There is a moment - and it is a very quiet moment - when a council stops delivering what it promised.

Not dramatically. Not with a press release. Not even with a particularly apologetic tone.

Just… quietly.

A leak takes a little longer to fix. A wastewater overflow becomes a little more frequent. A recycling target quietly fails to be met. A KPI, once comfortably achieved, drifts into the awkward territory of “partially achieved,” which is bureaucratic code for “we hoped you wouldn’t notice.”

And, of course, nobody notices. At least, not immediately.

Because the thing about service performance - and this is where it becomes almost beautifully deceptive - is that it is always telling you about the past.

Not the present.

Certainly not the future.

The numbers look reassuring, at first. Across councils - Porirua, Wellington, Hutt, Upper Hutt - the early years show something approaching stability. KPIs sit in that vaguely comforting 58–60% range. Services appear to function. Pipes, one assumes, are doing whatever pipes are supposed to do when nobody is thinking about them.

And then, slowly, the numbers begin to move.

Porirua drifts from 59% down to 46%. Wellington hovers stubbornly around the high-50s, but with persistent gaps that refuse to close. Hutt starts to wobble in later years. Upper Hutt remains steady, but in the way that suggests not so much progress as a determined refusal to improve.

At a glance, you might call this variation.

At depth, it is something far more interesting - and far more troubling.

Because what we are looking at here is not four different stories.

It is the same story, told four times, with slightly different accents.

It goes like this.

First, strategy expands. Ambitions grow. Plans are written. Infrastructure is promised. Outcomes are described in language so optimistic it occasionally borders on science fiction.

Then, delivery begins to struggle. Projects take longer. Capacity stretches. Systems -both human and physical - start to operate just a little closer to their limits than anyone is entirely comfortable admitting.

Then, the infrastructure begins to feel it. Assets age faster than they are renewed. Maintenance becomes reactive rather than planned. The system, in a deeply technical sense, starts to creak.

And only then - only then - does service performance begin to deteriorate.

This is the critical trick.

By the time you see the problem… the problem has already been there for years.

Which is why all four councils, despite their differences, converge on the same peculiar pattern: early stability followed by later decline.

It is not coincidence.

It is physics. Or, at the very least, local government’s closest approximation to it.

And if you want to see where this becomes particularly real - as opposed to politely theoretical - you don’t look at the KPIs.

You look at the water.

Because water systems, unlike reports, are notoriously resistant to narrative management.

In Porirua: leaks, overflows, wastewater performance issues.
In Wellington: persistent pipe failures, response time problems, water loss that seems to have developed a personality of its own.
In Hutt: increasing repair activity, the unmistakable signal of a system under pressure.

Different councils. Same underlying message.

The infrastructure is talking.

And it is not saying reassuring things.

Waste systems tell a slightly different, but equally revealing, story. Strategies speak confidently of circular economies - elegant loops of reuse and recovery - while operational reality occasionally forgets to complete the loop. Targets are missed. Outcomes are… mixed. Progress is described in a tone that suggests everyone involved would quite like a bit more time.

Which, to be fair, they would.

But time, as it turns out, is precisely what the system has already been quietly consuming.

Even customer satisfaction - that most polite of indicators - begins to drift. Not catastrophically. Not enough to trigger outrage. Just enough to suggest that somewhere, in the space between promise and delivery, something has started to slip.

And then there is the most wonderfully ironic signal of all.

In Wellington, the measurements themselves start to become unreliable.

Which is a bit like a doctor saying, “The patient may be unwell, but unfortunately the thermometer has developed trust issues.”

At this point, we are no longer talking about isolated performance issues.

We are looking at system behaviour.

A system in which strategy is broadly correct, finance is increasingly strained, delivery cannot quite keep up, and services - inevitably, predictably, almost apologetically - begin to deteriorate.

And here is the part that should make anyone reading this just slightly uncomfortable.

Because none of this is hidden.

Every piece of it sits, quite openly, in Long Term Plans and Annual Reports. Public documents. Audited numbers. Carefully worded disclosures that, when read individually, appear entirely reasonable.

It is only when you place them side by side - year against year, council against council - that the pattern reveals itself.

Which raises an awkward question.

If the pattern is visible now… when did it first become visible?

And more importantly - did anyone, anywhere in the system, see it coming?

