Cheshire councils to axe 70 IT jobs

And of course they're a bit light on funds...

When they moved council tax collection to the two split authorities, they managed not to collect two months direct debits from at least 1/4 of their council tax payers and then didn't notice their mistake for around 5 months.

Cue phone calls from staff offering to clear the arrears by doubling payments, and no, there was no room for negotiation of extension. Their incompetence was magically re-named your debt and they threatened action to recover it.

Only after three (count 'em) levels of escalation did they grudgingly offer to spread the outstanding balance over the two non-collection months - very generous.

Just goes to show... I the private sector if you f*ck up a customers account you apologise and correct the error. In the public sector you f*ck up the account just the same but threaten a CCJ and bailiffs as recompense.

As you can see I'm a bitter bitter (council tax paying) man. ;-)

Not a Unitary

Cheshire wasn't a unitary a few years ago; it was a the standard County Council/District Council with 1 Council responsible for things like Highways, Schools and Social Services and then 6 District Councils who dealt with Planning, Street Cleaning etc.

During the last round of Local Government Review the County Council proposed a single Unitary for the whole council and the Districts proposed the East/West split. As the Districts started adding up the figures they changed their mind and swapped to supporting the status quo, it was too late however and the Government opted for the 2 Councils option. One could argue that the Labour government at the time rather hoped that by splitting the County that way they could gain one of them (in the end both halves went Conservative in the local elections).

The best option financially was a single Unitary, however due to Cheshire's demographics there was really only one colour of council it was going to elect and it wasn't the same colour as the government making the decision. Surely however, that's just tinfoil hattery.

I think it must be unmanageable at it's size then...

... because, living in one of those old Labour run areas, service to end users has absolutely fallen off a cliff.

But I guess we need to pay for all that window dressing in Macc and the very east of the county somehow...