkward things there are for management to discover.

That now presents Cllr Roger Harmer with a straightforward test. He does not need a commission, an expensive consultant, a citizens’ jury or a three-year transformation programme decorated with arrows and coloured boxes. He needs to ask Eleri Roberts for a clear account of how the office works, what Vuelio records, who owns each enquiry, what standards staff are expected to meet, how many questions are answered and how many quietly fall through the floorboards. If the information already exists, it should be published. If it does not exist, the political leader responsible for the function should require it to exist.

I have submitted a further Freedom of Information request seeking the fields held within Vuelio, its status categories, reporting facilities, response data, audit trails and management arrangements. It may reveal that the first answer was incomplete and that an impressive internal system has been quietly operating all along. Nobody would be happier than me to discover Birmingham has the most industrious communications office in the country.

Until then, we are left with a communications department that can count the questions arriving at its front door but apparently cannot tell the public how many were answered before somebody turned out the lights. For an organisation devoted to communication, that is quite a message to communicate.