Vision of future without spin city

WE NEED more houses. If Gravesham can't take another 3,000, then Swale can. With all the extra houses, we need more jobs. Don't worry about empty industrial estates, we can expand Kent Science Park into the countryside and convert farm buildings into industrial units.

Local jobs mean local workers will walk, cycle or take public transport to work. And all the extra factories will require more, bigger and better roads. To fund the roads, we'll build more houses. Who needs planners?

Sittingbourne High Street is not attracting shoppers. Let's build another shopping centre away from the High Street so that when the High Street chokes to death on a diet of charity shops and estate agents, we can then open up the High Street to two-way traffic to relieve congestion and build more houses on the now redundant car parks.

Spin City tells us in its latest "transport" fable that car parks
are a waste of space — the way forward is to use public transport, walk or cycle. And if we are really good, we can have two wheelie bins for Christmas. What a load of rubbish!

Perhaps the answer is to chuck Spin City into a wheelie bin. Alternatively, to set an example, sell off the car park surrounding Spin City for housing industrial use and this might encourage the new chief executive and his merry men (and women) and all our noble councillors to walk, cycle or take a bus to work.

A whiff of reality might concentrate their minds.

Imagine a new era in Swale without all those useless glossy publications, endless wasteful surveys, interminable directives, expensive, worthless initiatives and non-jobs. We could save a fortune.

Imagine a ceiling being imposed on the annual percentage council tax increase being limited to the cost of living increase given to pensioners and most other workers. We might balance the books.

Even the last chief executive of Spin City would approve, now that he is a pensioner at the ripe old age of 54! Can't think why he dashed off to Yorkshire.
On the other hand, we could take a leaf out of the books of big business and transfer Spin City, lock stock and barrel, to a call centre in Bombay.
Swale forwards, backwards — or down the plughole?

John Bonney,
Stockers Hill Road, Rodmersham.