Call to action for residents of Looe regarding ITV coverage

Looe Town Council have received a number of complaints from residents regarding the ITV West Country coverage of the road closure of Sandplace Road on Thursday 8th of July. We believe that this coverage was highly misleading and incredibly damaging to the residents of Sandplace Road and broaches professional journalistic standards.

We will be contacting ITV and professional standards bodies for the following reasons:

Looe Town Council were not consulted or asked to comment by ITV at any time.
Continual references to ‘the Council’ were extremely confusing as the broadcasters were actually referring to Cornwall Council rather than Looe Town Council.
The ‘resident’ who was asked to comment was a Mr Elio Rossi was renting a property in the area for 1 week and resides in Essex.
Cllr Armand Toms (who is also a Looe Town Council member), was asked to comment on behalf of Cornwall Council in his capacity as Cornwall Councillor for Looe East & Deviock and was completely unaware that ITV had based their report on a historical tragedy for the Town to ‘sensationalise’ the story. He is extremely disappointed that his footage was used in this way as his comments were clearly restricted to only the matter of the currently leaning wall.

Looe Town Council are in contact with the owners of the premises and with Cornwall Council and are working with both to ensure a early resolution to the immediate situation.

On behalf of Looe Town Council I have instructed our Clerk to write a official letter of complaint to ITV asking for a formal apology. We shall also be reporting the coverage to OFCOM and the independent press standards organisation (IPSO), and I urge residents to do the same, details of how to contact these three organisations are below.

My thoughts and sympathies are with the individuals and families affected by the ITV report and we will keep you updated on any progress made.

To contact ITV:

ITV (UK) complaints contacts

Email Customer Services on viewerservices@itv.com.

Call Customer Services on 0344 881 4150.

Tweet @ITV (UK)

To Contact OFCOM:

0300 123 3333 – calls cost no more than calls to geographic numbers (01 or 02) and must be included in inclusive minutes and discount schemes in the same way.

To submit your complaint in writing please send it to: PO Box 1285, Warrington WA1 9GL.

Complete and online form: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/complaints/complain-about-tv-radio-a-website

To contact the IPSO

using IPSO’s online complaints form https://www.ipso.co.uk/complain/complaints-form/

by email at inquiries@ipso.co.uk,

or by writing to IPSO at the following address:

Independent Press Standards Organisation

Gate House

1 Farringdon Street

London

EC4M 7LG

Cllr Martin Gregory