Because if service performance is a lagging indicator - if it only begins to fail after the underlying system has already shifted - then by the time councillors are asked to make decisions based on declining KPIs and visible service stress…

They are not deciding how to avoid the problem.

They are deciding how to live with it.

And that, perhaps, is the most interesting question of all.

Not whether performance is declining - because it is, and the evidence is sitting there in plain sight.

But whether the system that produced that decline is capable of recognising it early enough to do something about it.

Or whether, like so many well-intentioned systems before it, it will continue - calmly, methodically, entirely rationally - to explain the past…

while the future quietly unfolds somewhere else.

Next week, we might take a look at whether anyone, in any of these councils, actually saw this coming.

And if they did… what they chose to do about it.

Our analysis of the Service Performance aspects of the four LTPs is here in all it’s dryness.

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There is a point in every Long Term Plan where local government stops describing reality and starts describing aspiration.

You can usually spot it because the verbs become extremely confident.

“We will deliver.”

“We are committed to.”

“We are investing in.”

It all sounds wonderfully reassuring. Like the bridge between vision and reality has already been built and all that remains is a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by a mayor wearing a hi-vis vest three sizes too large.

Then you open the Annual Reports.

And suddenly the verbs become… softer.

“Deferred.”

“Rephased.”

“Timing differences.”

“Below forecast.”

Which is local-government language for:

the thing we said would happen has entered the quantum realm and now exists primarily as a future intention.

Over the past several months, Delta Charlie has been digging through the Long Term Plans and Annual Reports of four major Wellington-region councils -Porirua, Wellington, Hutt, and Upper Hutt - attempting to answer a deceptively simple question:

Do councils actually deliver what they say they will deliver?

The answer, unfortunately, appears to be: sort of, eventually, maybe, depending on the weather and whether reality turns up unexpectedly.

And before anyone starts firing angry emails about pandemics, storms, inflation, earthquakes, supply chains, contractor shortages, volcanic activity, or Mercury being in retrograde - yes, all of those things matter. Councils have faced genuine pressures.

But here’s the problem.

Those explanations don’t explain the pattern.

Because the same thing is happening everywhere.

Different councils. Different mayors. Different priorities. Same outcome.

Projects slide sideways through time like drunken shopping trolleys.

Capital programmes underspend year after year.

Infrastructure upgrades drift into “future years,” where they join a growing pile of other future things waiting patiently for civilisation to catch up.

And once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it.

This is not random under-delivery.

It is structural.

The councils are not failing because they forgot to plan.

They are failing because they are planning beyond what the system can physically execute.

That distinction matters enormously.

Because it means the problem isn’t ambition.

It’s capacity.

And capacity is a brutal thing. It doesn’t care about strategy workshops, consultation documents, vision statements, or inspirational branding exercises involving words like “resilience” floating over stock photos of happy cyclists.

Capacity simply asks:

“How many projects can you actually build?”

And increasingly, the answer appears to be:

“Fewer than we promised.”

Porirua eventually had to materially reduce parts of its programme. Wellington started rephasing and stopping projects on a scale large enough to make accountants develop nervous twitches. Upper Hutt maintained an oddly disciplined form of perpetual delay, while Hutt pivoted priorities midstream under infrastructure pressure.

Different management styles. Same bottleneck.

Which suggests something deeply uncomfortable.

The Wellington-region local government system may already be operating beyond sustainable delivery capacity.

Not financially.

Operationally.

That’s the part nobody really wants to talk about.

Because finance is politically exciting. Debt makes headlines. Rates rises create outrage. Numbers can be weaponised. Individuals can be called « insert your favourite insult here »

Delivery constraints are far less dramatic.

They are slow.

Creeping.

Administrative.

They arrive disguised as “carry-forwards” and “programme sequencing adjustments.” They hide inside spreadsheets until suddenly an infrastructure programme that was supposed to take ten years now appears to require something closer to geological time.

And here’s the truly fascinating part.

Everything else starts breaking downstream from that one constraint.

Service performance deteriorates because infrastructure upgrades arrive late.

Financial forecasts wobble because spending happens years after planned.

Risk accumulates because deferred maintenance doesn’t magically become undeferred.

The whole system starts behaving like a motorway operating permanently at 130% capacity: technically still moving, but only because everyone has quietly accepted that traffic jams are now part of the design.

Which brings us to the giant political elephant currently lumbering around the Wellington region wearing a nametag labelled “Amalgamation.”

