Towns and cities across Britain are drowning under mountainous piles of Christmas and New Year rubbish as some homes have not had refuse collections for up to three weeks.
Well, it’s the recession, innit? Government cuts, y’know, what can we do, etc, ad infinitum.
Meanwhile…
Council bosses have been slammed for spending more than £4,000 on a two-day ‘workshop’ at an historic castle.
A group of 26 senior Conservative councillors and officers from Surrey County Council attended the away day at the 900-year-old Farnham Castle.
Opposition politicians and local residents accused them of wasting taxpayer’s money on a ‘posh jolly’.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Or cllaborating in police corruption …
See here:
link to bastardoldholborn.blogspot.co.uk
Really, really nasty.
Yup. And totally unsurprising…
But that £4k is only the visibly-invoiced tip of the iceberg of costs.
If we assume half the group to be paid officers, costing around £300 a day, then add in the usual expenses, we get around an additional £10,000 of real and opportunity cost, none of which will ever appear in council’s accounts as attributable to this ‘jolly’. Then add in some value for the elected councillors, although in most cases their true value is limited, but they’ll still want expenses.
(In a past life, I used to organise similar events for public sector groups – part of the sales-pitch was in ‘losing’ as much of the real cost as possible into such invisible budgets to help justify the event – the clients were usually the leading conspirators in this, as they understood their local budget systems best. Nothing changes).
Just to balance the books:
Our council collect alternate weeks rubbish and recycling, one collection was scheduled a day later due to Christmas. Everything else continued exactly as normal. Credit where it is due to Newcastle Under Lyme council & workers.
No credit is due – they’re just doing their job.
Any person who wants to be a politician should not be allowed to be one, local Councillors should be selected from the electoral roll at random, all employment applicants to councils should be chosen or vetted from residents and tenants committees.