Pretty much every month the parish council is asked to respond to one kind of consultation exercise or another.
A questionnaire, a letter, an online form, attach something to the leg of a racing pigeon.
Invariably we are given a very short deadline for our response and are given no feedback on what happens at the end of it.
Last week we got an email from the police asking us to respond to a questionnaire on the performance in our neighbourhood policing team.
The email arrived on a Friday (when the parish office is shut) and they needed the response by the following Tuesday (the parish office is also shut on a Monday).
What particularly irked was that the answer to freedom of information request I had received only a few weeks before showed that crime in the NPT had gone up dramatically in the last year (232 incidents to 411) and the types of crime had got more serious.
So here was a botched consultation exercise taking place at a time when perhaps more attention was needed on basic law enforcement.
What finally led the council to submit a very sharp response was the last question.
"Are the Neighbourhood Policing Teams in your area engaging locally to gather intelligence on counter-terrorism and to reassure the public?"
Our parish, like many in rural Wiltshire, has a large number of soldiers stationed in it so we're actually pretty reassured that plenty of people keeping an eye our already and should a terrorist incident occur they'll be plenty of people of around to take of the problem.
It's reasssurance that with the day to day petty crime is being detected and punished that we need.
This is my latest post on the Total Politics blog.
Comments