It wuz them!

In the week when the Auditor General Jeremy Colman recommends that a "tough and effective" board needs to be put in place to sort things out in Anglesey council, which has "serious persistent problems" which affect its working through a combination of "Personality politics", based on mistrust and suspicion and problems with both officials and political arrangements, perhaps it's time to ask why Conwy Council gets such a bad press.

In almost every local Blog, Conwy comes in for criticism. Now, we're no fans of local authority control in general, partly because - since time immemorial - local councillors throughout the UK have proved to be a curious combination of empire builders, the truly inept, the staggeringly daft and the just plain thick. Partly, it must be said, this has a lot to do with the iniquitous party allegiances which cause vested interest groups to be fighting for control in councils and leaves many councillors unable to act in the best interests of those they represent. Partly, however, it has to do with the voters, who make apathy into an art form and who then moan about nothing being done.

So what's the solution? One possible idea might be to remove party politics from the game altogether. Introducing PR might be a good first step in that direction. Secondly, the voters have to wake up and realise that the better councillors around the area are often independents. Independents don't have a party machine around them and -most importantly - don't have party peer-groups telling them how wonderful they are and what line they ought to be taking. Instead they have to do what they see as genuinely best for the area.

But is the current Conwy council that bad? Is there anything they do well, for instance? Perhaps we need objectively defined Performance indicators, and perhaps we need councils to define criteria for success of any project they undertake before starting that project. That is, after all, the way the rest of the world works. Perhaps it's time to introduce it here.