Because central government has now effectively told councils to come up with regional amalgamation options.

And that raises a very awkward question.

If four councils already struggle to deliver their existing programmes individually…

…what exactly happens when we combine them into one giant mega-council with an even larger infrastructure backlog, more competing priorities, more political complexity, and a delivery pipeline already gasping for oxygen?

Do we get efficiency?

Or do we simply create a bigger queue?

This is the point where some people become extremely uncomfortable with Delta Charlie’s work, because we are committing the unforgivable crime of asking whether the system’s execution capability actually matches its strategic imagination.

Apparently that’s considered impolite.

But it matters.

Because if the delivery system is overloaded now, then amalgamation without delivery reform doesn’t solve the problem.

It scales it.

And once you start looking at the evidence through that lens, the entire conversation changes.

The issue is no longer whether councils have good intentions.

Most clearly do.

The issue is whether the machinery underneath local government is physically capable of translating those intentions into completed infrastructure before the next Long Term Plan arrives promising even more.

At some point, Wellington region is going to have to confront a possibility that has been hiding in plain sight for years:

The problem may not be what councils want to do.

The problem may be that the system has quietly lost the ability to deliver at the scale it promises.

And if that’s true, then we are no longer debating policy.

We are debating operational reality.

Which is a far more dangerous conversation.

And a far more important one.

Our analysis of the Delivery aspects of the four LTPs is here in all it’s dryness.

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A slightly more friendly version of this article will be published by Wellington Scoop on Saturday 23 May, and Nicola Willis’ recent announcement about government departments somehow makes this investigation a bit more poignant.

There is a particular kind of sentence that appears in almost every Long Term Plan ever written by a New Zealand council. It usually contains words like prudent, balanced, affordable, and - if the author is feeling especially optimistic - sustainable.

It reads beautifully. Calmly. Reassuringly. Like a financial lullaby whispered to a slightly nervous ratepayer at bedtime.

And to be fair, when you line up the Long Term Plans from across the Wellington region - Porirua City Council, Wellington City Council, Hutt City Council, and Upper Hutt City Council - you discover something rather remarkable.

They all tell the same story.

Debt will be managed prudently.
Rates will remain affordable.
Budgets will balance over time.
The future will be handled responsibly, preferably with a firm grip and a spreadsheet.

It is, in short, a region in perfect agreement with itself.

Which is where things begin to go wrong.

Because when you step out of 10 years of Long Term Plans and into the 10 Annual Reports - the place where reality quietly files its paperwork - you discover that while the story remains the same… the plot has wandered off.

Not dramatically at first. Nothing so gauche as immediate chaos. No, the divergence is polite. Gradual. Almost apologetic.

Debt, for example, behaves impeccably in the early years. It stays within limits. It nods respectfully at policy. It might even bring a bottle of wine.

And then, a few years later, it moves in permanently and starts redecorating.

Across the region, the pattern repeats. Debt rises. Sometimes sharply. Sometimes spectacularly. In one case climbing from roughly $1.25 billion to $1.6 billion with the quiet determination of a number that has realised no one is actually stopping it.

Rates, meanwhile, perform a different trick. They begin life as the embodiment of affordability - steady, restrained, almost virtuous. And then, as the years pass, they develop what can only be described as… ambition.

The pressure builds. The increases follow. The earlier restraint reveals itself not as discipline, but as delay.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, the concept of a “balanced budget” quietly packs its bags, postpones itself several times, and promises to return in a future year that always seems to be just out of reach.

Now, at this point, a reasonable person might conclude that councils are simply failing financially.

That would be neat. Simple. Comforting, even.

It would also be wrong.

Because when you look more closely - really look, in the slightly obsessive way that tends to alarm friends and family - you begin to see that finance isn’t actually the problem.

Finance is the symptom.

Across all four councils, the same structural pattern emerges. Not occasionally. Not coincidentally. Consistently.

First, planned infrastructure investment doesn’t quite happen as expected. Projects are delayed. Scaled back. Quietly rescheduled into the future where all difficult things go to think about themselves.

This has an interesting side effect.

Because if you don’t build the thing you said you were going to build… you don’t need to borrow the money you said you were going to borrow.

And suddenly - almost magically - your debt looks very well controlled.

Your financial ratios improve.
Your balance sheet behaves.
Your strategy appears to be working.

