Council agrees to wider advertising of housing vacancies

Cornwall Council has recently entered a new advertising contract for council and housing association vacancies. That contract is with the Western Morning News who will run the notices in their Saturday property section.

To my mind, this is far from ideal. Although the WMN is sold across Cornwall, it's not the best read paper and Saturday papers have less circulation than much of the rest of the week. I am told that the basis for this decision was cost. (There was another suggestion which would have seen the list published only in the West Briton and copies of this sold across Cornwall. Thankfully that suggestion didn't make it past first base.)

So I made two suggestions to the council which I am delighted they have will be doing both:

- First, they are planning to advertise all local properties in the One Stop Shop network. Initially, this will simply be in the form of leaflets. But the council are developing a type of estate agent advertising scheme for their shop windows and I think this is an excellent move.

- Second I asked them to make sure that the WMN property section is available in all libraries throughout the week. The only trouble is that some of Cornwall's libraries are closed on Saturdays and so they would not normally have a copy of the Saturday WMN. But the council has agreed to make sure that all libraries receive a copy of the Saturday paper and make the property listings available for the full week.

Thanks to officers for listening and agreeing on this.