A witness to local authorities’ wilful wastefulness and procrastination

SIR – Isabel Oakeshott is lucky that she has only been waiting a year for a local road to be fixed (“Feckless councils are ripping taxpayers off”, Comment, September 4). 

In August 2020 we asked the authorities in Suffolk to install about 35 yards of double-yellow lines in a stretch of street outside our house. Despite unanimous support from the local residents, and the town and county councils, the work has still not been done. 

Instead, it has been held up by surveys, planning applications and our local councillor’s earnest explanations of budgetary constraints. All this “work” makes the authorities look busy, but here on the ground we see it for what it is: officially sanctioned procrastination, prevarication and waste.

If it takes three years (and counting) to paint two yellow lines on a road, no wonder so little seems to get done.

Timothy Martin
Nayland, Suffolk

SIR – In October 2022 Oxfordshire County Council proudly announced a new Oxford park-and-ride car park at Eynsham, some 10 miles from the city centre. The scheme will provide parking for up to 850 cars, and a roadside sign predicts “completion by late 2025”.

How on earth can it take three years to build a car park, when a 57-storey skyscraper in Changsha in China was completed in 19 days?

Mike Bridgman
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

SIR – I worked for four different local authorities and have to agree with Ms Oakeshott. However, given my experience, I can add that the fault lies not only with the local councils but also with the system itself. 

Local “politicians” are not required to have any particular qualifications, being in effect volunteers on expenses. This enables incompetent councillors to make important decisions. However, more than that, the leader of a council ensures that all ruling members follow a party line, thereby putting politics before sound management. 

That is why so little gets done – at great expense and to a mediocre standard. It’s the system that needs to change and the politics that need to be erased.

Peter Taylor
Tipton St John, Devon

SIR – South Cambridgeshire District Council, which is planning to allow its refuse collectors to work a four-day week, says: “We can’t just keep adding more and more homes on to existing bin rounds” (report, September 5). Surely the answer, then, is to source more vehicles and employ more bin men. 

Admittedly that would involve paying people to work rather than paying them not to work – anathema to this council, apparently.

Neil Bunyan
Flitwick, Bedfordshire