IT IS, I know, only what it would cost to provide seven town hall executives with private lavatories near their offices - something that Blackburn with Darwen Council leader Malcolm Doherty evidently regards as their right by tradition.

But the notion that the value-for-money unitary authority - more than £100million in the red - should now splash out £38,000 on a survey of 1,000 folk to find out what people expect of the council is, surely, as immensely ridiculous as it would be a huge waste of public money.

For if the authority has not, in all the long years since Blackburn was incorporated in 1851 and Darwen followed in 1878, by now discovered what people want from the town hall in return for their hard-earned brass, then the council must be seriously bewildered as to its function. For absolutely no charge, I and, I am sure, most council tax payers could apprise the apparently perplexed authority of what is expected of it.

They want their children properly taught in decent schools, their bins emptied on time, the streets swept back and front, the holes in the roads mended, direct vehicular access to the railway station and the opening hours for the museum to be somewhat longer than the once-in-a-blue-moon-period that cuts have made it.

And what they do not want are councillors who increase their own allowances and perks for no perceivable improvement in council services, shopkeepers hounded and hauled to court over their A-boards, overkill traffic calming, 14-year-old lads banned from delivering milk, banners outside the town hall saying the millennium is coming and, apparently, town hall executives ensconced in exclusive loos wondering what job they and their staff are supposed to be doing and waiting for a MORI poll to tell them.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.