FOI - Marketing and communications [Nov 2025]

Your request 

Please can you tell me how much the authority has spent on combined marketing and communications over the past 12 months?

In cases where the authority is less than 12 months old, these figures can be for the lifetime of the authority so far. In cases where it is older, please provide figures for the last five years.

Please break these figures down for spending on external 1) photographers, 2) videographers, 3) social media and 4) directors.

Please also tell me the three highest paid members of the authority's communications and marketing team along with their titles.

Please tell me the salary of your director of communications or equivalent?

Our response 

I can confirm that the GLA holds information within the scope of your request.

The GLA has a responsibility to keep Londoners informed and engaged in the work of the Mayor of London and the London Assembly. This includes, for example, activity to inform Londoners about People’s Question Time events and encourage them to register to attend, or to encourage Londoners to take part in statutory public consultations. In any given year, we also run cost effective, multi-channel campaigns to ensure Londoners receive information about their top concerns. This includes, but is not limited to, support through the cost-of-living crisis, supporting rough sleepers, tackling violence against women and girls, and violence affecting young people.

This spend is part of the GLA’s annual Central Marketing Budget (CMB) which is published on the GLA website (MD3410 GLA Marketing Budget 2025-26 | London City Hall) and has remained constant at £1,000,000 per year since 2017/18, with small fluctuation (reduced to £700k per year) in 2021/22 and 2022/23 due to the pandemic. In addition, some policy teams across the GLA hold additional budget for marketing and communications relating to specific policy requirements or statutory responsibilities, which are interwoven into their programme delivery. For example, public consultation advertising, public information campaigns to democratically participate in elections backed by the GLA and the London Assembly, which has no involvement from the Mayor of Mayor’s office, and one-off campaigns to support emerging challenges like post-Covid tourism/economic recovery, which run separately.   

Details of senior staff and salaries are published on the GLA website (Senior staff | London City Hall; The Mayor and his team | London City Hall).

Unfortunately, to provide the information you have requested on the breakdown of spend for parts 1 and 2 of your request, would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

Under section 12 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to comply with a request if the cost of determining whether we hold the information, locating and retrieving it and extracting it from other information would exceed the appropriate limit.  This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described and equates to 18 hours of work.

Based on the estimated time it would take to collate this information, it would significantly exceed the limit to provide a full response to your request.

We have therefore refused this part of your request under the cost limit provisions of section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act and this email constitutes a refusal notice under section 17(1) of the Act.

To bring the cost of responding to your request to within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider narrowing the scope of your request so that we can more easily provide the information you are seeking. For example, by providing a more defined subject matter – for example, costs associated with a particular campaign that you are interested in so that we can target our searches accordingly

Although not broken down in the format you have requested, you may be interested to know that the GLA publishes all expenditure over £250.00 here: Our spending | London City Hall - this includes payments to an organisation or individual for goods and services.