The recent decision by Brighton and Hove City Council to cut funding for services providing invaluable help to local people at their most vulnerable has shocked local charity workers.

I don't expect we're the only ones who don't get the logic of it all.

It is hard to believe the majority of people in Brighton and Hove would agree with the decision to, for instance, effectively shut a Citizens' Advice Bureau, Brighton's Women's Centre and the only rape crisis project in the city.

Councils have to make difficult decisions about how to allocate scarce resources and charities need to be properly accountable for the money they spend.

But the council's recent decision owes little to these factors and a lot to the grotesque bureaucracy it has put in place to police the local voluntary sector.

It is estimated that £40,000 of public money was spent on the pseudo-scientific "evaluation" of charities during this recent process - that's more than three helplines for rape victims in the real world.

In the past, I have suffered at the hands of this sort of "evaluation".

First, there's the form-filling, questionnaires, "consultations" and "reviews", so intrusive they'd make a Big Brother contestant blush. Then there's the meetings - boy, are there meetings - behind closed doors where all this gets junked.

Finally, there's the decision, delayed for months (to allow for more meetings) and rubber-stamped by councillors within 24 hours of seeing the papers.

And, after all this palaver, groups get their grants cut on the basis of basic factual mistakes by council officers that seem to have survived this tortuous process. There's no appeal, of course. That would be too bureaucratic.

Maybe, just maybe, it's possible some good could yet come of all this. For years, the local voluntary sector has been trying to build a real partnership with the council to ensure that local people, especially those most in need, get top-quality, value-for-money services.

Too often, the expertise and views of the people who actually deliver services are ignored by a council bureaucracy with the power to arbitrarily shut valuable services for no good reason.

Now, elected councillors, MPs and the public are beginning to see just how wasteful and irrational this bureaucracy is. Let's hope they do something about it.

-Colin Chalmers, Director, Community Base, Queens Road, Brighton