I’m thinking about starting a competition on ‘how many emails does the citizen/public/customer have to send to a local authority before they get an answer.

Our council recently decided to put a notice at the top of our road telling people to ‘use the diversion’ - i.e. use our road instead of the main road while the developers build some flats*. As this has led to an increase in traffic in our road I wrote to the council to ask them how long this would last for. And never got a response. So I wrote again. And never got a response. So I’ve now sent an email to my local councillor - and not got a response.

I don’t think the question ‘How long is a diversion notice going to be at the top of the road’ is particularly difficult.

It’s interesting how central government tries to set the agenda with some issues and not others. Apparantly research suggests that speeding cars, SUVs, heaving traffic (about 30,000 roads in Britain are classified as rat runs are very high up the agenda of the voters/citizens/customers etc - but you would get little sense of this from the lack of attention this seems to get in the media ( our unelected ‘government’) or politicians. Could this be anything to do with the power of the car industry and the oil companies I cynically ask? When the ho-ha about passive smoking dies down, will attention switch to the effects of ‘passively’ inhaling car exhausts?

Back to e-government. What is the point of any council spending huge sums of money on email systems if no one can be bothered to acknowledge, let alone answer basic questions?

* Footnote: Before we moved into this area, there was a huge campaign to save the memorial hospital ( a listed building) and some allotments. Thousands of people signed a petition asking that the memorial hospital was not knocked down but was converted into another use. The developers opposed this. Lo and behold, a ‘mysterious fire’ destroyed the building and the developers got to do what they wanted to do.