It’s hard to tell what looks worse on a 77-year-old man: fluorescent visibility vest or fluorescent leopard-skin leggings but it doesn’t matter in the end because Sir Rod Stewart has been doing his bit for his local community and the message couldn’t be clearer: we should all be more like Rod.

You may have seen what Sir Rod did. Fed up with pot holes on a road near his house in Essex, the singer rounded up some burly lads, organised a tip-up truck and a few tons of hard core and went out to fix the holes himself. “No one can be bothered to do it,” he said. “My Ferrari can’t go through here at all.” I know exactly how he feels.

At first, everything went well. Rod posted a video on social media of what he was doing to the road and lots of people liked the post – there were 80,000 likes in a day. He also received lots of praise from people who thought he was doing the right thing, including the Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood. “Bravo Rod!” said Ronnie.

However, the local council was not impressed. Lee Scott, the man responsible for road repairs and not the rapper presumably unless everyone in music is working on the roads these days, said it was important people did not take matters into their own hands. “People must always report potholes to the council,” he said, “and we will fix anything that’s dangerous.”

But let’s have a think about whose side we should be on here and more importantly what the council’s advice reveals about us. What Rod was doing, in his own pop-star-don’t-want-my-Ferrari-to-get-scratched way is what lots of us do in our own communities all the time. The road by my house has potholes constantly and mostly it’s the farmer who fixes them a) because it’s just practical and b) because the council would take forever.

Some people will say the reason it’s this way is because councils are under-funded and can’t afford to provide basic services and that’s absolutely true. I’ve spoken to people at every level in Scotland’s councils and the funding situation is shocking and a little frightening and fixing potholes costs a lot of money and there are a lot of potholes.

However, the leap that some people then make (you hear this a lot) is that private citizens – you, me, Rod – shouldn’t go out fixing potholes or do any of the other work of councils because that’s what councils are there for and if we start doing it, then councils will start to expect it or factor it in and the situation will just get worse. But it’s not a very good argument. Both things should happen: the councils should do their bit and so should we. If Essex County Council isn’t fixing potholes, let Rod Stewart.

I see other examples for myself in my own community and the communities of friends and family. There’s a lane by my neighbours’ house that is constantly filled with litter so they pick it up. There was a rough piece of ground near a friend’s house that was left to rot so he and some other people turned it into a garden. When I walk the dog, I always take bags with me to put rubbish in because if I and my neighbours don’t do it, it will be left to lie there for weeks or forever.

By doing this kind of thing, the kind of thing Rod Stewart did in his own way, we are not absolving the council of responsibility, but we are helping and we are challenging an approach, an attitude, that the issues in a community should always be fixed by official authorities. David Cameron’s Big Society idea was much derided but the principle was sound: local services don’t always have to be run by public organisations and sometimes it’s more effective and more efficient if they’re not.

Of course money matters: councils are under-funded and not everyone has cash like Rod to buy hardcore and fix potholes themselves. But the principle remains sound: councils, no one, should criticise or discourage people from fixing problems in the community themselves. Sir Rod doesn’t want to scratch his Ferrari. I get it, I don’t want to scratch my 2003 Toyota Yaris either. So let’s go out with a high-viz and fix it.

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