Avoid creating future eyesores

The delays are understandable as the council has been anxious to make sure major - and therefore costly - schemes are made possible by this windfall and have had to wait longer than many would have preferred, until the entire funding packages were in place.

However, the enthusiasm for this kind of arrangement should be kept in perspective. Almost all the projects will need financial investment in the future. One-off projects may be well and good but the council needs to ensure that it can afford to maintain them otherwise we will simply be creating the eyesores of tomorrow.

Learning reality of life in high office

WENTWORTH MP John Healey now knows all about the pressures of high office. For within hours of being appointed local government minister in Gordon Brown's Cabinet reshuffle, he found himself at the centre of the worst peacetime disaster in living memory.

As storms battered South Yorkshire, he was given special responsibility for heading the Government's flood recovery efforts. He was just getting to grips with the task when his headache was doulbed by further floods inundating counties in the south.

At a corporate level, the Government's response has often been criticised. But it is clear that Mr Healey's personal commitment could not be faulted.

Lucan's neighbours

FIRST it was the great white shark that wasn't and now it's the Lord Lucan who isn't. Reports that the elusive minor aristocrat who disappeared after the murder of his children's nanny in the 1970s is living in New Zealand have proved, as ever, to be inaccurate. Of course they are - any follower of silly season stories will know that Lucky Lucan is hiding in a Scottish cave with Elivis and the Loch Ness Monster!