DARLINGTON Borough Council is in an extremely difficult position. Its grant from central government has been cut by 40 per cent since 2010 and it is now having to take decisions that many, if not all, the councillors do not want to have to vote through.

Perhaps those councillors’ greatest responsibility, when voting on a decision as momentous as closing the town’s Crown Street library and squeezing it into the Dolphin leisure centre, is to ensure that every aspect of the unwelcome change is watertight so that the townspeople are left with the best possible service.

But the councillors’ vote has been delayed for a third time because of a legal oversight. It is only procedural, but it is still embarrassing.

It has only been as each stage of the legal process has been tested that its flaws have become clear.

So, how much faith can the townspeople have in the other stages of the process that have not yet been tested. For example, the savings: something like £1.7m is needed from “prudent borrowing” to prepare the Dolphin Centre in order to save about £300,000-a-year from the library’s running costs. And the service: we still don’t know where various items are to be stored or how the skeleton staff will cope with the public’s demands.

We shan’t be able to test either the savings or the service until the new system has been running a couple of years. Therefore, the councillors will have to trust the advice given to them, and the legal process is showing that there are many holes in that advice.

Of course, we would love the plan to be withdrawn, but that is as likely as Theresa May withdrawing her hasty invitation to Donald Trump. The councillors, then, when eventually voting it through, must be convinced that the savings are real and the service will be acceptable. But can they when the preliminary legalities have been so flawed?