CAN the last public service to leave High Wycombe please turn out the lights?

That’s what I felt like screaming when I read the continued depressing news about the trend for centralisation and outsourcing which allegedly saves money and boosts efficiency.

The latest service which stands to fall prey to this fashion is the local CCTV control room in Wycombe, which we were recently told may be moved to Slough to save cash for the district council.

Now, I appreciate lots of people don’t like the principle of CCTV, even though I do, but do you really believe it will be better to be ‘spied on’ in Berkshire by people who don’t know our area?

However, I’m afraid modern bureaucrats love the idea of remote services which benefit from ‘economies of scale’.

We’ve seen it for the last few years in our hospitals where bigger is apparently better. Doctors and health officials adore the notion of massive units where they can all work together and share knowledge and the best equipment.

That’s why so many services have moved, or are about to move, from Wycombe to Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

But where’s it all going to end? Why stop with Stoke Mandeville? Why not go the whole hog and have a huge brilliant hospital in say France?

I’m sure the Channel Tunnel is more attractive to many, and easier to negotiate, than the dreaded A4010.

Yes, silly joke perhaps, but who would have thought say ten years ago that a town the size of High Wycombe wouldn’t have a full maternity department or emergency trauma or an A&E?

My prediction is that in a few years time, we’ll have another consultation about moving Stoke Mandeville services to somewhere such as Oxford. Then it will be London, Birmingham or Southampton. But at least they’ll keep Wycombe Hospital open to specialise in toe-nail clipping surgery, and we’ll be told we all must be grateful.

So what is it exactly about Wycombe that these people don’t like? Unlike Aylesbury, it has fantastic road networks, being close to the M40, M25 and M4.

It has a large growing population, lots of great schools and superb countryside. It’s even got decent shopping, theatre, restaurants and cinema.

It also has the wonderful scenic riverside town of Marlow on the doorstep which relies on the same public services.

But all this is not good enough apparently to allow us to run our own complete hospital or our own CCTV services.

Coincidentally last week, news also broke that High Wycombe suffered the worst job losses in the whole of the UK during the boom years before recession hit.

The town lost 18,000 jobs or 17.1 per cent employment between 2004 and 2009. A report last week revealed High Wycombe isn’t set to recover from the recession until 2018.

Well, if the bureaucrats continue on their merry way, it will take a lot longer than that. There will be fewer jobs in the area because they will all have been outsourced to somewhere else to save money. Yet, in the grand scheme, it won’t save money because more people will be out of work relying on state benefits through no fault of their own.

The only thing that ever seems to grow and flourish in this area is traffic lights. They spring up right, left and centre, causing no end of headaches to motorists and blocking up our roads. But, I suppose, at least this provides some work.

So when my son grows up and asks me for career advice, I’m going to tell him to become a traffic light engineer.

Or perhaps he can train to join the Ministry of Outsourcing Local Services.

Trouble with that one there won’t be any local services to speak of by the time he enters the world of work. Apart from traffic light sequence co-ordination. But that will probably be outsourced as well by then.

So that rather answers the question in my first paragraph: They won’t need anyone to turn off the lights in High Wycombe – they will be able to do it remotely from an outsourced central hub in Slough or Milton Keynes.