When public bodies invite views about certain proposals from the public, the consultation responses invariably call for the opposite of what the public body wants.

So, for example, councils may want to close some children’s centres to save money which parents want to stay open.

There’s no easy solution to this but the consultation on Kent County Council’s spending programme did produce a clear view.

Of the 219 alternative suggestions for savings made by the public, some 59 of respondents most ‘liked’ a cut in management pay. Ouch.

THERE will be a touch of the blame game going on closer to home this week when, after a long period of consultation Kent County Council will have to bite the bullet and set a budget.

The headline figures will naturally be the whopping 5% council tax increase proposed by the Conservative administration alongside an unknown number of accusing fingers being pointed in the direction of Parliament.

It has become something of a ritual for councils to blame their Westminster paymasters for short-changing them but this year the evidence that town halls are in serious trouble is particularly strong.

Kent County Council has sounded the ‘mayday, mayday’ klaxon more loudly than some.

Its leader Roger Gough teamed up with the leader of Hampshire county council for some political tag-team wrestling to focus the government’s attention on their plight.

It had some success - notably because the letter warned that both authorities were not too far away from becoming bankrupt.

A touch of sabre-rattling, perhaps - but next year is shaping up to be just as dreadful.

The government needs to provide councils with stability as well as money. The triple threat posed by the cost-of-living crisis; rising energy bills; the pandemic and global insecurity is a dangerous political cocktail, capable of leaving our councils with an enormous hangover.

THE hapless Liz Truss broke a lot of records when she became PM and most of them cast her as not just hopelessly out of touch but hopelessly out of her depth.

Now she is giving her account of her 49 days in Downing Street, where she chalked up another record: the shortest serving Prime Minister in history.

If you are looking for an admission that she got some things wrong - well, actually quite a lot - we can save you the time.

There is no such fulsome apology; only a brief admission that she was not blameless when it came perilously close to the UK economy imploding.

Apologies were thin on the ground in an article that was peppered with criticisms of others and only a casual admission that her tax-cutting blueprint failed because it came too soon and the markets didn’t like the look of it.

Not so much a ‘mea culpa’ as ‘mea maxima culpa’.