TORIES on Selby Council today "took a machete" to bureaucracy, slashing red tape costs with a single blow.

The Conservative group, which wrested power from Labour at May's local elections, have decided to downgrade the council's "best value" team, which will now consist of just one officer instead of five.

They said the move would save around £200,000 a year - money that would be redirected to front line services.

Getting the best value for money has cost the council nearly £800,000 since the strategy was introduced at the Civic Centre four years ago.

Tories said the strategy was a scandalous waste of taxpayers' money and had become a "bureaucratic nightmare".

Council chairman and Tory group leader Mark Crane said today that reducing the best value team from five to one had been part of their election manifesto.

He said that even the district auditor had now recognised that this red tape was just not necessary and was weighing heavily on the shoulders of council taxpayers.

He said one team member had left to go to another local authority, one was coming to the end of his contract and the others had been redeployed.

Coun Crane said: "Best value has taken up far too much staff time and resources and scaling the team down to the absolute minimum has been long overdue.

"The staff were also unhappy. They couldn't get on with their day job because they were tied up for weeks on end, providing information and statistics for the best value team.

"It was costing nearly £200,000 a year and that does not include the hidden costs of staff time being spent on a non-stop flood of bureaucracy."

He said the council would now rely for its performance assessment on an outside group coming in and looking at the services the council provided, and how they compared with other local authorities.

The exercise would last only two weeks and the council would then be given a rating ranging from excellent to poor.

Updated: 12:50 Monday, June 16, 2003