Medway's Council Plan

Something that was looked at during the council's Budget meeting was the Council Plan. This is one of many formerly imposed strategy documents that the then Labour government compelled councils to produce, as part of their Soviet-style bureaucracy-led non-productive style of operation.

The legal requirement for such a plan has been eradicated by the Coalition Government, along with hundreds of other such impositions; but it can still be a useful overarching "visionary" document. I understand this, despite hating avoidable bureaucracy (as I frequently made very clear at Council and Scrutiny Committee meetings during my time there), and a lean portfolio of accessible and practical strategic plans or similar can be made into a useful management tool or set of tools.

Previously, the whole idea was to feed statistics into (originally) Tony Blair's book that he always had at Prime Minister's Questions – remember that tome? It contained all the "tractor production statistics" and suchlike that had been fed in by government departments, local councils and anyone else upon whom they had imposed a duty to report regular facts and figures.

Of course, a true strategy document is not full of targets in that form, only overarching goals and desired outcomes. Medway Council's Labour members just couldn't grasp this, and claimed at last night's meeting that the Council Plan was of no value without them. It was for the Conservatives (who do pay attention to what is going on) to point out that the targets and performance statistics they seek are still there, and 9as always) are reported to Scrutiny on a quarterly basis. The only difference is that these are now the council's own performance indicators, not centrally-imposed ones.

I of course was already well aware of this fact, not only from my years as vice-chairman of the 'lead' scrutiny committee, but also since, keeping tabs as I do on that committee's activities (even though I have rarely attended the meetings after last May's local elections, mainly because of my illness just before then). It is significant that current Labour members seem universally to be unaware of this ongoing procedure, as several of them unwittingly revealed via the line they took during the debate on this agenda item.

As I noticed so often when I was on Medway Council myself, Labour members simply weren't interested in doing the job they had been elected to do, so were typically ignorant of what was going on much of the time, simply because their sole and exclusive interest was on self and party promotion.

If there had been any doubt about that, the glaring ignorance that this episode showed up is complete and unambiguous testament to what I have just described in the previous paragraph. Both their leader and deputy leader were among those making the same basic 'schoolboy error' (to use the aphorism), so it seems the entire Labour group of fifteen are completely ignorant of the purpose and practical implementation of the key Council Plan that their own party introduced when in national government...