The wrong shade of yellow

County council staff had been told the faded double-yellows in leafy Broadway should be replaced with lines of a “more sympathetic, creamier yellow colour”.

But angry villagers awoke to find the standard bright-yellow, four-inch wide lines had been painted instead.

A spokesman explained that £2,000 has now been spent on re-doing the job because it is “council policy” to paint the daintier lines in all conservation areas - and not doing so would set a dangerous precedent.

No sympathy from the Sunday Telegraph, however - it chose to report the “blunder” in its Waste Watch column this week as a shining example of “how taxpayers’ money is being wasted” by council bureaucrats.

Still, all publicity is good, right?

MORE from the city council’s licensing committee, whose increasingly epic meetings were noted in this column last week.

Thankfully, it appears the six (yes, six) hours recently spent pondering whether to let a mobile van sell pancakes in Worcester’s High Street may have been the final straw for some members.

It has now been decided that future applications for street trading licences will be heard by a panel of just three councillors, in a bid to speed up decisions.

Committee chair Andy Roberts noted: “In my experience, when you have 17 people mulling over every sentence, every comma, every apostrophe, it can become messy... Sometimes I think people would not consider this to be an example of good governance.”

And who could disagree with that? Now, if they could just do something about those endless planning meetings that plod on and on for entire afternoons...

HAPPY days in the Foster household, still celebrating Mike’s first ministerial post (and accompanying £30,000 pay rise).

The Worcester MP is getting into the swing of his snappily-titled job as parliamentary under-secretary of state for the department of international development - this week he was proudly showing off the famous red box ministers are given filled with departmental paperwork to wade through at home each night.

But the extra workload has not won much sympathy at chez Foster.

Mr Foster returned from London to discover his family had generously put together their own red box for him to work through - filled with friendly reminders to clean the windows, help with the kids’ homework, etc...

Such is the glamorous life of our ruling class.