Stop this nosey nonsense!

 

We had to smile when we read the following story in the Daily Mail.

“Fruit and vegetable growers are protesting over a council survey which asks if they are gay. The questionnaire is put to residents when they apply for one of the 18 allotments available in Lincoln. The city council wants to know their sexual orientation, race and religion.

"Taxpayers' Association spokeswoman, Fiona McEvoy, said the venture was a waste of time and money.

"It is local authority nonsense at its worst,' she said. 'It's costing money and taking up the time of council officials. 'Who cares how many lesbians, Christians or black people want allotments?'”
If all this sounds familiar, that’s because you heard about this nosey parker “nonsense” before – in the pages of Boston Eye.
It’s a standard feature of every consultation/survey run by Boston Borough Council, and there are no end of these pointless questionnaires issued each year.

The latest is the “cultural” survey which asks a mere eleven questions – including several numbered empty boxes for comments and explanation – about our attendance at “cultural” events in and around Boston.

It then asks a further fifteen questions in the “Getting to know you” section which is prefaced by the words: “We want to provide great services to everyone and it would really help if you could give us some information about yourself…”

This is the usual intrusive, nonsensical exercise of gathering information for its own sake – including age, sex, disability, ethnicity, religion, sexuality and interestingly for Boston “your preferred language” (in our experience it generally starts with an ‘F’.)

The great missed opportunity is that – given the borough’s dominant national migrant groups now hail from Latvia, followed by Lithuania, then Poland, Romania, Bulgaria – no opportunity is taken to analyse this more deeply

We really wish that someone at Boston Borough Council would explain to us why this sort of information needs to be gathered – and whether one single benefit has been gained from gaining it.

Meanwhile, the “cultural” survey ignores one major flaw – which is that Boston broadly lacks any decent cultural structure.

One museum, which is the same every time you visit and has been sanitised to seem as though it could have been built yesterday. A collection of local artefacts that remain locked away from the public gaze. An art gallery that was so completely hopeless, it has been closed. A cinema that could use decent projection equipment. Then there’s Blackfriars – more or less a cut down version of the Embassy Centre in Skegness – but scarcely what you might call “culture.”

We’re sure that there is a small group that would like to think that Boston is the cultural capital of South Lincolnshire, but if there is, it’s high time that they woke up to reality.

In the meantime, the Borough could improve the culture of its questionnaires by dropping all this unnecessary nonsense about disability, ethnicity and sexuality. By all means ask when necessary – but not routinely.

And remember the words of the Taxpayers' Association. “It is local authority nonsense at its worst. 'It’s costing money and taking up the time of council officials. “

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