WHILE the city council's self-induced fiasco over parking charges resulting from a £2 million budget gap this year rumbles on unresolved, councillors are already arguing about public consultation plans for next year's budget.

And well they might because they are facing a far worse deficit, now projected at £9.5 million.

All the "consultation" questions are going to be approved by the council leader himself, hardly independent, and will inevitably centre on reduced services, increased fees and higher council tax, effectively amounting to the single issue "how much more pain are you prepared to stand?"

Budget consultation is a device imposed on councils by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott to dilute the responsibility of elected members (and the Government) by spreading their guilt to the council tax victims themselves.

Local government finance is now so immensely complex it baffles many councillors, so what questions could public consultation usefully throw up?

For sure there will be none on the council's existing spending commitments, that's a non-sequitur. Yet staffing levels are by far its biggest single cost, amounting to about 90 per cent of its entire £157 million net budget and increasing unstoppably every year.

During the last decade the council has let itself become over-committed, over-structured and, consequently, overstaffed. Yet amazingly, nowhere in its vast corporate structure is any machinery in place to effectively curtail any one of these, let alone all three.

Ken Beavan,

Albemarle Road,

York.

Updated: 12:00 Monday, September 13, 2004