Dyfed Powys Police - the Major Incident Mystery

Back in April of this year, Dyfed Powys Police proudly announced that construction work on its new three storey major incident centre had been completed. The cost of this extension to the Carmarthen Headquarters of the force runs into millions of pounds, with some reports stating that the bill runs to £10 million. A chunk of the funding apparently came from the Welsh Government.

Here they are sharing a cake. Will they soon be sharing a bunker?

Five months have passed, and the centre has still not opened. There have been suggestions that the centre is prone to flooding, but a spokesperson for the police force dismissed these as just "local rumours" without giving an explanation for the delay in this week's Carmarthen Journal (article appears to be unavailable online).

The police have previously said that the new centre will be used for training, and that in the event of a major incident, the facilities could be used by other agencies, including Carmarthenshire County Council. The thought of Mark James and Meryl Gravell being comfortably ensconced in the new headquarters while the rest of us are left to fend off rabid badgers, floods, famine and marauding bands of Meibion Glyndŵr paratroopers is a great comfort, and we can be sure that the top brass of Pembrokeshire, Ceredigion and Powys county councils will be happy to relinquish control to the dynamic duo, since they appear not to have been given space in the new HQ and will therefore be wiped out with the rest of us.

No doubt when the flood waters recede and the last of the plague ridden peasantry have been 'dealt with', Meryl and Mark will emerge, Queen and King of all they survey. Real Power at last! And victory over those parochial fools on the fire and police authorities who rejected Meryl's plans to absorb the two authorities into the county council.

Older readers may be wondering why the council could not use its very own nuclear bunker under Spilman Street. You know, the one they just finished building at huge cost when the Berlin Wall came down? Now used for storage, apparently. How much is the county council paying to book its place in the new centre?

But back to the new super major incident centre. So far unopened and unused. Like me, you may be naively wondering how many major incidents Dyfed Powys have to deal with in a year. Or even how many truly major incidents they have dealt with, well, ever. Mrs Evans' cat stuck up a tree in Plwmp, perhaps?

Helpfully, the police tell us what counts as a major incident. You can find details here. The list is as follows:

Examples of Hazards

• Transport accidents
• Severe weather
• Flooding
• Industrial accidents and environmental pollution
• Human health risks
• Animal health risks
• Industrial technical failure

Examples of Threats

• Attacks using explosives
• Chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear threats
• Electronic attacks affecting utilities and communications

That's a pretty wide range of threats and hazards, and there have been examples recently of events which fell into the first category, including a tragic accident involving a minibus and the explosion at the refinery in Milford Haven earlier this year. Both involved loss of life. Hardly a week goes by without a fatal road accident somewhere in the region, and far too many of these involve young male drivers, but the number of road accidents which could be classified as major incidents is vanishingly small in a large geographical area with next to no stretches of motorway.

All of the incidents classified as "major" were managed successfully without the new major incident centre, which stood empty and unused for several of them. And there was no reason for Carmarthenshire County Council to take up residence either.

Even the architects of the new building said that it was unlikely that the new centre would see much active use, and the local Assembly Member, Rhodri Glyn Thomas, said he feared it might become another white elephant. This was probably a reference to the national herd of white elephants we have in Carmarthenshire, a herd which has grown and prospered mightily thanks to the vision of Mark James.

So as we prepare to fight off radioactive badgers and the flood waters lap around our homes, residents of the Dyfed Powys Police area might fleetingly wonder why the force has been spending so much on top of the range BMWs, etc. for the use of senior officers and the new major incident centre, while police stations in places like Tregaron are being closed.

It's all a question of priorities, of course. After all, what's more likely, a drunken brawl on a Saturday night in Tregaron or a nuclear threat to Trimsaran?

Reforming Welsh Local Government - Carl Sargeant shows a bit of ankle

We did not have to wait long to get a glimpse of what the Welsh Government intends to do with local government, with the announcement yesterday that it plans to create six new regions to deliver services such as education, social care and waste collection. A draft law will be published in the autumn setting out details, and until we see that yesterday's announcement leaves us with more questions than answers.

What is already clear is that none of the existing 22 councils will be merged or abolished, and all 1,200-odd councillors will remain.

It is also clear that there is broad consensus among both the public and in government circles that 22 separate local authorities is too many, but the Government's conclusion was that a reorganisation along those lines would be expensive, slow and might not deliver efficiencies. In addition, the Government is almost certainly mindful that any attempt to change boundaries would invariably upset vocal local lobbies who want to keep entities such as Pembrokeshire.

