Spend, Spend, Spend

It was years ago that a pools winner coined the phrase ‘spend, spend, spend’ to describe what she did. And soon she was back were she started – with little or nothing.

The advertising budget of the Labour/Liberal-Democrat Executive might suggest that they’ve won the pools as well. In the three years since they were elected their spending has gone from £1.6 million a year to over £6 million.

So I have been asking whether we get value for money. Firstly they told me it would be too expensive to even consider giving out information about their many campaigns.

I tried again and invited them to choose any one of their campaigns and tell us about it. And on Friday they finally did.

The advertising they have given us information on was “Foolspeed”. It is targetted at getting us all to stop speeding on our roads.

Well with our twisty, single carriageway roads carrying a large volume of mixed traffic – slow farm vehicles, large lorries, faster moving cars – our accident record certainly suggests that this is a campaign that we should support.

But do expensive TV adverts actually make a difference?

The evidence suggest perhaps not. It seems that even the evaluators did not think that this kind of advertising was effective. Less than a third of people asked could recall the adverts.

And this from the Scottish Executive who have now spent themselves into being the biggest advertiser in Scotland.

Ministers have been chanting ‘spend, spend, spend’ with our money for rather too long methinks.

Fifty Not Out

At the end of this week it will be 500 days since I was elected to Parliament. And last week saw me speak in my fiftieth debate. It was time a for wider look at the work of the Parliament.

One of the mistaken impressions left with electors is that we all sit in Edinburgh voting as our whips tells us. And that could suggest that we are not allowed to think through the consequences of our actions.

I have been looking at some of the statistics and a very different picture emerges.

In the Justice Committee of which I am one of seven members, we have been undertaking detailed consideration of the Land Reform Bill.

Over the last eight parliamentary committee days of debate, we have had sixty votes on proposed amendments to the Bill. A fair number are withdrawn after the government made a commitment to bring forward further changes.

With their access to lawyers to assist with drafting sometimes complex law, that’s fair enough.

I have tabled nearly fifty amendments so far but we’ve voted only a minority of them.

It seems that on 13 our of sixty votes, the three Labour members voted in different ways. And my SNP colleague and I diverged on 7 occasions.

So if my 500 days since joining the Parliament have shown me anything, it is that we are there to think, not just to “do as we are told”.