COWARDS OF THE COUNTY

How Shropshire’s Officers Lost the Plot, the Councillors Lost Their Nerve, and the Taxpayer Lost Everything Else

There comes a point in every county’s slow slide into farce when you realise the people running the show are not merely incompetent — they’re proud of it. That point, in Shropshire, arrived some time between:

1. Shropshire Council illegally ignoring the Freedom of Information Act,

2. Homes England shuffling boundary lines like a back-street card dealer, and

3. Planning officers waving through developer fantasies as if public land were a suggestion rather than a legal fact.

And as for the councillors?

Well — let’s just say the orchestra on the Titanic put up a better fight.

Welcome, then, to our latest entry in the chronicle of municipal collapse:

Cowards of the County — A portrait of a local authority so spineless it would be the premium display item at Worms Are Us — right next to the bait.

Part I – The Elephant in the Room Has Learned to Hide the Files

In our first project, we already laid out the grand tradition of Shropshire Council refusing FOIs, shredding transparency, and treating statutory obligations like a seasonal hobby. One FOI breach could be a mistake. Two suggests incompetence.

But when you hit the double digits, you’ve crossed the border into illegality — and the Council seems to have applied for dual citizenship.

Transparency isn’t optional. It isn’t a courtesy extended to taxpayers between tea breaks. It is the law. A law the Council has now broken so routinely that if it were a person, it would have been barred from entering the United States.

Yet councillors — bold guardians of democracy that they are — did precisely nothing.

A few muttered concerns here. A raised eyebrow at a scrutiny meeting there.

And then?

Silence. Manufactured, cultivated silence. The sort issued to councillors who forget their place.

They saw the elephant.

They watched it trample through the accounts, the audits, the governance.

Then they politely held the door open so it could do a second lap.

Part II – Where the Lies Stop and the Evidence Begins

If Elephant in the Room exposed incompetence, This exposes something darker — the sort of thing that makes auditors reach for a second pen and police forces reach for a new incident log.

Here we have:

– Developers shifting boundary lines like pieces on a Monopoly board.

– Council officers nodding it through with all the scrutiny of a weary postman.

– Homes England acting less like a regulator and more like a co-conspirator, greasing the edges of legal boundaries until they magically realign with the developer’s profitability spreadsheet.

And then there is the evidence — not circumstantial, not inferred, not hinted at — but documented, timestamped, mapped and cross-referenced.

Property boundaries don’t move themselves.

Planning portal pages don’t vanish on their own.

Officers don’t “accidentally” forget statutory duties unless they’ve been trained to.

When residents presented the truth, officers stalled.

When councillors were warned, they shrank, stiffened, and swivelled obediently towards the officers — as if trained.

And when wrongdoing surfaced, nobody — not a soul — reached for the whistle – because the referee was in on it.

Because in Shropshire, blowing the whistle is now considered a breach of workplace etiquette.

Part III – The Great Homes England Tango

Let’s be honest: if anyone thought Homes England were the grown-ups in the room, This has put that fantasy to bed.

Instead of upholding standards, they appear to have opted for a thrilling new partnership with Shropshire Council’s planning department and developers in a boundary-shifting tango so synchronised it could win Strictly.

They move.

Shropshire Council moves.

The boundary moves.

Only the residents — the people who actually pay for all this — remain bolted to the floor.

It takes two to tango, yes.

But it takes three to pull off a conspiracy:

Homes England, Shropshire Council Planning, and the developer counting projected profits in the wings.

Part IV – Councillors: Present in Body, Absent in Courage

If officers are the architects of this circus, councillors are its ushers — smiling weakly, showing you to your seat, and apologising for the smell.

Not one councillor, faced with evidence of illegality, procedural breaches, FOI violations, boundary manipulation and planning misconduct, has managed more than a paper-thin shrug of concern, invariably followed by:

– “We’ll look into it.”

– “We’ll ask officers for clarity.”

– “We’re awaiting guidance.”

– “We’re aware of the issue.”

– “We will respond in due course.”

In due course?

Which, translated from Guildhall dialect, means: “Never, unless someone else takes the blame.”

Part V – Corruption on a Grand Scale: Nobody Wants to Say It, So We Will

When:

– Boundaries move in ways that defy maps, law and physics,

– Portal pages vanish like witnesses in a Mafia film,

– FOI laws are treated as optional suggestions,

– Officers behave as if transparency is a nuisance,

– Homes England and developers share outcomes a little too neatly,

– And councillors refuse to challenge any of it—

There is a word for this:

CORRUPTION.

Part VI – The Punchline: The Taxpayer Pays for Every Last Drop of Cowardice

The irony of Shropshire’s governance meltdown is that the only people who haven’t played a role in this farce — Shropshire’s residents — are the ones footing the bill.

They pay for the land.

They pay for the officers.

They pay for the councillors.

They pay for the mistakes.

They pay for the cover-ups.

Shropshire doesn’t need new strategies.

It needs a backbone — preferably one with a map, a law book, and the courage to say “No”.

And so we arrive at the truth Shropshire Council has worked so hard to bury: a county where boundary lines shift when it suits somebody’s balance sheet, FOI requests are dodged with the agility of seasoned escape artists, and Cornovii hides behind “information not held” as if ignorance were a defence rather than an admission.

Homes England choreographs the steps, Shropshire Council follows the routine, and the developer walks away humming the encore.

Meanwhile, councillors — nominal guardians of public accountability — hover politely on the sidelines, mistaking cowardice for caution as the system burns around them.

But the cover-up is fraying. And when the rising tide of evidence finally smashes through the locked drawers, the redacted pages and the cultivated silence, it won’t merely expose incompetence — it will expose a culture that believed secrecy was a right, lying was strategy, and the taxpayer too docile to notice.

That illusion ends now.