Somewhere, over the rainbow

Today's Audit Commission performance assessment scores look, at first sight, like a ringing endorsement for Pugh and Co. In 2006 the "new broom" Council was judged to be "improving well", and the previous 2-star rating was duly replaced by, er, 2 stars. In the following year, again "improving well" (in the auditor's perhaps over-generous view) the Council yet again notched up the familiar 2 stars. Today's results show that although the heady pace of improvement has declined in 2008, it is still "adequate", and enough to secure - you guessed it - 2 stars.

Unfortunately, of course, everyone else has moved on over this period, and two stars and "improving adequately" puts the Isle of Wight in the bottom 14 councils nationally, out of 150. The auditor helpfully provides scores for individual service areas as well, and if we look at the average score across all services for these 14 basket cases, only 6 of them are lower than the Isle of Wight. Interestingly, right at the bottom of the heap is Thurrock, which is clearly missing its ex-Education chief, Steve Beynon, now ensconced as IWC Chief Executive number 9.

As the only council to receive a reduced score from the auditor for "financial standing" last year, it looks like IWC is not just crap, not just broke, but crap and broke, which is not quite in line with "We will ensure that the Council's statutory services are rated with the best in the country" (April 2005, A Sutton).

To be fair, though, according to Pugh on the radio this morning, it's all the Lib-Dem's fault.

Meanwhile, whilst service delivery may be in the gutter, Tim Hunter-Henderson has his eyes firmly focussed on the stars, or at least the PFI crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. At last week's Council meeting, however, under relentless probing from John "Waldorf" Wortham, he was forced to admit that the much trumpeted Government award of £350m does not actually exist in writing. Given that over the last three years it has gone from being one of only 3 viable contenders to one of many, the start date has been delayed by two years, and the costings are way out of date, no doubt some thought is going on into damage limitation in the event that nobody at GOSE can actually remember what was agreed in the taxi outside Guilford railway station in 2007.

In a spirit of helpfulness therefore, I put forward these suggested mitigating factors:

• The credit crunch
• Global warming
• The Undercliff Drive illegal payments (although note that they don't actually exist outside of Bazza's tortured imagination)
• Inflation
• Deflation
• The last administration (except for Muriel Miller and Ian Stevens)

Meanwhile, manifesto score out of 20: A generous nil