In service of this blog yesterday I listened to Radio 4's "You and Yours". Normally, nothing would induce me to listen to its reporters mining the bottomless pit of ecocentric moaning that are its mainstay. However, yesterday morning I heard a trailer that it would be reporting from an event at which "Council bigwigs would be discussing the cuts" and so, I went to iplayer and traced down the episode (well, I wasn't going to listen to the whole lot) on their iplayer page here and picked the 30th June episode and tracked past "the email from listener Mrs Trellis complaining about the quality of French paint" to the segment 19m 40s in where the reporter speaks to Phil Loach from WM Fire and Rescue and Stephen Greenhalgh, the Leader of Hammersmith and Fulham at what, it turns out is an LGIU event.Both Phil and Stephen speak a lot of sense (though the reporter characteristically says that it "sounds like a load of management-speak that I don't understand") about the opportunities for making significant savings by re-thinking services and the segment is worth hunting down.But, what gets me is that here we have an important issue about people thinking hard about how to redesign local public services and the BBC decide that it should be in the whingefest that is "You and Yours".
