Does best mean worst?

Being in the word business ourselves, we are always keen to study their use and the way that they can be interpreted.
Particularly so when the wordsmith involved is the council's deputy leader Councillor Peter ("we walk on water") Jordan.
His latest quotations appear in this week's Boston Standard.
The issue under discussion is the council decision to ask the private sector to bid to run some services.
In the newspaper item, Councillor Jordan is asked why the council is undertaking the exercise, and says that the idea is to give "value for money - the best possible service at the lowest possible cost. It's that simple."
In fact it's so simple that he tells us again, when asked: "What do you want to achieve?"
The reply: "The best possible service at the lowest possible cost. "
So now that we simpletons have heard the answer, how do we interpret it?
In our book it means that we are going to end up with the worst service available, not the best.
That's because the "best possible service at the lowest possible cost" is a service set by price rather than quality.
In other words we are asking bidders to use cost as the controlling factor - instead of giving them targets to be met and then seeing who comes up with the lowest bid to achieve it, which we always believed was the way that these sort of things were usually done.
Whilst Councillor Jordan's words seem to tell us that we will be getting quality for our money, when one looks more closely he really seems to be saying something different altogether.
And we wonder whether he really meant to say what he did.
We think the questions need asking again .... "why is the council undertaking the exercise, and what does it want to achieve?"

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