"Not on the agenda" - Llanelly House

A favourite device used by the Carmarthenshire Politburo with increasing frequency during the last year is to declare anything they don't want discussed to be not on the agenda, and therefore not a subject to be raised.

At yesterday's meeting of the full council, Cllr Alun Lenny (Plaid) asked whether Llanelly House had repaid part of an emergency loan of £250,000 made by the county council at the end of last year.

"Not on the agenda", snapped the Chief Executive.

The question was raised during a discussion of the council's Annual Report and Improvement Plan, which was very much on the agenda. This is a vast document, and it contains a section dealing with regeneration projects. Listed among them is Llanelly House, which we are told is on course to open in 2013.

Back at the end of 2012, Llanelly House popped up as an emergency item at a meeting of the council's Executive Board (minutes here). The reason for the emergency was that Finance Wales (a body set up by the Welsh Government) was not willing, for reasons we can only speculate about, to extend an existing loan to the trust which runs the Llanelly House project.

The minutes state:

UNANIMOUSLY RESOLVED that the provision of a cash flow loan (on an interest free basis) of up to £250k for the period from January 2013 to December 2013 with a part repayment of £125k being made in July 2013 be approved.

So it would seem that while the Annual Report and Improvement Plan was on the agenda, its contents were not, and we can probably take the chief executive's refusal to answer a simple question as to whether the part repayment had been received as a "no".