Until, of course, reality catches up.

Because infrastructure, like gravity, is not especially interested in your scheduling preferences.

The work still needs to be done. The pipes still rot and need replacing. The systems still need upgrading. And when the delay finally runs out of road, everything arrives at once.

Debt rises.
Rates follow.
Affordability tightens.

And the original strategy - so calm, so reasonable, so entirely logical - begins to look less like a plan and more like a postponement.

This is the part that should make readers slightly uncomfortable.

Because it suggests that some of the “good news” in council finances isn’t good news at all.

It is what might politely be called a signal distortion.

Lower debt? Possibly a sign of prudence.
Or possibly a sign that the work simply hasn’t been done.

Stable rates? Possibly a triumph of affordability.
Or possibly a bill that has been carefully folded and placed in the future.

Balanced budgets? Possibly discipline.
Or possibly deferral with better branding.

Across the region, different councils express this pattern in different ways.

One compresses financial pressure into later years until even its credit rating begins to raise an eyebrow.
Another maintains strong discipline on paper while repeatedly postponing the moment of reckoning.
A third appears almost serenely prudent - until you notice the projects that quietly didn’t happen.
And a fourth simply changes the rules mid-game, deciding that if the numbers don’t fit the model, the model should evolve.

Different styles. Same underlying structure.

And this is where the conversation about local government - particularly the increasingly fashionable idea of council amalgamation - becomes rather more complicated than the brochures would suggest.

Because if four separate councils, each with their own leadership, their own systems, and their own carefully worded Long Term Plans, all produce the same pattern of financial behaviour…

…then what, exactly, do we think happens when we combine them?

Do we imagine the inconsistencies will cancel each other out?

Or is it more likely that we simply end up with a larger, more sophisticated version of the same problem - now operating at scale, with better graphics?

There is, buried in all of this, a rather inconvenient conclusion.

Financial inconsistency is not the disease.

It is the fever.

The real issue sits elsewhere - in the gap between what councils plan to deliver, and what they actually manage to execute.

Finance doesn’t create that gap.
It absorbs it.

Which means that until we understand why delivery diverges from plan - consistently, structurally, and across multiple councils - we are, to put it mildly, solving the wrong problem.

Or, to put it in terms more suitable for a Long Term Plan:

We remain fully committed to addressing the symptoms…
while carefully deferring any engagement with the cause.

And that, one suspects, is where things are about to get interesting.

In next weeks article we’ll talk about Project Delivery and how that, like the Hydra, has many heads and faces.

Our analysis of the Financial aspects of the four LTPs is here in all it’s dryness.

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There is a peculiar comfort to be found in a Long Term Plan.

Not because anyone actually reads them recreationally, you understand. Nobody has ever cancelled a weekend in Queenstown because they became absolutely gripped by Volume 2: Infrastructure Funding Assumptions 2027–2034. But there is something reassuring about their existence. They radiate confidence. Calmness. The sort of institutional certainty usually associated with airline pilots and people who say things like “leave that with me.”

A Long Term Plan tells you that the future has been studied carefully and filed into categories. Growth has been considered. Climate has been considered. Infrastructure has definitely been considered. There are diagrams. There are arrows. Occasionally there is a smiling child wearing a bicycle helmet.

And after spending several weeks buried inside the Long Term Plans and Annual Reports of Porirua City Council, Wellington City Council, Hutt City Council, and Upper Hutt City Council, we have arrived at a conclusion that is simultaneously reassuring, concerning, and faintly hilarious.

They all know exactly what the problems are.

Every single one of them.

Infrastructure ageing? Yes.
Growth pressure? Absolutely.
Climate resilience? Everywhere.
Affordability constraints? Written with the haunted tone of somebody checking the price of cheese in Woolworths.

Strategically speaking, the Wellington region is not confused. In fact, from a planning perspective, it is remarkably coherent. Across a full decade of Long Term Plans and Annual Reports, the councils all broadly identify the same pressures and chart almost exactly the same journey in response.

The language evolves over time, but the trajectory remains strikingly consistent:

Growth and development → Infrastructure investment → Resilience and sustainability.

Which is really just local government’s version of ageing.

You start off enthusiastic about growth and exciting opportunities. Then you discover your pipes are collapsing and your roads are cracking. Eventually you begin talking a lot about resilience, sustainability, and whether your knees still make that clicking sound when you stand up.

