Has anyone told the Local Government Minister Eric Pickles that the policy towards local government of the administration he represents is for localism?

We ask the question because Mr Pickles seems to wake up each morning with a new rant on how local councils should run their affairs, some of them quite bizarre.

It is our suspicion that council leaders from his own party are getting fed up with some of the nonsense coming from his department in recent weeks.

This week, we were treated to two gems. First, we were told that the Government was removing the restrictions on local councils that forced them into high charges for car parking in order to encourage motorists out of their car and on to public transport.

We have no idea what he is referring to. Charging for car parking has always been at the absolute discretion of local councils. In fact, in Oxfordshire, we have councils that take opposite stances, and for obvious reasons.

While West Oxfordshire District Council keeps its car parks free as part of its policy to keep the town centres attractive to visitors, Oxford City Council keeps its charges high to encourage visitors to use park and ride. Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the respective councils, we would argue that it is exactly the sort of local decision-making that our local authorities should be making and that the political administrations should live or die by.

Refuse collections were another subject on Mr Pickles’ to-do list this week. There was unquestionably a hint of political opportunism in his remarks as councils struggled to keep up collections thanks to a combination of the Christmas period and the heavy snow.

According to Mr Pickles, councils should now all revert back to weekly collections of refuse and his department was going to help them to do this with expertise on renegotiating contracts.

He also suggested they could fund the change by charging a bit more for processing planning applications and tree felling.

Of course, what Mr Pickles fails to acknowledge is that we do still have weekly collections — the major change is that they have to alternate between recyclables and non-recyclables in order to hit targets for reducing landfill imposed by Government.

Maintaining a weekly collection of all waste, which distinguished between recyclables and non-recyclables, was too expensive for most councils to contemplate even when the financial climate was better.

The changes in Oxfordshire were not without teething problems but they have settled down and most of our authorities are achieving recycling rates that we can be proud of. The chances of any of them returning to a weekly collection of all waste are, we would guess, zero.

For Mr Pickles, we would suggest a belated New Year’s resolution — that is to do less grandstanding from Whitehall and devote more attention to achieving the laudable aim of localism.

There is much to do before success can be properly claimed.

A good starting point would be a little less of Whitehall telling us how we should run our local affairs.