Treasure Island

This week's blog effort is a semi-serious one brought on by the arrival of this beautiful little traffic island at the end of Albert Street in Harrogate.  When I asked North Yorkshire County Council what the hell it was via Twitter they laughingly replied " Crossing put in to improve pedestrian crossing manoeuvres at location; funded thru area-specific highway improvement funds"!  Presumably this means it helps elderly and handicapped people by providing a refuge.  Why say something in 3 words when you can use 17?

The island is lovely don't you think? But look at where they built it - right in the middle of a traffic lane and they've not been arsed to sort out the road markings yet. The question is - will it be two narrower lanes or just one, thus causing traffic to back up Albert Street as is already evident?  They really are muppets.

Anyway, when the island was under construction (it took almost 5 weeks by the way!), I rang Harrogate Borough Council about it as I thought it had all the hallmarks of their logic and tomfoolery about it.  They referred me to North Yorkshire County Council with whom I've had several spats recently about wasting money and providing shit service to those who fund it.  I've had this a few times recently - being passed from pillar to post to find things out about councils so I have done a bit of research and in our lovely county there are no fewer than 8 district councils, and the mightily ineffective North Yorkshire County Council.  The District Councils are

• Craven District Council
• Hambleton District Council
• Harrogate Borough Council
• Richmondshire District Council
• Ryedale District Council
• Scarborough Borough Council
• Selby District Council
• York City Council

Now, all of these have expensive to run offices, often multi-sited and of course NYCC have a huge office in Northallerton and other premises in most NY towns.

I really fail to see why we need 2 tiers of local government and all the massive costs they bring - surely it is now time to have one council per county and ditch this huge cost - much of which is funded by us!

And while we're at it, there are something like 53 different police forces in the UK, again all with expensive head offices, all with 53 HR, Finance. Training and Admin functions, all doing the same thing but in splendid isolation and at great cost to the tax payer.  Why not have ONE national police force with a north and south regional office set-up and let's bank the savings for something useful.

No private sector business that I know of has such a ridiculous structure as local councils and the police.  The ambulance service went some way towards this a few years ago and consolidated the individual county services into regional ones.  Judging by the number of ambulances flying around Harrogate it all seems to work so why can't councils and the police now take this lead?

I hate to see waste on this scale - every business I know is driving so hard to take cost out of their operations yet local government simply sails on using the same old fat structure that it has used for hundreds of years - time for a change I think?

Anyway, why did the chicken perform a pedestrian crossing manoeuvre?  Answers on a postcard to North Yorkshire County Council please