I listened to a quite extraordinary exchange on Radio 4's You and Yours this week.

Trafford Council has twice been found guilty by the Local Government Ombudsman of maladministration causing injustice. Both times they have simply ignored the ruling.

Both cases involved vulnerable people and both seem, to me, to be simply that Trafford is too stingy to pay what it should and has too much brass neck to be bothered by the public reaction.

In the first case it refused to agree to waive repayment of a housing grant it had made to an elderly woman with mental health problems who had been unaware of a change in the rules governing such a clawback.

In the second it is refusing to pay £100,000 in compensation to the family of Carly Wright, a young woman with disabilities whose needs were neglected by the council when she was due to transfer from children's services to those for adults.

Let's be clear that these decisions to ignore the ombudsman's rulings were not made by some unaccountable cabal. The whole council had to agree to do this.

So Carly's mum was interviewed on Your and Yours and in remarkably composed fashion set out the scandalous way her daughter had been treated.

On comes Anne Seex, the ombudsman, who has been shown to be essentially ineffective in the face of an obdurate council, and despite this thinks the system works.

It works, she says, because these cases are very rare (true) and because it would "fundamentally change the relationship" between the ombudsman and a council.

Yeah, like make it effective.

It's like pulling back the curtain in the Wizard of Oz. The ombudsman blows great puffs of anger in report after report but can at most require a council to put a story in the local paper. If the council decides to take the heat there's nothing that can be done.

Let's be clear: Trafford is the guilty party here (and so are East Riding of Yorkshire and Blackpool councils which have also ignored such rulings).

But the Wright family have started an epetition asking that all rulings be binding in law and I see merit in that. You can sign it here.

If someone from the Local Government Ombudsmen wishes to put their reasons for keeping the present system I'd welcome the debate.

If, however, Trafford Council believes that in the interests of fairness I should balance this report with some comment from them, they can go whistle. If they don't like it they can take it up with my ombudsman.