It is impossible to hold officials to account

I am sure that those responsible for the now the dire traffic situation in Hinckley haven’t engineered it out of malice, so I have read with interest the explanations from acting and would-be public servants that have been published here over recent weeks.

Over a long period we have all been methodically out-manoeuvred by the government hierarchy. It has been cleverly constructed to stop the public pin-pointing the one thing that is meant to be at the forefront of its thinking – accountability. This has been achieved by distancing the people who should be accountable from the people they are meant to serve making the job of holding anyone to account utterly impossible. If one ever gets too close, the authorities have the ability to simply close the line of communication and refuse to enter into any further dialogue. The system is therefore selfperpetuating and those within it (especially the civil servants) have a clear vested interest in keeping the way it is.

Sadly as a result we all suffer. Their determination to maintain the status quo however is borne out a misconception of what is needed, which is about a more productive way of thinking, not staff cuts – it takes little more effort to do a job well rather than badly. They could achieve so much more with a different approach from the lowest to the highest levels – admitting mistakes wouldn’t be a bad place to start. The question is, how we can convince them and who will take the lead – one of our elected representatives perhaps? A Clarke