SO Cheshire’s police and crime commissioner John Dwyer is adding to his staff with some new jobs.

The posts – carrying the grand titles of commissioning officer and planning and strategy officer and costing £60,000, are being funded by a Government grant.

However, it means that Mr Dwyer will now have 15 staff at a cost to us, the taxpayers, of £760,000.

Mr Dwyer argues that this is still £100,000 a year less than the old police authority used to cost us but it’s still not saving us much cash – which I think was the general idea of having PCCs in the first place.

Quite what these 15 staff do is less clear and I’d be really interested to know more about their roles and the value for money they provide.

But what’s really got my goat with this latest announcement is that of the 70 police staff due to lose their jobs in the latest round of budget cuts, not one of them is deemed suitable to be considered for either role. So the jobs have been advertised externally.

Admittedly my knowledge of employment law is not vast but it has always been my understanding that an employer is supposed to offer any ‘suitable alternative employment’ within an organisation or an associated company to those at risk of redundancy.

Even if that means the person might require training in order to fulfil a new role.

So I find it inconceivable that not one of the 70 people currently holding down jobs as police staff are even being allowed to have a crack at one of the new positions – instead they’ve all been thrown on the scrapheap.

I don’t know how Mr Dwyer sleeps at night, but I’m sure having 15 people to help him do his job certainly helps free the mind.

n I SUPPOSE I shouldn’t be surprised to read how many children in our town don’t speak English as their first language.

However I was fairly astonished that at one primary school, Westbrook Old Hall, children speak no fewer than 17 languages and one of them – Tagalog I’d never even heard of. Apparently it is spoken by a quarter of the population of the Philippines.

In St Alban’s Catholic Primary in Bewsey nearly half the children don’t have English as their first language.

That’s some headache for our education system and a high cost to the local authority which is having to use interpreters to speak to parents who don’t speak English at all.

n Shame on Abba Cars using the hideous wall of tyres near Kingsway Bridge to advertise its services by paying for a banner there.

The unsightly stack was constructed without planning permission and the council has ordered it to be taken down. But to encourage those responsible for this monstrosity by paying them to advertise is just wrong.

Spend your money more wisely Abba.