Social care, education and waste collection account for a huge chunk of our councils' business, and pooling these services on regional lines certainly makes some sense. Without them, questions will inevitably be asked whether we then still need all the paraphernalia of chief executives, assistant chief executives and directors of this and that 22 times over. The residual responsibilities of the councils will be reduced to not much more than housing and planning, collecting council tax, running leisure centres and public health.

One of the main dangers of the proposals is that they could result in the creation of a new layer of government with new regional education authorities and joint committees of councillors, while leaving the old county infrastructure in place below it and leading to (even) less transparency and accountability.

There will also be concerns about the impact on the Welsh language, with education in places such as Gwynedd and Ynys Môn, being subsumed into a much larger quasi-authority covering areas which are predominantly English-speaking. The same could be true for the proposed Mid and West Wales region.

On the positive side, many people in Wales will hope that the bureaucratic nonsense of a myriad of council boundaries is reduced. Comments on the BBC Wales website include several from people who have been threatened for daring to use the wrong council waste collection depot, and perhaps in some areas school catchments will be less restrictive.

The proposals have already been criticised by some as reorganisation through the back door. It certainly looks as though the Government is following the line of least resistance politically, with a largely technocratic reform which could yet have much greater consequences for all of us than the low-key announcement yesterday let on.

Welsh councils - the vultures come home to roost

First it was Angelsey, then it was Pembrokeshire, and now Blaenau Gwent. The commissioners have not been sent into Pembrokeshire yet, but as Caebrwyn reports, the war of words between Leighton Andrews, Minister for Education, and the hapless council leader, John Davies, is hotting up. Meanwhile, the first shock troops have already gone into Blaenau Gwent (see the Photon for details).

Pembrokeshire illustrates well what is wrong with so much of our local government in Wales. The council is dominated by Independent councillors who have delegated most of their powers to a very powerful chief executive; in this case Bryn Parry Jones, who has been busy keeping his head down in the slanging match between John Davies and Leighton Andrews. Interestingly, one of the excuses offered by Mr Davies for his council's failings was that so many of the council's powers and responsibilities had been delegated to non-elected officials.

Carmarthenshire's constitution is a very good example of the way this works. Huge swathes of powers and responsibilities have been delegated to the chief executive, who also decides what can and cannot be discussed in the council chamber.

As in so many other parts of Wales, the Independents are an old boy network (with a few old girls thrown in these days). We all know the type. Typically aged between 65 and 80, their ranks are made up for the most part of retired businessmen, well-to-do farmers, retired police officers, Freemasons and the like. Many of them are returned unopposed at elections, and so what you get is a self-perpetuating oligarchy which looks after itself and the interests of its friends. To be fair, there are some good Independent councillors, but the key question is, how do you become an Independent?

Just as no one is born wearing grey slacks and a blue blazer, nobody grows up thinking, "I am an Independent with a capital I". Like the secret service, the magistracy, the masons and other hallowed institutions, you do not apply to join. You are "approached".

As an Independent councillor, you will from time to time be asked to appoint a chief executive, who then knows that provided he keeps his trousers up and his hands out of the till, his job is safe as long as the Independents retain political control. The chief executive then appoints his own team of senior officers, and the appointments are rubber-stamped by the councillors. The chief executive and his client officers can then get on with running the council, safe in the knowledge that nobody is going to ask awkward questions or rock the boat provided that the outside world can be convinced that the ship is running smoothly. Hence the need for a strong and ultra-loyal PR team. Any cock-ups or unfortunate failures can usually be discreetly dealt with behind closed doors.

So while we all applaud the brave protesters in Arab countries who are fighting to end one-party rule and bring down the oligarchs, here in Wales we ignore the perpetual one-party states which are our county councils.

That is not to say that councillors who belong to political parties are always good; there are some bad and mediocre examples wherever you look. But, with the exception of the Conservative Party, the mainstream political parties are open and democratic. There are also some (not many) genuine independents to choose from as well.

So tempting as it is to place all the blame on councillors and over-mighty council officers, we the electorate must also shoulder a lot of responsibility for councils which fail our children, the elderly and others. Local democracy should mean that all councillors have to fight for re-election every four years, and that we see administrations being kicked out of office a lot more often than is the case now. If John Davies and Bryn Parry Jones knew that there was a real risk that the voters might send them packing, it is unlikely that Pembrokeshire would find itself in the mess it is in now.

