LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Front page shames those running this failing town

It merely serves to highlight the total ineptitude of this Labour run authority for allowing this to take place.

Those in charge of finance and IT within the council should be sacked. They should stop trying to blame the government for this farce.

The final comments at the end of this article from the council are simply an insult to us all and leaders of the council should be seen holding hands as they walk towards the job centre for allowing it.

Reading the article, we learn that upwards of 34,000 households were sent a cheque, many of whom were unable to process it for a number of reasons.

This represented a singular loss of around £16 per household and a gain of around £540k for the companies cashing the cheques. All in a day’s work in this Labour-run satrapy.

Within the article we are further asked to believe that printing vouchers was a technical step too far for Rotherham. But it was managed successfully by Sheffield and Manchester. Such drivel is beyond even this council, or so it should be.

If we didn’t want to implement this solution we could easily have entered into arrangement with either of the other two more capable organisations to produce the vouchers for us.

There was ample time to set up such an agreement and they could have been sent by courier to Rotherham. Better still, a print file of the vouchers could have been transferred electronically to Rotherham and printed locally.

The picture on the front of the paper says it all, a town centre depressed, full of pawn shops and cheque cashing and a queue full of desperate people, all courtesy of years of a Labour administration. That has failed to prevent or at least slow down the demise of the town centre.

One might have hoped that they might have arrived at a simple solution to prevent such a catastrophe to the poorest being ripped off. But no, they actually facilitated this disgraceful act and have the temerity to try to implicate others in this act of shame.   

As for the role of RMBC in this debacle, allowing the statements of their spokespeople to suggest that council tax accounts could be credited with the money after three months or that payment could be made in cash by appointment on an individual basis.

Just what do they not understand about desperate; or about the numbers of people in the town who do not have a bank account, or simply cannot manage a bank account?

It really is time to say goodbye to some of our senior politicians and officers for their years of incompetence.

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