8:10am Thursday 9th September 2010
SIR – The long-running saga over the Worcester City Council’s farcical roundabout ads says a lot about how our local government is run.
The council has ended up threatening to sue itself over failures to its ad campaign. It almost defies belief.
Knowing the way local government works and looking at the small amounts of money the council has received from the advertisements I bet they have cost more money than they have raised.
Even if they had achieved their target of £60,000 it would be a small sum. How many staff were involved and at what cost? Enough to account for a large chunk of the £60,000, I imagine.
But the council hasn’t even made half the target. In reality, the real point of the adverts was job creation and publicity for the council, not the stated aim of raising money for frontline services.
At the same time, the county council is wasting millions of pounds and causing massive inconvenience to the public with the ridiculous Newtown Road bus lane scheme. This project was never going to make bus travel and general traffic in the area any better and the service is actually being reduced for lack of demand.
Our councils’ failures would almost be funny but they are actually disturbing. The state of some of our roads is potentially lethal, yet the councils waste money on irrelevant schemes and fails to do the things we pay it for.
Steve Davis, Worcester
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