The failure this year by Devon County Council to control Exeter’s weeds has been bad enough, but the proposal from them to do nothing at all next year beggars belief. Exeter City Council is facing equally serious budgetary constraints, yet it manages to do a decent job on street cleaning, parks and its other responsibilities. But the image of the city is completely let down if the county fails in its duty on weed control.

Next year Exeter will be a show case to the world during the Rugby World Cup. It would be completely unacceptable for this year’s fiasco to be repeated. If Devon can’t or won’t do the job they should hand responsibility and funding to the city who I’m sure would be only too happy to do it.

This is another of the many examples where Exeter is badly let down by Tory run Devon and why Exeter would be better off running its own affairs under a single unitary local authority. This was delivered in 2010 by the then Labour Government, only for the coalition to reverse it in one of their first acts in Government. We are now seeing the damaging consequences of that, whether on weeds, the county switching off our street lights and in the worrying news this week that two of Exeter’s well used youth centres might close, even though there are other organisations willing to take them on, because of incompetence by the county council.