Suffolk County Council...(or should that be Suffolk Parish Council)

Suffolk County Council is as it has pointed out to us is a multi million pound enterprise. Indeed it has revenue of over £1bn a year, has a swanky looking corporate head office (Endeavour House in Ipswich) and a CEO on a salary of some 230K a year.

It isn't a parish council, school govening body, local volunteer charity group or any of the kind of organisation that it has talked of "divesting" its services to.

However it is behaving as if it is a badly organised bunch of volunteers rather than a well organised corporate body. It is rapidly becoming clear that the "new strategic direction" it voted for last week doesn't really exist in any detailed form at all. It is simply a vague feeling that can be summarised as:

• we know we will have less money
• governments and councils are a bad thing and "people" know best
• it would be better if we "enabled" such people to run services
• that would save money

And that is it. Suffolk don't seem to know who these groups and people are one minute its village groups and parish councils next minute large professionally run charities, then private companies, then not private companies then certainly not small groups of volunteers.

One minute Suffolk plan to employ only 200 staff the next talk of 200-500 is "scaremongering

The truth is Suffolk hasn't worked any of it out thinking that this is "detail".

But until Suffolk identify who would run the services, how much they would cost and how they would be funded held to account it is impossible to asess the plans at all. Certainly impossible to adopt a new strategic direction when you have no clue what that direction is and what it will cost to get there.

This is what happens when people allow ideology to dominate their judgement. Such things "must" be right. No matter if the sums don't add up or the people you imagine running your services just don't exist.

So please can Suffolk start to behave more like the large corporate organisation it is and a little less than a dysfunctional parish council.....