A council named sue

‘CRACKPOT councils are wasting thousands of pounds . . . by suing THEMSELVES over parking tickets,’ was how the Sun saw it. And it really is as barmy as it sounds. At least half a dozen councils are known to have issued tickets against their own vehicles – and then refused to pay them. My own local council, Islington, took one case to the parking appeals tribunal, won and then asked for costs to be awarded against itself. The adjudicator Gerald Styles refused on the ground that the council could not ‘act wholly unreasonably or vexatiously against itself’.

The Sun sees all this Alice in Wonderlandish absurdity (great film, by the way, but Tim Burton’s scriptwriters can’t match Carroll) as straightforward evidence of what it used to call ‘loony’ local authorities. Actually I think it has more to do with the madness of running public services as you would profit-maximising private enterprises. If you contract out parking ticketing to companies with more interest in making money than keeping the traffic moving, they will employ traffic wardens on pay structures that depend on them issuing as many tickets as possible. And if you insist on ‘internal market’ accounting procedures that force one council department to pay another if it so much as uses a paper clip that isn’t part of its inventory, the reductio ad absurdum of this neoliberal accounting arcadia is that they will end up suing each other to sort out any differences.

Central London shop for sale, under £27,000

How much do you reckon you’d pay for a shop in St John Street, Finsbury, a stone’s throw from London’s Barbican centre, the City and some of the highest-value real estate in the land? Okay, it was only a dry cleaning business, albeit one that brought 24 years of customer goodwill along with the deal. But it was the freehold that was up for sale, allowing you to do whatever you wanted with the property, subject to planning consent. And it is in one of the few parts of the country where property prices have still been rising despite the recent credit crunch.

How does £26,809 sound? Done!

The lucky buyer was the property investor Structadene, who snapped it up as part of a £69.5 million portfolio of 222 shops and other commercial premises sold off to the company by Islington Council. The council originally claimed to have sold it for £260,809 and it took campaigners and the local press a month to get it to admit to the real figure. It wasn’t a cover-up but a ‘clerical error’, according to the council – presumably by a council officer who couldn’t believe that the £26,809 figure could possibly be correct.