And here’s the interesting bit: when we actually tested whether councils moved in the direction they said they would, the answer was broadly yes.

Not perfectly. Not flawlessly. But directionally? Yes.

That matters, because it quietly demolishes one of the most popular public assumptions about local government - that councils are strategically chaotic, constantly changing direction, or fundamentally incapable of identifying what matters.

The evidence simply doesn’t support that.

In fact, when we scored each council against four criteria - strategic diagnosis, directional alignment, consistency, and calibration - the results were almost absurdly similar. Hutt scored 1.5. Upper Hutt scored 1.5. Porirua and Wellington both scored 1.4. Every council landed in the “mostly aligned” category.

Which means that, from a strategic perspective, the region behaves less like four independent councils and more like a distributed hive mind connected through infrastructure anxiety.

There is no obvious strategic outlier here. No council staring wildly at the sky while muttering about monorails and floating gondola systems powered by liquid optimism. The strategies are coherent. The priorities are stable. The direction is logical.

So naturally, this raises a deeply awkward question.

If everybody knows what the problems are…

why does everything still feel like it’s held together with laminated consultation documents and deferred maintenance schedules?

And this is where the report starts getting genuinely interesting.

Because the issue is not diagnosis. The issue is calibration.

Or, put more simply:

The councils know what needs to happen. They just don’t quite respond at the scale and speed that their own strategies imply.

Porirua identifies the infrastructure gap very clearly… and then funds roughly half of the required renewals. Wellington identifies major delivery pressures… and continues with programmes despite already knowing there are constraints. Hutt pivots hard toward infrastructure renewal - but only after the pressure becomes impossible to ignore. Upper Hutt maintains consistency largely by repeatedly rephasing timelines into the future.

Individually, every one of these decisions is understandable. Rates pressure is real. Delivery capability is real. Political caution is, sadly, very real indeed.

But collectively they form a pattern that is impossible to ignore.

The Wellington region has developed a sophisticated ability to recognise problems early… while simultaneously developing an equally sophisticated ability to respond slightly later than the strategy suggests might be ideal.

Not catastrophically later. Just… comfortably later.

It is a system that behaves a little like a very intelligent person who fully understands the importance of exercise, diet, and sleep, but also says things like:

“Right. Definitely starting Monday.”

What emerges from the analysis is not evidence of strategic incompetence, but something arguably more difficult to solve: structural hesitation.

The councils are directionally aligned. They are strategically coherent. But they remain constrained by affordability concerns, delivery limitations, institutional caution, and the political reality that nobody enjoys voting for large rates increases even when they know exactly why they are necessary.

And this matters enormously, because it reframes the entire amalgamation debate currently drifting across the Wellington region like a management consultant with a PowerPoint presentation (not to mention two Ministers with Boxing Gloves).

The assumption behind amalgamation is usually that fragmentation is the problem. That if we simply combine councils into one larger entity, clarity and capability will somehow magically emerge from the fog.

But this analysis suggests something rather different.

The councils already agree on the strategy.

They already identify the same problems.
They already point in the same direction.
They already understand the pressures coming.

The challenge is not alignment.

The challenge is turning strategic intent into sufficiently scaled action before the infrastructure starts expressing its opinions physically.

And that is a very different problem indeed.

Because a mega-council that still hesitates is not necessarily a solution. It is potentially just a larger, more coordinated hesitation.

Which leaves us with the central finding of this article.

The Wellington region does not appear to have a strategy problem.

It has a follow-through problem.

And that distinction is likely to become increasingly important over the next decade.

Next week’s article will look at the normally deadpan aspect of Financials.

Our analysis of the Strategic aspects of the four LTPs is here in all it’s dryness.

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A summary version of this article will be published on Wellington Scoop on Saturday 16 May 2026

If you’ve ever had the faint suspicion that your council is doing something almost impressive - just not necessarily the thing it said it would do - then this is your invitation to pay attention.

Because we’d like your help.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to do something rather unfashionable. We’re going to take councils at their word - not their intentions (those are magnificent, operatic things that are born from the mouths of Mayors) - but their documents. The ones that calmly explain what will happen… and then what, in fact, did - which, invariably, is not the same thing.

And we’re going to place them side by side.

What we have found so far over several months and different investigations, and after a slightly unreasonable amount of comparison and a heroic amount of coffee, is that local government appears to operate in two parallel conversational universes.

