DWP spent £1m on search engine 'biasing' in single year
Civil servants throw cash at Google and friends
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The Department for Work and Pensions has spent more than £1.1m on search engine biasing over the last four years.
In a parliamentary written answer, work and pensions minister Chris Grayling revealed that the highest recorded costs were for 2009-10, when his department spent £956,000 on search engine biasing.
The figure for the previous year was £176,000. In 2007-08 and 2006-07 only £2,500 and £5,100 was spent respectively.
Grayling said the figures represented the total cost of DWP search engine biasing work. This includes spend on 'pay per click' and 'paid for' search terms.
Search engine optimisation is carried out by the department's own in-house communication teams.
Individual figures for Google and other search engine providers were not available, and extracting them would result in a "disproportionate" cost, Grayling said.
"The current cross-government policy of freezing all paid for marketing and advertising has suspended spend on this type of paid for search term until further notice," he added.
He also disclosed that the DWP is working with the Cabinet Office to implement a standardised method for quantifying website costs across the department's agencies and non-departmental public bodies.
The action comes in response a Public Accounts Committee recommendation. The costs will be available from April 2011 onwards.
This article was originally published at Kable.
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COMMENTS
Nuts
Let's assume the average wage in the UK is 25K - not sure what it really is, must be about that.
Let's use an online income tax calculator to find that's about £5800 per year. This is a simple example so we're not including all the other taxes that the average citizen pays, such as VAT, Road tax yadda yadda.
£1,100,000 / 5800 = 190 normal joes working their godforsaken soul crushing 9-5 jobs every year just to have their tax spent on one government department bumping it's name up search engine rankings? Not exactly a great use of that cash is it?
Mental. The people holding the purse strings clearly had no respect at all for us. Every one of those 190 normal joes could have done a lot with that 5 grand.
Why do they need Marketing?
It's not like there is any competition.
Labour's wasteful self-stimulation
These revelations simply demonstrate a complete disregard for the tax payer, an arrogance that simply highlights their mealy-mouthed speeches and how false their claims to be looking after the less fortunate in society were.
No tax money should be used to shape opinion and all publicly funded opinion poles should be published with 3o days of their completion.
Few endeavours such as this can be achieved at a lower cost by using civil servants.
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