I WAS delighted to learn this week that our councils have finally woken up and smelt the coffee as far as staff and jobs are concerned.

The three district councils in south Buckinghamshire are to merge their senior officers into one unit to save a bucket-load of cash – and high time too.

Private industry has been cutting back for years while our local authorities have continued to over-staff and over-emphasise their own importance.

Where council chief executives differ from normal captains of companies is that they are not actually in charge of their business. They have to follow the orders of elected politicians, so in fact they never need make any controversial life-changing decisions at all. They never need to take the blame or hold the can for a disastrous policy.

Most of the public fail to understand that these highly-paid officers are being ruled by politicians who are often far less qualified than they are, and far less paid. In theory, you could have a retired labourer running the council and telling an Oxbridge-educated chief officer how to do things.

Nothing wrong with that, per se, but it rather makes a nonsense of previous top-heavy structures. By and large, you need decent administrators, not radical visionaries, to run our councils.

That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be well paid, and it doesn’t mean the job of a council chief officer should be denigrated. We want good people to aspire to these top posts, and I have no problem with them earning decent salaries.

But, as our three district councils acknowledged this week, we just need far fewer of them.