The Forest of Dean, we learn, is to benefit from a £300,000 share of the Recession Fund which will be used to enhance broadband services. This is in addition to the £180,000 already secured from RDPE funding to investigate deficiencies in local service.

Last year, I'd been invited by council staff to participate in the Broadband Task Force. It followed the 'Faster Broadband' meeting with BT at Bream Rugby Club where I'd related local efforts to implement 'next generation' broadband on the basis of a community interest company. This would create local employment and re-invest profit into the community to provide funding for business startups.

The council invitation was accepted with no payment offered or requested.

Seven years ago I had been thanked by MP Diana Organ for drawing her attention to how BT were locking competition out of the rural broadband market, a market then valued at £2bn. She had written to say that this had been used in a meeting with BT when local exchanges had yet to be upgraded. No such courtesy was apparent when dealing with a council who seem intent on excluding local people and denying them opportunity.

Gloucestershire First, an organisation appearing just a few months ago are now coming to the same conclusions, albeit a few years too late. The Forest of Dean is a "graveyard" for business, they say. Everything else they say about local economic development has already been offered, with copyright.

On the table now is another £165,000 as a one off handout to support micro business rather than profit continuously re-invested in the community as proposed earlier.

Gloucestershire First say: "It's a completely new way of doing things" Well not for us, because we'd done it already in Russia, leaving behind 10,000 micro-businesses by 2004. We call it people-centered economics because it's aimed at creating conditions where people and their needs are the first consideration. Microeconomic development, as it's known is something new for them, whereas a local business has the benefit of more than a decade of experience.

What I really would like to know is where the Broadband Task Group managed to spend £180,000 and why alternative proposals had apparently not been evaluated. Awkward questions perhaps, but I mean to keep asking them.

– Jeff Mowatt, Parkend.