Local services - What is needed?

A while back I Blogged about a chance to redefine what local services should look like and where they should be targeted, as the government is promising local councils much greater powers to decide what is needed locally.
http://alvin-finch.blogspot.com/2010/11/26-cuts-or-opportunities.html

I also mused about what it is that a council must do. What a good council should do, and what could be left out, if residents don’t want it. Councils are legally obliged to fulfil their statutory duties. But what are the statutory duties they are required to fulfil? New ones are added each year and we hardly ever see any taken out.

http://alvin-finch.blogspot.com/2010/07/statutory-duties-and-budgets.html

I read today at http://www.localgov.co.uk/index.cfm?method=news.detail&id=96368 that “Councils are being offered the chance to ditch what they regard as their most onerous bureaucratic burdens.”

There are it seems that there at least 1294 statutory duties that councils have to abide by.

16 Whitehall departments and agencies are publishing their initial list of statutory duties for which they are responsible. Councils are now being asked which duties are vital to keep.
They are also being asked whether there are other duties that could also be removed.

More information at:
http://www.communities.gov.uk/localgovernment/decentralisation/tacklingburdens/reviewstatutoryduties/

The questions I asked before are:

What sort of things should your council be obliged to do?
How much do you want to pay for those things?

What other questions should we be asking?

Tracking Trash, and Watching Waste

3,000 pieces of rubbish, donated by volunteers, will be tagged in New York, Seattle and London. In order to monitor how rubbish moves around the cities and beyond, a MIT team has developed a small mobile sensor. Basically a miniature cell phone with limited functionality. They say that the system should be able to track rubbish around the globe.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8149183.stm

I will be interesting to see the results.

The team also says that it hopes that the technology can be miniaturised and made cheap enough that the tags could one day be attached to everything.

But does that mean that we might en up throwing even more away? I remember a company I worked for asking that when photocopies were made, a copy was to be set to an administrator. This was so that excessive copying could be tracked. Of course there was then outrage from the admin department that the use of the photocopier had doubled.

Also in the article it says that the MIT team has previously revealed the movements of people around cities, such as Rome and Copenhagen, by analysing mobile phone signals.

Perhaps a bit scary that - Who is able to do this monitoring?