COUNCIL OPINION

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POWER AND INFLUENCE
It is abundantly clear that the power and influence within Derby City Council rests with the paid officers, not the elected councillors. The city planners are paid to plan and it is not surprising that they come up with schemes that are likely to attract finance, whether private or from the Government, to the "benefit" of our city.

When the planners recommend their financially beneficial plans to the elected councillors on the planning committee, no doubt they are going to have great difficulty in rejecting them. The planners are their source of professional advice and it must be nigh-on impossible to reject apparently lucrative proposals.

Unfortunately, nowhere in this planning approval process is there any consideration of whether the people of Derby are generally supportive of their proposals. Even when public "consultations" are held, massive public objections are ignored and only statistics in support of their presented "options" are given publicity. Do they think no-one notices?

Issues such as St Helen's House, the Inner Ring Road, the Aslin bus station and Quad show how out of touch the decision-makers are with the public of Derby. So we were told that the public preferred option for Quad agreed exactly with that of the council? This despite continued protests over the quality of the designs presented and the inadequacy of the consultation.

Now we are told there was a fatal flaw in the funding and the planned design must be shelved. How much money was wasted in this fruitless proposal and pretence of a consultation? Who will pay for it? No surprises there. It's not the council committees that need a shake-up, it's the undemocratic bureaucracy of the unelected, unanswerable and seemingly unstoppable council officers. Chris Woodward

COUNCIL A DISGRACE
I wonder how many of the people who make up Derby City Council are actually Derby or county born and bred? You'd think none of them are, the way they carry on. They seem to be hell-bent on a course of destruction and desecration. Derby has an absolutely disgraceful record with regard to heritage, planning and conservation. Over the last 60 years we've lost the Mayor's Parlour, St Alkmund's Church and our jewel of a railway station.

We've lost our open-air markets, our mainsteam city-centre cinemas and our pubs have had all manner of ridiculous, so-called "refurbishments" and name changes inflicted upon them. Now Derby bus station. Why? The bus station is in a prime position and there's nothing wrong with it that spending some money won't sort out. There are waiting rooms, toilet and washing facilities and space for a cafe. What's the problem? Get your wallet out, Derby City Council.

Try spending some money on restoration instead of demolition for a change. I can't believe that the plans for the Riverlights development and the Roundhouse site include bars and restaurants. Just how many more does Derby need? The entire city-centre is in danger of becoming an "eating out" theme park as it is. The council is intent on making an ugly town uglier still. Lisa Howe

WASTING MONEY
The subject of blundering local authority staff has cropped up again, this time over those traffic surveys. It could also be about speed humps, the Five Lamps traffic lights and the closure of nursery schools. What puzzles me is how the people making these decisions actually get their positions in the first place and then how they manage to keep those positions. Councillors won votes on the promise of removing speed humps, then commissioned yet more surveys, at great expense, to find out what we already knew - that the speed humps weren't wanted. The council found this out right at the start of this saga but put the speed humps in anyway.

And they've still not all been removed! We have seen plans of alternative ways of improving traffic flow at Five Lamps, along with the statement that the traffic lights will not be removed. This is in spite of the fact that the lights are hugely unpopular and, to anyone with even a smidgen of common sense, the only way to improve traffic flow and stop the increasing number of traffic accidents is to get rid of them. In the early days of the plans for the superhospital, consultants were paid to come up with the stunning observation that, if you merge hospitals, you need fewer managers!

It cost more than £60,000 to find out what virtually anybody in the street could tell you within seconds of being asked. And this was only the initial consultation out of many, so it is no wonder that we can't afford enough nurses and hospital beds. These are just a few examples, and I speak from experience as I have worked with various local authority departments, as well as being one of their suppliers. Tony Blair keeps boasting of how much extra money is going into local services, yet we see very little improvement. He doesn't seem to have realised that, if you give money to the people who have wasted it in the past, then it will keep on being wasted.

The biggest frustration is that I have had management experience with a multi-national organisation, a successful sales career and spells as a manager, but am currently driving trucks at about £5 an hour. Despite my success, experience and capabilities, I have to watch people making an absolute foul-up of jobs I could do standing on my head. I even applied for a job with the council dealing with traffic flow, cycle lanes and traffic lights. Ironically, the letter turning me down arrived on the Tuesday that the pretty coloured tarmac surfaces around the Five Lamps traffic lights were completed, causing worse traffic jams than in a Friday afternoon rush hour! Anon

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