A NEW year starts for Brighton and Hove Council today with a new system to go with it. For the first time, nearly all the committees that have run the authority will go, to be replaced by a Cabinet system of government.

So, at a stroke, the council has abolished a system which generated huge piles of papers (many of them unread), wasted thousands of hours of time and bored the socks off the few members of the public who ever attended them. Why wasn't it done before?

The answer is it was the way in which business was always done. On the surface it appeared democratic even if, behind the scenes, all the real decisions were always made in closed meetings of the majority party.

It enabled councillors to have a good chew over issues that bothered them and a few that did not.

But it was laborious, long-winded and cumbersome with a terrible tendency to produce shoddy compromises. Someone once said that a camel was a horse designed by committee and you could see how true that was.

It was also unfortunate that conversation tended to expand to fit the time available with the result that bores often dominated.

There was also an endless regurgitation of old issues. The famous example in the last year was the purchase of a lawn mower which was solemnly discussed by four or five committees before going to the full council for decision.

Admittedly it was an expensive mower costing £25,000 but that was nothing for a council dealing in millions.

Some councillors went to committees merely for a cuppa and a snooze. One old boy at Hove would always fall into a light doze at meetings of the road safety committee halfway through his cuppa.

On the Press bench we would watch with bemused satisfaction to see at which point he would inevitably loll forward on to the table, upsetting the contents of the cup.

Councillors often did not understand finance if it involved any figure larger than the value of their houses. They would cheerfully nod through millions on this or that while getting really stuck in on some triviality such as which kinds of toaster could be bought for the staff kitchen.

Clever officers could nearly always get their own way. They would find money from obscure budgets for pet projects while regretfully telling councillors nothing was available for any of their hare-brained schemes.

I won't really miss meetings of the Procrastination And Waffle Committee in which Councillor Bore would pick up a sheaf of papers, exclaiming that he hadn't intended to speak on this issue tonight, before launching into a well-rehearsed diatribe against his political enemies.

Nor will I be hankering after going back to the Prevarication And Superfluous Statements Sub-committee at which the chairman would inquire brightly after an hour's debate on buying new paper clips: "Would anyone else like to have a say?", thereby ensuring another 20 minutes' delay before the only worthwhile item on the agenda.

But what will the fresh system be like on councils which are all being forcibly persuaded by the New Labour Government into cutting the cackle? We may not get camels instead of horses when designed by a cabinet and scrutiny boards but I bet we get the odd dromedary and I may still get the hump.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.