COUNCIL’S LAME £165K EXCUSE

CRUMBRIA: 20/08/2025

SHADOWY PR spinners at Westmorland and Furness Council are scrambling to defend their decision to splash £165,000 on a computerised room-booking system.

The official excuse is a pearler.

The council needs it, apparently, because it holds “many hundreds of meetings every day”.

That line was fed to BBC Radio Dumbria this morning by an unnamed council “spokesperson”, presumably between meetings.

And there you have the problem.

At your modern Local Authority, meetings aren’t something that gets in the way of the job. They are the job.

There’s a certain crop of middle-management bullshitters with nothing better to do than fire out meeting invitations so they can surround themselves with time-serving sycophants and talk out of their arseholes from breakfast till home time.

Even the shy and retiring Conservative opposition on the council has noticed.

Deputy group leader Matt Brereton said it was “disappointing” that such spending wasn’t properly scrutinised or tested for value for money.

At £165,000 over three years, the council could hire a human being to manage its meetings — and still have £70,000 left over.