IN THE final days before the lame duck is replaced by the herd of lost sheep our council's officers are trying to push through one of their favourite schemes.

I have seen little publicly of Elected Mayor Mark Meredith's contribution since his arrest last month and at the beginning of June he will have to stop even collecting his salary. Once he goes the councillors will set about replacing him with one of their own and the rush for the trough makes the spread of swine flu look slow and straightforward.

Meanwhile the paid officers have slipped plans for the speeding up of the transfer of council jobs to a private sector partner on to the agenda of the dying regime. Their proposal is to appoint a new partner organisation to undertake administrative functions like facility management, IT, property services, payroll and human resources on behalf of the authority.

The new partner would take over existing staff and manage them as they saw fit. This type of arrangement, much favoured by Government, has three major advantages. First of all it gets the job done for a price that is agreed in advance. So no unsightly overspends. Secondly it makes someone else responsible if your council tax benefit doesn't arrive or the bins aren't collected. That suits politicians and officers alike.

Thirdly it gives the difficult job of changing a staff culture that has often become bureaucratic and lazy to someone else. Managers who have agonised for years about who should tell George that he can't continue to arrive at 9.30am and start by making a brew are only too glad to pass the responsibility of George's management to a new employer.

Now, actually, I think there are some advantages to outsourcing, as this arrangement is called. I do believe that much of the present operation is inefficient and that smaller focused units with a clear contract to perform tasks could improve efficiency. However, that is not what is proposed at Stoke Town Hall. No, our resident brains want to transfer almost all of their functions over a period of a few years to a single private sector contractor.

The transfer fails to realise that huge private sector organisations are just as inefficient as huge public sector ones. We will not end up with a council bureaucracy that is more effective at serving our communities; we will simply end up with one that has loyalties that are divided between our city and its shareholders.

If experience elsewhere is anything to go by, the people at the top will all be poached from our council staff or other local authorities.

In other words they could be brought in anyway. The vast majority of hard working employees who want leadership to improve their outputs will be intimidated and disempowered by target driven management, redundancies and over rapid change.

As time goes on, jobs that could be done here will be moved elsewhere for cost savings. Our city centre is rightly delighted to have all the payroll staff for a major Birmingham health trust located here.

Under the council's proposals it is likely that, in the medium term, instead of winning jobs from Birmingham, we will be losing them to cities like Birmingham or even overseas providers.

Outsourcing only works where it is run by a strong visionary leadership.

If councillors really knew how to put the city on the road to recovery and had analysed the tasks that need doing next then it would be fine to delegate those tasks to private sector contractors for delivery.

However, that is clearly not the case. The fact that this scheme is aiming to transfer jobs from Stoke town to the new business district in the city centre is symptomatic of their muddle.

Yes, this transfer will allow them to claim that the new business district is a major employment centre, but it will not have created a single new job.

The fact that this huge strategic scheme is being pushed through to suit the politics of the moment screams to me of poor quality thinking. The fact that our councillors are prepared to accept this proposal as though it were inevitable demonstrates their lack of a strategic framework against which to evaluate new proposals. If you thought Faulty Towers could get no worse watch this space!