THE Advertiser/Messenger reported in April that Bromsgrove District Council was to spend two million pounds on redundancies and early retirements.

By the end of May, and after a special council meeting it agreed to release two million pounds from capital funds, but by now the money was to be spent in support of the council recovery plan and according to Chris Flavell's article on June 1 a council representative was quoted as saying - 'But we don't know exactly how the money will be spent'.

I believe these tactics to be no more than the opening shots in a strategy well known and often used by the district council when it thinks that a particular issue is becoming too contentious, and would be better shielded from too much public scrutiny.

The 'closed door' policy will be implemented and the whole issue of redundancies and early retirements will disappear behind closed doors and deep into the darkest recesses of the inner sanctum where cronyism and the 'old boys act' flourish.

Council taxpayers in this town have been asked year on year to dig ever deeper into their pockets to fund their council tax bills and year on year our elected representative and often highly paid executives have failed us miserably. In fact they have probably been complicated in helping to turn Bromsgrove into what must be one of the most neglected and mucky little towns in Worcestershire.

I feel confident the majority of council taxpayers in this town are as sick as I am of the continuing bunglings of this administration and, if its recovery plan is to have any credence whatsoever, any executive job losses should be treated as the necessary pruning of dead wood and anything vaguely suggestive of a golden handshake should be treated as nothing less than a total travesty.

David L Pardoe

Crabtree Lane

Bromsgrove