Jayne Kendall

Caution please.

I can understand that Jayne is the preferred choice that many Town Councillors would make as the next Town Clerk.

She is very strong willed and will push her policies through, as she has in the past.

The major problem will be that they will be Jayne's policies and not necessarily those of the town. She showed what can go wrong when she ran the town web site. She was presented by an excellent design by Furness Internet, the firm in Barrow who then had to watch in despair as the site was ruined. She pigheadedly refused all advice from several experts and made a total mess of the site so that it had to be eventually abandoned.

Jayne chooses to do a job her way. She is not a facilitator : someone who pulls the town's resources together and coordinates the efforts and skills that are available in the town. What people admire is her single mindedness, a quality much absent in most of our town councillors, hence her popularity with them but those outside this closed circle are ignored. Her protegee Peter Winston is similar, they work well together. Things certainly get done but both of them are very bad at involving others and readily get potential workers' backs up.

Decisions with these two are often made without consultation and the finances can be of dubious reliability - take the example of the Ulverston Better Towns Team (the organisation that runs  Flag Fortnight) which Jayne was chair of until recently.   Incidentally how much does Peter get paid for running the Dickensian Festival? Sadly we have an inner circle in the town who are not good at involving others.

The town is heading for difficult times. There will be no slack and we genuinely all need to pull together: people that will make the most of all the town's talents.

Beware: any councillor with views different to Jayne's will have a tough time.

Please make sure her contract has a tight statement in it that will assist with a smooth replacement when this becomes important.