Last updated 16:34, Thursday, 24 April 2008

THE Audit Commission rarely pulls any punches. And this time they’ve given Copeland Council a left hook worthy of Joe Calzaghe.

And although Copeland have hit the canvas, they are at least promising to get back up and start fighting.

Copeland Council has received no stars for the way it provides its services – desperately unfair on the hard-working staff, but an honest appraisal by an independent body can, in the long-term, be a valuable exercise.

Phrases like “poor and have poor prospects to improve” or “the council has neglected private housing services in the borough for some years” do little to reassure or inspire.

Even the much-trumpeted recycling division of Copeland was damned with faint praise. There’s been improvement year on year but very little compared to other councils. And we’re in the bottom 25 per cent when it comes to public satisfaction with the waste and recycling services. One suspects its dropped even more in the wake of this week’s publicity.

It’s good to hear Elaine Woodburn accepting the criticism – or to continue the boxing analogy, “we are taking it on the chin” – and promising that resources are now being put in place to put things right.

And Kells councillor George Clements said: “We are very confident that within the next 12-18 months we will have turned everything round... when the inspectors come back we are sure we will have done better.”

But just a minute. That sort of talk has a familiar ring about it. And sure enough, if you turn back the pages of The Whitehaven News to December 2004 there’s a sense of deja vu. The council had just been appraised as ‘only fair’ by the Audit Commission. And at the time chief executive Dr John Stanforth said: “When the audit team did the inspection we didn’t have the things in place we want to do but we will have very soon. They more or less agreed that if they did the inspection in a couple of months’ time they would most likely see us as improving.”

Well it’s more than a couple of months later – in fact it’s three years’ later. Plenty of time, one would have thought, to have put things in place and got the act together. Instead the Audit Commission find the usual problems.

Elaine Woodburn is right to point out that frontline staff have been commended. It’s the managers who seem to be letting them, and the public down. All that blue-sky thinking doesn’t seem to have helped. Instead of an away-day at some hotel somewhere, perhaps what is really needed is ‘stay-in-the-office’ day. Perhaps then there might be a real chance of some action.

“Come back in six months’ time and see how we have improved” says Coun Clements. We’ve made a note in our diary.