[Tealeaf]

It ain't that simple, Rindy...as well as value for money in terms of local council tax revenues, you have to look at value in terms of overall spending per head - the difference being the amount of central government funding. Here in Tower Hamlets - with a population about 2.5 X that of Hyndburn - local government expenditure is just about 1billion, as compared to Hyndburn's 15m or so (I don't have the exact figures).

Obviously, you have to factor in County expenditure - education, social services, police and the like - but the simple fact remains that an authority such as LBTH is spending per head of population a figure which is a multiple of that spent by HBC/LCC in Hyndburn. And the place is an absolute disaster - think yourself lucky in Hyndburn.

The argument for this state of affairs, of course, is that LBTH is the poorest local authoiry in the country, in terms of various deprivation indices; yet it also contains some of London's wealthiest areas - think of Wapping, Canary Wharf and Limehouse. The simple truth is that there is a relatively small difference in the median measures between HBC and THBC, but for overtly political reasons money is pumped into this Borough and just pi**ed away on every crackpot and corrupt scheme you can possibly imagine. This is the real scandal and whether you are Labour, Tory or whatever in Hyndburn, the one thing that local councillors there should be doing is kicking up a real stink about this sorry and indefencible mess.