I HAVE many years of work experience with large organisations, including government organisations, so I’ve been face to face with some all-but-incomprehensible documents in my day.

None of these prepared me for the 24-page questionnaire titled ‘Have your say on council budgets pressures 2016- 2019’ from Pembrokeshire County Council.

The first impression is of carelessness and indifference, starting with the front cover (‘The closing date for responses is Friday 4th January 2016) (a non-existent date) and continuing on the back (‘Once complete, please hand in… by 04/12/16’).

After grappling with it unsuccessfully three times, I started wondering if there might be more wrong with the poorly-written, unanswerable mess than carelessness and indifference.

How can a private individual make a judgement, given risibly little background information, about the costs of coastline maintenance?

Bridge maintenance? Street Lighting? The environmental pros and cons of more or fewer grass cuttings? Or most of the other 39 questions (not counting the final item, which asks for race, sex, religion, age, disability if any and just about everything else except sexual preference)?

If a few questionnaires were returned, they will have been from a few brave souls doing their best to fight their own corners.

The longest item was about the price of school meals.

Parents who tried to cope with this one have my admiration.

What were they to make, given two answer columns headed ‘Acceptable’ and ‘Unacceptable’, of a third column headed ‘Neither’?

The county council will have gathered up any results it received and blamed public apathy for the fact that it didn’t receive more.

Quite! But I stumbled on the questionnaire by chance and mentioned it to several people, one an astute councilwatcher, none of whom knew anything about it.

By now – my own apathy having descended with a crash; I started this letter nearly two months ago – it will have totted up percentages (with so few data, how meaningful can percentages be?), given itself credit for ticking the public outreach box (please!), announced that its findings were inconclusive (really?) and probably started doing whatever it was going to do in the first place.

There are difficult decisions to be made. We all know that. The council hired the prominent consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to help it make these decisions.

Why, then, didn’t it commission a competent, effectivelydesigned questionnaire from Pricewaterhouse and circulate it in good faith?

Instead, we were offered 24 pages of paper recycling, to which, with this letter, I add a 25th.

A GRIFFITHS

By email