The first is the public-facing one. Clean. Composed. Reassuring. Plans lead to actions, actions lead to outcomes, and outcomes are described with the quiet confidence of something that expects to be believed.

If you stay in that universe, everything makes perfect sense.

The second universe only really appears when you compare things – or, coincidently, if you happen to live in the real world like most of us human ratepayers do. Compare last year’s promise with this year’s result. Strategy with outcome. Intention with… whatever happened instead.

And what you notice is not failure. That would be too obvious.

What you see is drift.

A subtle, persistent misalignment. Everything moving - just not quite in the same direction. And once you see it, it becomes very difficult to stop seeing it.

Ordinarily, this might remain a niche hobby for people who enjoy reading public documents recreationally. But the Wellington region has decided this is an excellent moment to make the system bigger.

Amalgamation.

A single, larger, more coordinated entity. Fewer moving parts. Greater efficiency. Better outcomes.

It’s a beautiful idea.

And we’re not opposed to beautiful ideas.

But there is a small complication.

If a system occasionally struggles to deliver what it says it will do… what happens when you make more of it?

Do inconsistencies cancel out?
Or do they tend to do what most things do when scaled - and become more efficient versions of themselves?

Somewhere along the line, the question changes. Not whether this happens - but whether what we are seeing is a system that is, in fact, rather good at producing something slightly different from what it promises.

Because amalgamation assumes something very specific: that the problem is structure.

Fix the structure, and better outcomes will follow.

Which is reassuring. Structures can be redrawn. Lines can be moved. Boxes can be combined into larger, more confident boxes.

Behaviour, on the other hand, is less accommodating.

At this point, we realised we needed to separate things properly. Evidence in one place. Interpretation in another.

So here on Substack, we do the unglamorous part. Long Term Plans (what councils say they will do) next to Annual Reports (what they say they did). Line by line. Year by year. No commentary beyond what the documents support.

What emerges isn’t an argument.

It’s a picture.

And once you’ve seen it, it has a habit of rearranging your expectations.

Which brings us to Wellington Scoop.

Because once you have the picture, a different question forms: not “what does it say?” but “what does it mean?”

Last week’s Spicer Landfill hearing gave us a glimpse of the answer.

Faced with a complex, long-term decision, Cr. Trelin and Cr. Lawler suggested gathering everyone in a room to look at the full picture - a radical concept, historically quite popular with humans.

Instead, it was suggested - by Chairman Geoff Hayward, with support from Mayor Anita Baker - that email would be sufficient.

Now, email is a remarkable invention. It allows information to move rapidly between people, occasionally in a form that can be understood.

But it does raise a possibility.

That decisions of significant complexity can be assembled piece by piece, like intellectual flat-pack furniture.

A fragment here. A fragment there.

And eventually… something that can be voted on.

In that moment, what we had been seeing in documents - fragmentation, partial visibility, the inability to hold the whole system in view - stopped being theoretical.

It became operational.

Which brings us back to amalgamation.

Because if the system, exactly as it operates today, is very good at producing something slightly different from what it promises, then combining several such systems doesn’t remove that behaviour.

It tends to do what most things do when scaled.

It refines it.
It distributes it.
It may even improve its efficiency.

But it doesn’t necessarily produce better outcomes for us, the humble ratepayer.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll publish the full forensic analysis across Porirua, Wellington, Hutt City and Upper Hutt here on our Substack.

On Scoop, we’ll do something else – something more interesting.

We’ll talk about what it means.

And we won’t do it alone.

If you’ve seen things that don’t quite line up… if you’ve asked questions and received answers to slightly different questions… or if you’re simply curious how something can be both meticulously documented and faintly elusive at the same time -

join the conversation.

Because the more complete the picture becomes, the harder it is to maintain the comforting assumption that changing the shape of the system will change how it behaves.

And right now, that may be the most interesting question of all.

We are Delta Charlie - local government forensic investigators. That sounds slightly more dramatic than it is, but only slightly. What we actually do is take large, complex, often impenetrable sets of public documents and analyse them in a way that makes them understandable, comparable, and - most importantly - testable.

Not based on opinion.
Not based on politics.
Not based on who sounded most confident in the chamber last Tuesday afternoon.

But based on something much harder to argue with: the councils’ own published documents.

So, if you’re interested, please join in.