"Put your house in order" auditors tell Wiltshire Council

8.24.00am GMT Sun 20th Dec 2009

...adequate...

Any report about yet another inspection of local services by government quangocrats need to be prefaced by the health warning that these inspectors understand the price of what they're looking at but not the value. They are obsessed by performance indicators, averages and percentages but have only superficial knowledge of the human stories behind them. They act as parasites, and we would as a nation be better off without them, at least in the vast numbers in which they currently exist.

But having said that they do exist and we may as well look at the reports they produce on our organisations.

Wiltshire Council's Organisational Assessment is part of the Comprehensive Area Assessment produced under the auspices of the Audit Commission.

The council is given 2 marks out of 4 overall and is classed as "an organisation that meets only minimum requirements."

The auditors pick up on problems in the housing service. The root cause of these is that housing was a district council function and the county council doesn't understand it. Staff have moved in from the old councils, but with quite radical differences in the way they worked previously they haven't exactly hit the ground running under the new regime.

Primary Schools are also seen as a problem by the inspectors. This is because the government sees education as an industrial process and small village schools in rural areas are less productive than bigger units. If the government and their lackeys in the inspectorate saw the purpose of education as the production of intelligent and sane citizens then they would take a different view. In their words "A high proportion of primary schools are no better than satisfactory and a small number is inadequate." However they do accept that "most children make a good start in life."

The council is criticised for not maintaining the roads. "The number of main roads needing repairs has increased slightly this year." They point to weather and costs as the reason for this without noticing that other councils have weather and costs but still manage to keep their roads in reasonable condition.

Wiltshire Council is also slammed for ignoring climate change. Politically, the Conservative administration has taken the view that if they sign up to the various declarations on climate change nobody will notice that they're not actually doing anything about the problem. "Vote Blue get a kind of messy green fudge," is their slogan. The Tory backbenchers don't believe in man-made climate change. The leadership at least realises the electoral necessity to recognise the threat even if they don't fully recognise the threat itself.

"The percentage of people in Wiltshire who feel they can influence decisions locally is ... almost 32%" You might think that figure was a savage condemnation of the state of our democracy, with 68% feeling they're out of the loop. But so low have we gone that this 32% is actually seen as a good figure. It's described by the inspectors as "High....above the national and South West Averages (sic) ... above the average compared with similar councils."

If you want to read the full report you can find it within www.oneplace.direct.gov.uk