Ernie Clark. Hilperton Division, Wiltshire Council.

What's the difference between Wiltshire Council and a private company?
With some of the facts now coming out of County Hall, the answer must be: If the council were a private company, we would have seen sackings or resignations by now.

Whilst the financial situation at Wiltshire Council (WC) is very worrying, I have a limited amount of sympathy with the administration due to the fact that most of the funding is decided by Westminster.Firstly, councillors were told that WC was going to cut carbon dioxide output by 10%. Great. However, councillors were then told that WC doesn't know how much CO2 it currently produces. How do we reduce an unknown quantity by 10%?

We then heard that due to the SAP (don't ask me what it stands for) computer system not working properly, WC doesn't actually know how many job vacancies it has.

Finally, we were informed that some ex-staff had received too much in redundancy payments whilst others had received too little! The Leader of WC blamed this on the Implementation Executive (IE) of the old County Council. So far so good, apart from the fact that the WC Leader was Chairman if the IE and many of the IE members now serve on the WC Cabinet!!

If these events happened in a private business you would see sackings and resignations - quite rightly so. What happens at WC - nothing, apart from trying to shovel the blame onto a now defunct organisation that had the same hands at the tiller as WC has now.