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On 1st April, Wiltshire County Council (WCC) became Wiltshire Council (WC) and Salisbury District Council (SDC) - which used to be responsible for the area where I live - was abolished.
The grand idea behind all of this was to save money, apparently. In our new utopia, there is no more confusion about who is responsible for what - it's all WC.
In terms of the democratic impact, the total number of district and county councillors was considerably reduced as a result - there are now only 98 Unitary Councillors representing all of Wiltshire.
The elections for the new council don't take place until June, which means that between 1st April and 4th June there is a special "Implementation Executive" in charge of us.
Staff and departments from the now-defunct district councils along with those of the old WCC are in a state of flux - some are moving location and the entire structure is being reorganised.
The net result is that no-one can get anything done on the ground. From it being impossible to get sign-off on a requisition, to fights over which new department is actually going to take responsibility for a particular issue, it's chaos with bells on.
I feel sorry for the staff who actually do the work - this must be a nightmare to have to deal with.
 "Where Everybody Matters" - you just know that when an organisation puts a strapline like that under its logo it's trying desperately to convince people to believe it when in fact the opposite is true.
If everybody mattered, then the entire Unitary Council idea would have been abandoned when the huge scale of the public opposition was first realised.
But no, it was bulldozed through and we've just got to deal with it.
It's appropriate that WC and Implementation Executive Leader Jane Scott's middle name is Antoinette.
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simon
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