Communications and Marketing is open for enquiries from 8.45am to 5pm Monday to Thursday, and until 4.30pm on Friday. We’re closed on bank holidays.
If you’re not a journalist from an accredited media agency and have a general enquiry about council services. Then please contact us.
We advise our employees and elected members, who are directly approached by a member of the media, to not answer questions themselves. They should refer you to the Communications and Marketing team who will manage the response.
We’ll not normally comment on leaks, anonymous allegations or allegations about individual employees.
We’re open and accountable and will explain if there’s a reason why we cannot answer a specific enquiry.
We need a minimum of 24 hours to respond to an enquiry. In the interest of fair play, we ask that you give us this time. Anything we send to you has to be signed off and that can be difficult to achieve in short time frames.
How we can help each other
- Please don’t reuse any wording from online sources and attribute it as a quote from the council or the boards that we're part of. This information might not give you the context or full picture for your article. Please contact the Communications and Marketing team so we can provide you with a quote.
- Simple, factual queries will be dealt with by the Communications and Marketing team. This is without reference to other officers or Cabinet members. Our website has a lot of information on it. Please check it before you send in your enquiry.
- Provide us with as much detail as possible as early as possible and let us know what questions you want us to answer. This gives us the best chance to deal effectively with your query. The more complex or time-consuming the request, the longer we need. (If in doubt, call us at an early stage.)
- Tell us if your story changes as early as possible so we can deal with that in our response. It may be difficult to adapt to last-minute shifts in the story angle. Especially late in the day or if colleagues have already dropped other pressing work to deal with the original response.
- Tell us if your story is held or dropped. Otherwise council colleagues could be prioritising that over other work that they ought to be doing.
Out of hours enquiries
We operate an emergency out of hours service. The on-call officer is not on regular duty or based at work and therefore will not handle regular enquiries. This facility is for major or critical incidents only. So calls and email media requests sent to this address may not be answered until the next working day at 8.45am.
In the event of an emergency please call (01226) 773443 or email communications@barnsley.gov.uk. This will be redirected to the on call officer.