The recent weather problems seem to have taken the authorities by surprise.
Just like national government tinkering with education, or the Railways or emergency services, or the Health service or changing the planning rules, or ...........

Even local government is not immune.
Borough knocks down the flagship arts centre, proposes to restrict car ownership by the back door, provide information centres by duplication, skateboard facilities for the minority and other ‘initiatives’ which never go quiet as expected.

Our Town Council thought it had found the answer to democracy slowing the decision making process. Working Parties have been a feature of our Town Council over the past 3+ years. Their guru (ex Councillor/Mayor Peter Such) put the idea of small groups being able to make decisions faster without the restriction of anyone questioning the method (Borough and National Government call this process - consultants!).
Unfortunately, the skateboard working party could now have around 10 members to represent all views, the same as a normal committee, but without the restriction of inviting members of the public, publishing agendas or minutes in the same way.
 

The government is currently pushing to provide additional airport facilities to meet a demand which may or may not occur.

This is, of course, the very same government which is looking to reduce car use because of pollution and congestion.
For some reason this logic doesn’t apply to aircraft which produce more noise and air pollution than the motor car so you can expect everyone to be provided with a small plane instead of public transport facilities.

Now why do I think you don’t believe this will happen?

It’s Christmas, so I’ll wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Healthy and Prosperous New Year.

You are going to need it, with our Council Tax due to break the £1000 per year barrier for the ‘average’ property. The Town Council will no doubt add a few bob to that figure to provide facilities few want or are already provided by others.

I wonder if they will ever accept responsibility for actually doing something for the town?

They could actually take on powers to do things in the town. Street lighting and/or street cleaning for example. I bet you wouldn’t mind paying to get these things actually done by local people as they would actually get done instead of the current ‘lip service’ to something called a Charter Mark. On the other hand after asking both the Borough and Town Council (invisible Warden dept) to fix a few potholes in the one way part of Swing Gate Lane (called the service road) and getting no action for months and months, logging onto the www.hertsdirect.org web site, produced action within a couple of days.

So perhaps our money will start to produce results. Time will tell!