HAVING attended Lydney Town Council's PR exercise on Friday evening, I feel there are a number of issues which should be raised.

Firstly the organisation itself. There were 13 town councillors and 23 members of the public present yet the council felt it necessary to use public finance to appoint two independent security guards and one police constable.

One has to assume the councillors were not intending to attack the public so the security must have been present to protect the councillors from us. At what cost I wonder?

The management of the meeting itself was a farce with the chair failing to take control. He allowed the agenda item "Open Forum" to degenerate into a series of statements from former councillors and councillors' wives defending their inability to manage the council effectively since 1974.

Perhaps the only enlightening point of the meeting was when the clerk, now renamed the chief executive officer, agreed with a member of the public that the council had been financially incompetent between 1974 and 2010.

Questions raised concerning the report itself remained unanswered on the pretext that answering would be in breach of the Data Protection Act.

I am sure the whole of Lydney will be delighted to have heard from the mayor that cost cutting at the council had reached the point that biscuits were no longer provided free of charge at council meetings – I wonder how many biscuits could be bought for the cost of two security guards?

– Name and address supplied.