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Figures show that local residents - yes that’s you and me - have fallen out of love with local government, assuming we were ever that besotted in the first place.

Surveys show that barely half of us can bring ourselves to admit we are satisfied with the way our local council is running things, a figure that keeps getting worse every time we are asked for an opinion.

Why is it that we have such a disengaged and disenchanted relationship with local government in this country?  Why don’t we know and don’t care what our local councils do, even though we hate paying for them and complain all the time about what we think they are not doing for us?

Why do we always moan on about the general slowness and incompetence of our local council without having the slightest clue about how it is performing - or even how its performance is measured?

Of course the paradox is that, according to the research, we love most of things local government does.

We would fight to the death to keep our local library open, would start a revolution to defend our grandma’s right to receive meals on wheels and we would erect barricades to stop the closing of our village school.

Year on year we tell opinion pollsters that we are more and more satisfied with these services but less and less satisfied with the very councils that provide them.

This willful inability to get our heads around who is actually delivering these often life and death services - and our shameful neglect of the important democratic principles of local government - means that we are in danger of sleepwalking into a future of less and less influence over the things that matter most to our families: schools, roads, social services, cheap and good leisure facilities, the protection of the countryside and so on.

For example, in shire counties up and down the country a debate has been raging since the end of last year as councils wrangle over the future of so called two-tier areas where district councils and county councils run often overlapping services.

The government wants to create new, all-purpose and all-powerful councils in their place - and there does seem to be a strong argument that this will cut costs, clear up confusion and keep council tax increases low.

This debate is not about how councils are structured, although structures are part of it, it is about who will run schools and roads and meals on wheels in the future, how much these services will cost, and how local people can have more say in what happens in their area.

Yet this debate has probably passed most of us by. And that is a failure both of the councils themselves and their communications – and of you and me for failing to really take any notice of what is happening under our noses.

Paul.Masterman@blueyonder.co.uk