The latest slough of bills from the cracks debacle are revealed in the agenda to tonight's Policy and Resources Committee. I makes it another £16.5k of legal bills since the last count, and another £12.5k for some specialist HR legal advice which may or may not be related to the cracks snafu.

RUP made a public allegation some time ago now that the council had failed to make a claim in 2010 against their legal fees insurance which I presume would have paid up for what is now well in excess of £100k for the legal and other professional fees in pursuing the cracks claim. It's a significant sum of money, and a serious allegation which I presume RUP had good evidence to support. It's time the council published their investigation and told us honestly what the situation is. They're quick enough to publish press statements about grit bins and other similarly inconsequential pieces of fluff, and they're quick enough too to publish excoriating invective against members of the public who have asserted their rights or otherwise criticised the council, so in a matter that's of genuine public concern, involving as it does serious allegations of incompetence and maladministration, it's only right to be honest and open about what went wrong.

Given the latest tag match at West Berkshire, where the Tory Councillors have been castigated by their LibDem opposition for holding secret meetings, I'm more than surprised that the Tories haven't come back and thrown the Town Council's secrecy over this at them. Are we, the electorate, considered to be so simple as not to notice?

Are you another vexatious candidate?

It is blatantly obvious that this cracking fiasco is going to cost precept payers some serious money now isn't it? And I suspect we will have to pay again to put things to right in Viccy Park as well?

I just hope that precept payers remember all this when the elections roll round.........but who to vote for instead????? They all seem to be tarred with the same brush in Newbury.

Perhaps we should encourage Richard Garvie to have a go and field a rake of candidates from his party. At the very least it would give the current incumbents a dose of the collywobbles if nothing else.

Most certainly! General idea being that we should all be labelled vexatious; what then NTC?

What I would welcome is people taking it upon themselves to do the research and to inform themselves, then to ask the difficult questions to hold their local government to account - and to not be content with being fobbed off.

That's not happening. The people we elect are not in general doing it, either before they get elected, or afterwards. When I stood up at the town council and questioned its efficiency and spending none of the town councillors recognised my figures, not because they were wrong, but because they had never in their lives seen those figures. They had never been presented with the net service costs because the administration doesn't want councillors asking those questions, and they had never thought to work the costs out for themselves because we just don't elect people who are that dangerous. Councillors are in general so inured to the culture of deprecation and compliance that they can barely tolerate contact with their snivelling public unless we're pronating ourselves before their brass-buckled shoes, so a tax-paying member of the public questioning their efficiency like he was entitled to was no less offensive than if I'd mooned my fat hairy ****.

So whoever they are I'm not going to be impressed with any of the candidates because I hardly see anyone challenging their local government with robust informed questioning, and if I was going to be impressed with a candidate I'd need to see a track record of their detailed interest in their local government administration.