John Shewell, director of corporate relations at Brighton and Hove City Council, could barely contain himself as he boasted at a public meeting on Monday evening how quickly the council had repaired a broken street light after being alerted to the fault by someone using the social networking site, Twitter.

Mr Shewell gushingly described how a resident had attached a photo of the broken light to his message and within no more than a couple of hours the light had been fixed, with the workman – hilariously – taking his own photo showing the light fully operational again; which had also been displayed on Twitter.

According to Mr Shewell, this was an excellent example of how a council should be responding to its residents and highlighted one of the many benefits of social networking.

I take a different view and see it as a rather clumsy and desperate attempt to try and justify why Brighton and Hove City Council should be allocating extra funding to assist it to become a major player in the social networking arena.

Mr Shewell seems to be suggesting that the moral of the story is that if you want anything done in this city, you’ve got to start “tweeting”.

Presumably, though, the more people who “tweet” the council as their preferred method of communication, the more resources that will need to be allocated to deal with queries made using this method and, no doubt, at the expense of those who still prefer to use more traditional methods of communication such as letter and telephone, which Brighton and Hove Council tends to respond to in a rather more pedestrian way.

Brighton and Hove City Council should stop twittering around and dramatically improve the way it communicates with ALL residents so that everyone is clear as to what vision the council has for our city, what its priorities are – and exactly how our money is being spent.

Peter Lilley, Salisbury Road, Hove