Sir, I would refer to the articles on pages 1, 8 and 12, of The Westmorland Gazette of Friday, January 21, covering the latest developments in the job evaluation and staff grading structure undertaken by South Lakeland District Council in 2003, the subsequent suspensions of three senior professional officials and the Brooke inquiry.

In your Comment on page 12, you advocate that the electorate should "Seek answers, not scapegoats". I would agree with this sentiment in principle, but unfortunately SLDC has not displayed a willingness or an ability to learn from its mistakes in the recent past, nor does it enjoy a reputation for open and frank public accountability.

The council's culture of secrecy and its penchant for discussing controversial issues in camera, together with Councillor Barker's remarks as reported on your front page, ie calling for the resignation of the person who had leaked the Brooke report thereby "undermining democracy in a serious way", do not exactly lead me to believe that the electorate will enjoy a full and open explanation of the current sad and costly state of affairs.

Councillor Barker's comments and the offer made by the acting Chief Executive to prepare a report " which will put as much as that (sic) into the public domain as he can" (a carefully worded pre-emptive caveat?) tends to suggest a continuation of the council's tight-lipped, closed doors' culture, rather than a sudden conversion to open and frank accountability.

Meanwhile, members of the electorate who might have had lingering doubts as to the fairness of the "weak" adjudication awarded to SLDC in September 2003 by the Audit Commission, must have had them swept clean away by the comedy of errors' revealed in the resume of the Brooke Report on page 8.

Costly blunders and mismanagement arise in both the private and public sectors. The Brooke Report and the weekly feature Suspension Watch, which has appeared on your front page over the past 39 weeks, do, however, highlight a fundamental and striking difference between the public and private sectors, which raises questions as to the role, relevance and value of local councils and councillors.

The difference between the two sectors lies in the way in which such failures are tackled. In the private sector, and here I speak from considerable personal experience, errors and mistakes are routinely investigated within days and are dealt with in-house. In contrast, in the public sector, employees are all too often suspended on full pay for months in some instances years, pending the outcome of protracted inquiries.

There are countless examples of such protracted suspensions throughout the public sector embracing NHS staff, teachers, local and central government personnel. SLDC is, therefore, not alone in this regard, but I believe that such protracted periods of suspension are unfair to the suspended employee, his/her family and of course to the long-suffering tax payers.

It is difficult to see why public sector employers routinely take so long and incur such expense in dealing with disciplinary matters compared to their counterparts in the private sector. The cost of long-term suspensions are then further inflated where public sector employers eg SLDC, having suspended an employee, then find it necessary to bring in (at a considerable cost) independent experts' to investigate the merits of the case and suggest a solution to the problem.

Are members of SLDC procedurally/legally forbidden to sit in judgement and take disciplinary action against their senior officers, or are they too inexperienced, incompetent or hypersensitive to do so? If for whatever reason councillors are unable to exercise judgement and take disciplinary action without calling in external consultants and experts' to make their decisions for them, what earthly use are they to the community, and why should the electorate continue to find their attendance allowances and expenses?

Not surprisingly in the inclusive society we all live in, it would appear that no one was really to blame for SLDC's latest costly, lengthy and embarrassing fiasco.

True, the Director of Finance has been found guilty of misconduct in failing to discharge his duties under section 151. One feels, however, that he has been singled out to play the role of ritual scapegoat, as there is no suggestion that any further action should be taken against him. Indeed it is apparently suggested that he should be re-instated.

Although found not guilty' of misconduct, the recommendation for the most senior officer suspended is early retirement, presumably on full pension.

This solution is perhaps the soft-option' for both SLDC and the officer concerned in this current case.

I am baffled by the logic of the recommendations which apparently suggest that the officer found guilty of misconduct should be re-instated, while it is assumed that the officer found not guilty of misconduct will have lost the confidence of the council and should therefore be prematurely retired.

I am also curious to know how these recommendations will be funded, given that there are surely no more public toilets left in the South Lakes area which can be closed.

Having dealt with the relevant professional officers in SLDC, what has Brooke to offer by way of recommendations with regard to their political masters? While it was the professionals who recommended an apparently uncosted and flawed scheme for their approval, members of the general purposes committee appear to have compounded the issue by exercising inadequate due diligence, apparently, nodding' through the proposals by three votes out of seven.

If all that councillors do is approve of everything put before them by the professionals', what purpose are they serving? Meanwhile, none of the said political masters appear to have fallen on to their swords in shame or have offered to resign in acknowledgement of their share of responsibility for the creation of the fiasco.

One can but hope that the council will learn lessons from this whole sorry business, and that SLDC will make the Brooke Report available to the electorate in a new spirit of open and full accountability. We shall see, but meantime failing a miraculous change of heart by local councillors in their approach to public accountability, it is to be hoped that the Gazette will resume its traditional role as a truly crusading journal and carry out the promise made in this week's editorial by using the Freedom of Information Act to its fullest extent.

Dr Rob Vickers Silverdale