A picture is emerging at the moment of complete incompetence by our local Councillors or maybe it is more in the staff.

It looks as though almost £1,000,000 has been spent on trying to ‘save’ money by allowing private firms to carry out the IT functions of the Borough Council. Apparently the stumbling block that the ‘preferred’ company did not want to take responsibility if the system did not actually work.

The local press suggests that this condition was requested by one of the scrutiny committees. On another page the leader of the Council defending the ‘new’ cabinet system says ‘portfolio holders and officers iron out a lot of problems in certain issues before they get into the public domain’. REALLY!

When I was on the Council some seven years ago, I spent about three days a week dealing with Council business - and I was just one of two Independents (who really are even lower than the Lib-Dems!), so perhaps if Councillors actually were allowed to earn a decent salary to spend more time working on our behalf, this money would at least not be wasted so easily.

OK, so it means you have a job for just four years and perhaps not all members would want to give up their day job, but the system obviously needs a form of performance to enable things to get done.

At the moment, the officers really do have a ‘job for life’ (complete with one of the best pensions available anywhere), whereas Councillors have to ‘renew’ their job every four years - but it is the actions of officers which count as Councillors frequently do not have the time to attend to the detail involved. Indeed, many London Boroughs actually pay their Councillors enough to deal with the day to day matters (maybe well - maybe poorly!), so perhaps it would be worth spending, say, a million pounds to pay the 52 elected members an average of £15,0000 per year so that the event which I alluded to at the beginning is unlikely to happen and if it did, you know exactly where the blame lies.

Meanwhile, we are all waiting with bated breath to find out how well the County Council lives up to their ‘Charter Mark’ which includes things like street lights will be repaired within five days. Hmmmmm.

As you all know, they took over back a lot of ‘devolved’ functions on 1st October 2002 (including street lighting and highways) and results so far have been variable to say the least. Once again, I bet they do not know the extent of the problem and they run out of money within weeks and the Charter Mark will not be worth the paper it is printed on.

One day, politicians will actually have to tell the truth, the whole truth and (almost) nothing but the truth. They may be pleasantly surprised to know that the rest of us live in the real world and accept that life is not perfect.