In the meantime, before the IMF moves in...

A new report into eight local authorities is out:

Councils in the west of Scotland should work more closely together to help protect public services from cuts, a new report will say.

I always hate it when I read that, "a new report will say." Is it out or not?

But back to the main point. I note that:

BBC Scotland understands one recommendation is to have a single shared roads maintenance service.

There's a lot of other worthy stuff about efficiency and so on.

But the truth is that no government operation has any real way of knowing whether it's efficient or not. Sure, we can all point out some piece of nonsense or another and suggest all kinds of mergers (to save money) or de-mergers (to give more local control) but we can only obtain the best mixture of organisational sizes once all of these government functions have been privatised.

Those that aren't abolished, of course.