Leader: Shropshire Council has to shoulder incinerator mistakes

In an act of appalling misjudgment, Shropshire Council agreed to foot the bill for any appeal by its waste contractor Veolia against the council's own refusal of planning permission for the highly controversial incinerator on the outskirts of Shrewsbury.

How anybody could believe that this could ever be a good deal for council taxpayers is beyond belief.

Veolia did appeal and won, which meant the council had embarked on a doomed and costly battle.

And now the bill has come in.

Shropshire Council taxpayers have been landed with a hit of £759,505. To this must be added the council's own costs, which takes the grim total to £824,379.

This would have been a scandal at any time, but at a time when jobs are being lost and council staff are having their arms twisted to accept inferior working conditions, and when services are being cut, it is outrageous.

If anybody in the private sector dropped a clanger of this magnitude, losing their company £759,505, they would be fired.

Will heads roll at the Shirehall? Will somebody politically or managerially take responsibility? And responsibility does not just mean a mealy-mouthed admission that a mistake was made followed by the cliched desire to draw a line under the issue and move on.

Council managers justify their huge pay packets on the grounds that they are the salaries they would command in the private sector and that councils today are multi-million pound enterprises which need to be run with commercial nous.

If that is so, it is about time that they started to accept responsibility and take the consequences of their mistakes in the same way as those working in the private sector have to.