City of York Council has recently distributed thousands of multi-coloured six-page leaflets, showing a wide variety of "performance" comparisons, and with a fair amount of whiz-kid gobbledygook.

Ploughing through this we are overcome by the superb performance of our masters.

It requires a great effort to understand what is meant by such terms as 'beacon status', 'Best value performance plan', 'a one stop (note - no hyphen) approach', 'pilot scheme', "key option" and much, much more.

I note the production cost of these leaflets was £13,446. How much of this leaflet has the average ratepayer actually read? I suspect precious little.

It would be better to drop the whole idea of telling citizens how good our masters are; or, at least, if they must publish these things, print them in black on non-glossy white paper and perhaps reduce the cost by nine-tenths.

We are not babies, we don't need the facts prettying up.

Harry Hayes,

Chatsworth Drive,

Towthorpe Road,

Haxby, York.

Updated: 11:28 Wednesday, April 18, 2001