We're not shit, honest!

Firstly let us apologise for not posting for so long. First there was Easter and then we had a minor catastrophe in our office involving a fuse box and daisy-chained plug extension. We've now sacked the pimply faced youth we were employing and replaced him with bag of frozen peas. The team felt the peas would be more useful.

Now that we have the apologies over with, we did laugh heartily at Council's spin on their report/letter from the Audit Commission. "Greenwich Council’s finances 'improving well'" it says, and then tub-thumps about how they keep the books so well. We're subjected to the leader of the Council, Chris Roberts, telling us that the letters shows the Council are "prudent" in "handling our public finances" and that the report is "positive about the council’s abilities to manage its finances, both currently and into the future". What the press release doesn't mention is that the report actually said some very negative things too.

Greenwich is shit at culture; it's shit at education; it's shit at housing; it's shit at social care. It's really good at giving the shits in power pay rises, and it's really good at not spending money properly on us shits. The shit, by far, out weighs the non-shit in the letter. We're shittier than a shitty stick stuck on a shitty park that covered in litter and..... shit.

We shouldn't forget of course that the "direction of travel" in improvement is going the right way. We also shouldn't forget that there is no reverse in the scoring scheme. A Council cannot not "improve" anyway. There is only one direction that Audit Commission can say a Council is going in. Yes, the Audit Commission is independent, but the rules under which it operates are nonsense. Hence we have a report where the Council gets shittier in numerous areas and is still scored as "improving well".

Should people wish to read the letter then it can be downloaded for FREE here. Alternatively people could PAY Greenwich Councils' Finance Director £10 for a copy of the 14 pages to printed out and posted to you. That's just over a pound a page - is it any wonder they scored well on finance? First they bleed us dry with their salaries for doing sod all; then they charge us a tenner to print out a letter.