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# 'A council of idiots'
- URL: https://www.ipswich.co.uk/a-council-of-idiots/
- Published: 2026-08-21T07:14:20.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-21T07:14:20.000Z
- Description: Ipswich.co.uk columnist, The Insider, turns his or her attention to the state of decision-making at Ipswich Borough Council and East Suffolk Council, in which frustration and despair are the order of the day.
- Author: The Insider
- Tags: Opinion, Ipswich Borough Council, East Suffolk Council

Ipswich Borough Council employs 1,269 people – roughly 900 full-time equivalents – at a cost of £42.6m a year. Add to that the councillors elected to scrutinise those officers and make decisions on our behalf, and you might reasonably expect competence, prudence and a basic awareness of what residents actually want.

You would, however, be often mistaken. And spectacularly so.

There are good councillors and good officers, of course. Just not nearly enough of them. Ipswich Borough Council appears instead to have embraced a kind of Brechtian civic theatre: alienating the audience while insisting the performance is for their benefit. The question we should all be asking – far more often than we do – is simple: who holds these professionals to account for the nonsense they sign off?

Take the proposed £38m aquatics centre. Nothing says responsible stewardship quite like committing tens of millions to a swimming pool while the council itself is about to be abolished under Local Government Reorganisation (LGR). The organisation approving the project will cease to exist; the bill, the building and the consequences will be inherited by someone else – but paid for, inevitably and eternally, by us. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of booking a symphony orchestra for a backyard Proms, stuffing the oompah section into your shed next to the Flymo, then driving to Dundee barefoot while leaving the invoice pinned to your neighbour's door for the xylophone player to pay.

And it is not just the swimming pool. The council's capital programme runs into the tens of millions at precisely the moment Suffolk's governance structure is being dismantled and rebuilt. Officers know this. Councillors know this. The Government knows this. Yet here we are, watching legacy projects being waved through as though the future were someone else's problem – which, conveniently, it will be.

Consider the £560,000 investment in an empty town-centre building. Who is the tenant? "Not saying". What is the project? "No comment". Why spend over half a million of public money? "Commercially sensitive". Of course it is. Few things erode trust faster than secrecy wrapped in expenditure. "Can we have our £560,000 back?" "No."

It is little wonder turnout in local elections is so anaemic. People do not vote because they do not think councils listen. Councils then make decisions with tiny mandates because people do not vote. Those decisions further discourage voting. And round we go, trapped in a democratic spin cycle on a boil wash.

With new unitary elections approaching, one can only hope politicians, parties and voters find a way to engage with each other more successfully. Because Ipswich is currently cruising towards LGR in a clown car with inflatable wheels, the driver repeatedly pieing themselves in the face while honking the horn.

And Ipswich is not alone. East Suffolk's Green "leadership" – the word is doing some heavy lifting here – has signed off yet more Community Infrastructure Levy money for a decades-old sports pitch project where not a single spade has touched the ground. Toilets? Changing rooms? No. But more money? Certainly.

Then comes the pièce de résistance: a £500,000 estimate to move an enormous pile of rocks from a beach into storage. You did read that right: the cabinet voted for it – unanimously. They do not yet know where to store them – that is act two. Act three will involve spending up to another £500,000 moving them out of storage. Act four? Returning them to a spot only metres from where they began. Orton and Ayckbourn would be proud.

Real people – officers and councillors – sat in real rooms and decided these were good ideas and good uses of public money. It beggars belief.

So the next time you are at Ipswich's bus "station", observing a floor that resembles the ground at Latitude after the headline act has left the stage, remember: someone decided that was acceptable. And when your food-waste bins are not collected in Martlesham or Kesgrave – again – remember that people nobody voted for made all of these decisions, enabled by councillors whom only a few hundred hardy souls did vote for.

Perhaps redemption is coming. Perhaps a political conversion awaits on the road to Damascus. But I would not hold your breath. The Second Coming may arrive first.

As for me, that is enough for this week. Speaking of circuses, I have picked up some part-time work at the circus. Human cannonball. £500 a week, plus a bit of mileage.