Reorganising local government in Wales

A report produced by Estyn and the Care and Social Services Inspectorate has highlighted serious failings in the way Pembrokeshire County Council is run, and some of the criticism of the way in which the council is dominated by its non-elected officers sounds very familiar to us neighbours in Carmarthenshire.

The Western Telegraph's coverage of the report can be seen here, along with some interesting comments. Some of those commenting would seem to work for the council, and one advances a conspiracy theory that Estyn is somehow involved in a plot with the Welsh Government to discredit councils as a prelude to a shake-up of local government in Wales. The same anonymous individual warns that if Pembrokeshire is not careful, it could end up being ruled from Carmarthen, a fate surely worse than death.

In a measured piece, Vaughan Roderick also thinks the Welsh Government is preparing the ground for a shake-up.

Of course, the fact is that Wales does not need and cannot afford 22 separate counties and county boroughs, plus three national park authorities.

It is hard to make comparisons with other countries because systems of local government vary so much. Switzerland, with a population of just under 8 million, has 26 cantons. These vary in size and population enormously, and some of the smallest cantons are also the whackiest. That may sound familiar to residents of Angelsey, Wales's own leading basket case. Possibly the most notorious of the Swiss cantons are the two "half cantons" of Appenzell, where women did not get the vote until the 1970s, and where people voted strongly against joining the United Nations in 2002.

France, with a population of about 63 million, has 96 mainland departements, yielding an average of just under 660,000 people per departement.

How ever you look at it, we are pretty close to the top of the league table of most over-governed places in Europe, and probably in the world, but bringing about change will inevitably upset more people than it pleases.


Hands up in Angelsey if you want a merger with Gwynedd. Oh, all right then.

Come in Llanelli. So you are not happy with being part of Carmarthenshire, something we can understand. How about a merger with Swansea? No?

Calling Ceredigion. In many respects Ceredigion makes obvious sense as a county, but it is struggling in some important areas, including education where a budgetary crisis is looming. Not many takers in Ceredigion for a return to the days of Dyfed.

Powys is probably one of the few existing counties which should have a secure future, although there may well be a Radnorshire Liberation Front for all I know.

Then we have a clutch of Labour fiefdoms in Rhondda Cynon Taf, Merthyr, Blaenau Gwent, Torfaen, etc., some of which are very obviously failing local people and children in particular. Compare pupil-teacher ratios, and you will see what I mean.

It's not just local resistance that is holding up change, of course. There was not much discussion about reorganising local government in the recent Assembly election campaign, was there? Partly because the last two reorganisations were so badly botched, and partly because the patchwork quilt of local government provides so many jobs, and no politician wants to throw thousands of people out of work at a time of rising unemployment.

But we must bite the bullet, nevertheless. The report on children's services in Pembrokeshire is one of the most damning ever to be published in Wales, and its criticisms of the way in which the council is run apply to quite a few other Welsh councils. In some parts of Wales local authority education provision is so under-funded and inadequate that it should constitute a national scandal.

Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire are not alone in having undemocratic and secretive officer-led regimes. The Local Development Plans which threaten so many parts of Wales with massive housing developments and the obliteration of local communities are a product not of local democracy, but of a system in which a small elite of career administrators have gained control and are seeking to stamp their vision on the rest of us. The busier and bigger councils become, the less likely they are to be abolished; that may be the thought at the back of a few minds in county halls across Wales.

And then we have the ordinary, everyday lunacy of local government. The nearest council waste recycling centre to me is about 10 miles away, but I live a few hundred yards away on the wrong side of the river. So I have to do a round trip of about 45 miles, instead. Great for the environment.

How about a nice project to improve river access to local residents and tourists alike? Best not even think about it because the river is a local authority boundary, and any project which involves cross-border cooperation is almost certainly doomed.

So let's hope the conspiracy theorist is right, and that Cardiff is contemplating a root and branch reform; that the fiefdoms and rotten boroughs will be swept away; that the overmighty chief executives, secrecy and undemocratic ways of Welsh local government are consigned to the rubbish bin where they belong; and that our national politicians rise to the challenge and set about building a system of local government which is the envy of the rest of Europe.

Well, we can but hope.

