WITH the impending local elections on the horizon it is germane to ask just how much or indeed how little do we know about how and why many of the district council decisions are reached, actions taken, our council tax spent, and what ultimate returns, or values, ensue?

For example, the county council has produced detailed accounts for the new cabinet government but the district council hasn't maybe can't produce similar evidence, so we have no idea what the total diversion of council tax from voters' needs is to be!

Additionally, how much is spent on consultants per annum? And how many of those consultants are "regulars" under the Old Pals Act and how many projects are put out to competitive tender rather than merely passed on to regulars?

If these concerns do not, in fact, apply then wouldn't they best be demolished by more detailed and informative financial statements?

It isn't only the auditors who need to know on what the council is spending our money, and how and why after all we, the paying voters, want to know as well.

Whilst we are not consulted as to the council's fiscal policy, we do have sanction in the exercise of our votes not very often it is true but when it is available we will use it and, if councillors want it, the price is more and relevant information.

Elections, as with all political decisions in a democracy, should be about the quality of society and the fulfilment of voters' hopes and aspirations. Mutual understanding should be nurtured and the use of power exercised understandably and so voters must not be treated as mere components in a contrived social mechanism.

Ethical values are even more important than administrative efficiency and, when people are, apparently, turned into mere rational, abstract, calculations every four years or so, it destroys the very fabric of democratic communities.

No contrived statements, no expensive, technological, computer-contrived glossy publications, no political system which substitutes numeracy and abstractions for consultation, and which subordinates people to party policies, can claim to be a rational ideology and human beings, emotions, sensory experiences, and beliefs must never be subordinated to mechanised, computerised, assessments, however sophisticated they seem to be.

What we want is evidence of sentiment, intuition, personal experience, and consideration of feelings and beliefs as well as mechanised logic.

Computers may think faster even more accurately than councillors but they lack feelings, emotion, experience, and do not have to stand for election!

So councillors have to get back among the people and see, and hear, what they think and then feed that into the computers in Queen Victoria Road. They do not do that now so what chance is there that they can do it in the future?

Bill Purdie, West Street, Marlow