PERHAPS Councillor Kevin Connor (Letters, January 31) could enlighten us on exactly what his workload consists of -- such as how many seminars he attends and what are they about, of how many schools is he a governor or and how often they meet.

Scrutiny groups, another name for the old committee meetings, only with no teeth, only meet infrequently. If it takes him three hours a day to digest the plethora of paperwork emanating from the town hall, maybe it is time they called in an efficiency expert to eliminate the unnecessary verbiage.

The last review of councillors' time spent on council work was carried out before the new system was brought in and was based purely on councillors' own diaries and their assessment of the time they devoted exclusively to council work.

Maybe it is time for another review, especially as the new system was supposed streamline things and, thus, presumably, reduce the amount of time a councillor needs to devote to council business.

However, perhaps an independent panel of electors should carry out such a scrutiny. I wonder how much of Councillor Connor's time that he considers council work could really be interpreted as electioneering work, for example.

Since the executive group takes all decisions and the other councillors cannot change them then, I repeat, do we really need all of them? Maybe we could get along with just two per ward.

Better still, why not do away with the ward system altogether and have proportional representation -- that way there is a possibility that the executive might represent the electors and not just their parties.

L LAWES, Bold Street, Blackburn.