Freedom of Information and Bloodymindedness

Newcastle Emlyn, with Adpar on the other side of the river Teifi, has a population of about 1,500, but we have a lot of shops, banks and cafes. There is a medium-sized independent supermarket and a Co-op and a large Spar, and a range of independent food shops, including two butchers, a bakery, a delicatessen, a fishmonger and a shop specialising in locally produced food.  Apart from the Co-op, CK's and Boots, all of the shops are locally owned. Together, they provide a livelihood for quite a few families and employment for many more.

Like everywhere else, the retailers here are feeling the pinch, but the town has proved remarkably resilient, and there are almost no empty premises.

Against this background, you can imagine the shock felt here when two planning applications for supermarkets were submitted within a couple of months of each other back at the end of 2008 and early 2009. The first was an application by Lidl to build a store just outside the town centre, opposite the existing CK's supermarket.

At the time, the consensus was that Lidl would not present a serious threat to the livelihoods of the existing shops, and would help many local people struggling on low incomes as a source of low-cost basic foodstuffs.

The second application, known as the Cawdor application, was to build a much larger store on the very edge of the town centre with a floor area 2.5 times the size of CK's, currently the largest retailer, and as large as all of the existing convenience goods retailers in town put together. The owner of the site would not reveal the identity of the supermarket group which would operate the site, and he still refuses to do so.

It soon became clear that the county's planning department preferred the Cawdor application, but to cut a long story short, the Lidl application was eventually approved, with some important conditions attached, while the second application was refused on largely technical grounds, such as colour schemes and the lack of a traffic survey on a Saturday. Lidl later abandoned its plans because of what it felt were unduly onerous restrictions placed on its grant of planning.

The Cawdor application was refused in September 2009 and resubmitted a couple of months later. There have been long and unexplained delays in processing this application, but it now seems that it will go before the Planning Committee in September, almost certainly with a recommendation to accept from the planning officers.

There are many aspects of this long running saga which do not cast the County Council in a good light, but one of the worst concerns the council's culture of secrecy and the way it has handled legitimate requests for information from the public.

The planning officer's reports on both the Lidl and Cawdor applications cited various studies and reports commissioned by the council. The most important of these were a critique of the retail impact assessments and a report on road safety and traffic implications.

The action group set up by local residents and businesses requested copies of the reports. The planning officer rejected the requests. The traffic assessment was eventually released in response to an FOI request, while the critique, written by Nathaniel Lichfield Partners for the council, was eventually also released after very intense lobbying.

The Nathaniel Lichfiled critique, the planning officer's report and the retail impact assessment submitted by the applicant all made reference to a document referred to as Nathaniel Lichfield's "emerging" Retail Study for the county as a whole. In fact, it was clear that key parts of all three documents relied on evidence presented in the Retail Study, but that evidence was not available to the public. The council's attitude is best summed up as "we believe that there is a need for a fifth large food store in your town, and you're just going to have to accept that we are satisfied by the evidence we have, but which we are not going to show to you."

An FOI request to secure release of the Study was rejected. Adam Price, our MP at the time, also had a similar request rejected on the grounds that release of the information might show developers across the county where there were development opportunities, and thereby damage the environment. The requests were dealt with under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004, rather than FOIA.

A third request was submitted, this time saying that the Action Group wanted only the data on Newcastle Emlyn, and pointing out that it was highly unlikely that the Study would reveal opportunities for even more supermarkets. The reason the Study was so important was that this was the primary evidence being cited by both the council and the developer of the need for the supermarket.

The third request was also rejected, and it was clear from the response that the FOI officers had not read the request or understood that the information sought related only to Newcastle Emlyn. A complaint to that effect was answered with a letter saying that the complaint would be taken as a request for an appeal.

More weeks went by. By this time, almost a year had gone by with the council sticking doggedly to its guns.

Eventually the council announced that it had also rejected the appeal, before going on to say that an edited version of the relevant sections would be released in due course.

More weeks went by, until a heavily redacted and very slim document was released. Redacted is probably not the right word, because the document had effectively been hacked to pieces, with bits then stuck together again at random. Imagine a lunatic chainsaw murderer butchering his victim, and then sticking the head and a few other bits together before dumping the results in your front garden. Human, certainly, but without the torso and legs, and the head stuck onto a foot. Gruesome and senseless.

The letter helpfully added that if the requester was not satisfied, they could now appeal to the Information Commissioner, fully aware no doubt that by the time the Commissioner responded, the planning application would be ancient history.

