Lancashire County Complaints

Anyone familiar with parking at Salem Chapel on Sunday mornings will have a measure of the Lancashire County Council Highways Department. They rejected our plans for a modest carpark on the grounds of safety, despite the current unsafe arrangement of thirty cars parking along a narrow lane, making it difficult to drive down. We might be forgiven for thinking that whichever managers made this decision might have questionable levels of foresight. If you need further proof of this, read on...

Three times now, the sign to the chapel on the A682 has been knocked down, and three times I have reported it. Three times the Highways Department failed to act, and three times I had to 'raise' the issue as a complaint. Three times they responded to the complaint and got the job done. Why I must go to this additional trouble, and why they cannot just respond to initial reports is beyond my understanding and their levels of competence? Likewise, when I reported a large pothole and their inspector dismissed it till a subsequent complaint forced him to go back and realise he had looked at the wrong bit, the repair was duly made. I raised another, formal complaint: the department only seems to respond to complaints and not reports.

I complained. The first bureaucrat I dealt with could not understand why I wished to escalate it- the repairs had been made, right? I suggested that this was not good enough, and that only responding to complaints rather than reports was not acceptable, and that I was considering going to the Ombudsman. In response to that, her colleague 'Tom' replied. Tom must have been a sensitive soul, for he cautioned against threatening and abusive behaviour. I suggested to Tom that reporting a council to the ombudsman should not be considered threatening behaviour. Tom did not reply. Then Ridwan, the ‘Head of Service’ responded, but alas, Ridwan thought I was only complaining about the pot hole; he had not been briefed properly, or bothered to read the correspondence. I was then treated to short email from Angela, the Complaints and Appeals Manager:

We are so sorry about the upset this matter has caused you.

She went on to explain that no further comment will be made, as the matter was over. 

All of this gave me a glimpse into the cosy little world of local government: pen-pushing officials scrupulously looking out for each other, all tolerating poor service, all with a greater eye on their generous, local government pension scheme than offering taxpayers and residents a fair service and value for money. When the Bible urges us to pray for government, may it not just be so we can live peacebaly, but that God would penetrate their torpor and prod them into doing a half decent job. Central government may sometimes appear rather malevolent, and local councils less than competent, but human governance is God's temporal solution for our fallen planet. Its absence would be even worse.  

Wisdom strengthens the wise more than ten rulers of the city. Ecclesiastes 7:19