Letter - Bureaucrats making our job impossible

Bureaucrats making our job impossible

Congratulations to the Mercury for highlighting the latest bureaucratic nonsense from the Teesdale Safety Advisory Group.
For the last two years Middleton-in-Teesdale Carnival organisers have been required to put out signs on all approaches to the village advising of the road closure for the annual carnival parade.
These signs have to be produced by an approved road traffic management company but we have been able to save some money by collecting and positioning them ourselves and returning them after the event.
This year, for reasons known only to themselves, the safety advisory group have decreed that the signs must be erected by the approved contractor only.
Consequently, our costs for the six signs we need have increased by over 300 per cent, from £84.60 last year to £282.00 this year.
When asked to explain this huge increase, the traffic management company said it was because we did not have the piece of paper to say that we had been trained to carry out the safe positioning of the warning signs which Durham County Council requires.
In your front page article two weeks ago, you stated that the chairman of the safety advisory group had said that “the new measures were necessary to ensure that the two councils and event organisers were covered against personal liability claims”.
We have always taken out public liability insurance, which gives us £5million of cover – the cost of this has also increased from £113.20 to £367.50 in the past four years.
Without wishing to demean the work of people in the traffic management business I have to say that putting up signs at the side of the road is hardly rocket science.
We all understand and agree with the need for sensible safety measures so why do Durham County Council not offer the appropriate training in road sign placement to willing volunteers from the various community groups in Teesdale so that we can safely put up our own signs and save significant amounts of money?
It may well be that this year the school or youth club or Brownies or whatever will not get their normal donation from carnival funds because of this unnecessary additional expense which we will have to meet.
And the very small group who give up our time and energy to organise the carnival are left wondering whether it is worth the effort when a dedicated group of bureaucrats is doing its damnedest to make a difficult job absolutely impossible.