And that is how things stood until the recent publication of the deposit Local Development Plan where you will find, among the evidence proffered, a copy of the Retail Study. You know, the document which could not be released to campaigners fighting to protect their community from greedy developers and supermarket chains because publication would (EIR 2004 is clear about this as grounds for refusal: not might but would) damage the environment.

So what has changed?

Odder still, the Action Group also complained to the council that the developer and his agents had cited key findings from the Retail Study in their application, and that it was reasonable to assume that they had had access to evidence which was being denied to objectors. The council replied that it had not given the developer or his agents sight of the Retail Study, neglecting to explain how the applicant had been able to quote from it. Clairvoyance, perhaps.

So for anyone worried that publication of the LDP documentation will have opened up the floodgates to supermarket developments across Carmarthenshire, you can probably safely assume that they had already seen it. It was only members of the public who were not allowed to read it.

Oh, and Nathaniel Lichfield, the authors of the Retail Study, are trusted long-term partners of the County Council, according to the Head of Planning. Funnily enough, if you look at Nathaniel Lichfield's website, you can read similar testimonials from the supermarket chains it helps to win planning applications.

Secrecy and Incompetence

Carmarthenshire County Council has been re-jigging its website again, and managed both to "lose" a lot of important information and make the service even less user-friendly.

Want to find out who the members of the Planning Committee or the Education and Children's Services Committee are? Well, tough. Want to find out the linguistic preferences of councillors so that you know whether a letter in Welsh will be answered in Welsh? No longer possible. Click on the link headed "Councillors and Committees", and you find yourself looking at the council's constitution.

The website gives you a good idea of what the council's priorities are, and they are all about projecting an image rather than making basic, important information easily available to the public.

The main banner page features a selection of "top stories" which refresh every 30 seconds or so. The stories tend to change every couple of weeks. Currently we have a piece on job evaluation and equal pay for council staff; an advertisement for the upcoming Merlin Festival; information on how to nominate a member of council staff for a "Shine" award, and a notice stating that the council is going to review its polling districts and polling stations. Nothing about the Local Development Plan, which is now entering the last few days of its formal public consultation, and without doubt the most important thing the council is doing at the moment. Oh, and before you get too excited, the review of polling districts is really just a legal notice announcing that a review will be carried out, without any information on the scope of the review.

As Caebrwyn has pointed out on her blog, the council's Policy and Resources Committee reported in July that the council has seen a 10-15% rise in the number of Freedom of Information Requests in the last year, and concerns were expressed about the authority's ability to deal with them with the resources it currently has available.

So here are some suggestions to help reduce the number and complexity of FOI requests:

1. The prevailing culture within the council is best summed up as "if we are not legally obliged to publish something, we won't". Want to obtain a consultant's report on the road safety implications of a planning application? You have to submit an FOI request. You may not get a response until after the application has been decided, but the council has met its legal obligations. The approach should be to turn this on its head in favour of a presumption that everything will be published unless it breaches data protection legislation, compromises the council's financial interests in e.g. a competitive tender, or would compromise legal proceedings or criminal investigations.
2. Revamp the council's website and newspaper. The website needs a radical re-design to make it easier and more logical to use, with a much better search engine. A search in Welsh for "Cynllun Datblygu Lleol" retrieves nothing on the LDP, but tells you instead about the council's free school milk scheme. Again, a fundamental shift in thinking is needed, away from "how do we make ourselves look good" to an emphasis on making important information accessible. Wonderful though they may be, the "Shine Awards" are not a priority for people interested in the LDP, planning, education, social care, waste, the environment, etc.
3. Set a target to halve the number of public interest exemptions applied in meetings of the full council and its committees. There can be no justification for keeping secret a report on transferring the council's public toilets to community councils, or for withholding another report on an action plan for the county's leisure centres.

Do this, and the number of FOI requests would fall. And we might end up with a council that actually deserves the praise it is so desperate to receive.

Update

Doh! How could I have missed it? The website does still have a document showing membership of the committees. All you have to do is select 'Council and Democracy', then click on 'Councillors and Committees'. Next select 'List of Committees'. This pulls up the council's constitution, but bear with me. Scroll down to the end of the long list of documents, and you will find a heading '8. Bilingual Composition pdf' just after '7. Councillors' Names and Addresses'.  And bingo! There we have it. Obvious really.