Andy, you ask:

“Does this mean that councils are inept at running things?”

The answer is, in short, yes.

Councils rarely do anything strategically, often with different departments actively working against each other in order to achieve their own narrow objectives. They often require layers of supervisors, managers and directors in order to ensure noone ever has their job description changed as operational needs evolve: that would be risking the wrath of the unions.

While the truth of adding the extra layer of outgoings in the form of profits is undeniable, this is always likely to be less onerous than the layer upon layer of waste to be found in council halls.

Incompetents “promoted” out of the way or paid off with massive golden goodbyes only to take up another post somewhere else in the same organisation are the accepted order of business within councils. Bringing in consultants from private firms, with all of the costs of paying dividends goes on all the time now: after all it would be wrong of us to expect council workers to get their hands dirty or actually engage in life long learning to ensure their skills match requirements once again risks backlash from the unions with the attitude that “He/she has done this job for decades, why should he\she now have to learn something new just because the job is unrecognisable from when he/she was hired” Much better in the eyes of Unison to make that person a manager and give them the budget to hire outside people to do the job for them.

If we are to be able to trust councils with our money then first of all the public sector unions need to be neutered. They do not serve the interests of the people, as they have been so gallingly claiming of late. They often dont even represent the interests of their members, only the political ambitions of the senior “brothers”.

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@ Andy Chetwood…
You have two structured, rational, factual answers to your polemical, emotive and wandering letter. Next time you feel like declaiming, please try to follow a line of argument and get you facts checked. For a start, you may have bothered to compare the inflation-adjusted customer charges of the nationalised industries with the much cheaper provision of their privatised successors (rail being the only exception). And in the spirit of your polemical questions, ‘Would you really want the Post Office running the internet in the UK?’ I didn’t think so.

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