Edna's Law

Earlier this week a group of Carmarthenshire whistleblowers travelled up to Westminster to stage a peaceful protest and call for a new law to protect whistleblowers and thereby also the victims of the abuse. The campaign is called Edna's Law, named after an elderly victim of abuse in a care home run by a large private company, and a summary of what the campaigners are calling for can be found here.

Pictured below is Delyth Jenkins, the best known of the Carmarthenshire whistleblowers, and friends with two MPs who came out of the Houses of Parliament to show their support.

Whistleblowers exist in all walks of life. Perhaps we most often associate the term these days with social services, care homes and the health service, but a whistleblower is anyone whose conscience tells them to stand up and report something which they know to be wrong.

There are a number of cases in Carmarthenshire that this blog is aware of, and they all involve social care. Each one is different, but they appear to follow a pattern. What begins as a simple complaint that, for example, someone in the care of a home or day centre has been abused kicks off an extremely lengthy and immensely complex process which is open to manipulation. The whistleblowers then find that the machinery which is supposed to protect the victims and the whistleblowers themselves is turned against them. Sometimes they will face disciplinary procedures leading to dismissal, and perhaps further lengthy and stressful appeals to employment tribunals.

A large part of the problem is that the authority which is the subject of the complaint acts as prosecution and defence, judge and jury. Ranks close, whistleblowers find themselves frozen out and often bullied, and the abusers and those responsible for them remain in post and are even promoted.

Of course, the problem is not unique to Carmarthenshire.


This is not a party political campaign, and it is something which is in the interests of all of us. One day we may well find ourselves hoping and praying that there is someone there to help us when we are too weak to defend ourselves.

September Council Meeting - Cor Blimey, Guv'nor

After two months off, we were back with a bang and a reminder why Carmarthenshire has become such a watchword for dire local government in Wales.

An embarrassment

If you thought that Ivor Jackson (Ind) had set an unbeatable record for the worst Chair of Council ever, you reckoned without Daff Davies whose performance was one of toe curling embarrassment.


His first major challenge was to read a short piece about what he had been up to as chair over the summer months. He stumbled, stopped, started again, paused, garbled and bungled. He repeatedly forgot to switch on his microphone, so that the meeting was punctuated by periods of silence for viewers of the webcast. When questions of procedure arose, nobody for a second even thought to consult the chair even though he is supposed to be the expert. He made jokes which amused nobody but himself, groaned and moaned when councillors asked to speak on different subjects, and several times thought it was hilarious that two councillors (Sian Caiach and Bill Thomas) felt so strongly about pollution of the Burry Inlet that they declared an interest and left the chamber when planning issues came up.

The sad thing is that nobody on the Independent or Labour benches seems to think that putting Cllr Davies in the chair is in any way a poor reflection on the Council as a whole. It was Buggins' turn, and that's that, and now he is officially the public face of Carmarthenshire.

His own local community council in Llansteffan showed what it thought recently when it passed a vote of no confidence in him as chair.

Not that the Chief Executive acquitted himself much better. When Cllr Caiach was told to write to the Council Leader, Kevin Madge, about the pollution and she said she would, Mr James could clearly be heard off-mike saying "that's something to look forward to".

A breathing space

The first piece of business was about changes to the rules governing senior appointments. In future, the Welsh Government has decided, senior officers may only be appointed on an interim basis for a period not exceeding one year. Second, the Head of Paid Service (the Chief Executive) will no longer have the power to dismiss the Monitoring Officer or Head of Democratic Services. Any attempt to dismiss the person in that role will have to go to a committee, which it turns out does not actually exist.

Ironically, it fell to Mrs Linda Rees Jones to answer questions on these changes. She confirmed that interim appointments, such as her own, could only be made once off for a period of up to 12 months. This was needed, she explained, to give local authorities a breathing space while they made up their minds. In her own case, the breathing space has been three years.

Any Questions?

We were next faced with the novelty of questions to members of the Executive Board. But first Emlyn Dole (Plaid) wanted to know if supplementary questions would be allowed.

No, came the answer.

Fortunately Cllr Dole came well prepared. Turning to the constitution he pointed out that members of the public are allowed to ask both questions and supplementaries. So why are councillors not allowed supplementaries? The constitution did not say they were not allowed; in fact, it had nothing to say on the subject.

A fundamental principle of the law in Wales (and England) is that if something is not forbidden, it is allowed.  A characteristic of dictatorships, it is said, is when everything which is not expressly allowed is forbidden.

Guess what. In Carmarthenshire supplementary questions are forbidden because they are not expressly allowed. Just as filming by the public was forbidden because nobody had ever said it was allowed.

Appeals to common sense (why would the public be allowed supplementary questions, but councillors not?) and old-fashioned fair play fell on deaf ears. Mr James was not budging.

Cllr Alun Lenny asked why the Labour/Independent administration led by Kevin Madge (Lab) had reneged on a promise not to introduce car parking charges for blue badge holders.

There are 16,500 blue badge holders in Carmarthenshire, and one of the key pledges in Labour's manifesto just two short years ago was that there would be no charges.

Cue four and a half minutes of waffle from Kevin Madge. The short version was "everybody else is doing it, and so we thought we would too".

Next was an interest free loan to Llanelly House. It turned out that although the council had been prepared to loan the money on certain conditions, the conditions had not been met, and so there had been no loan.

The last time this came up in 2013, the Chief Executive refused point blank to allow the question because it was not on the agenda. Whether he refused out of sheer bloody-mindedness, we will never know, but there seems to be no reason why he should have been so secretive about it.

Cllr Mansel Charles (Plaid) wanted to know why the council was insisting that people may only put out rubbish bags for collection after 6pm the night before. In the winter this could be dangerous for elderly people having to go out in the dark in sometimes slippery conditions.

Replying, Cllr Colin Evans (Lab) had no sympathy whatsoever. He began with a barbed comment about some Executive Board members being more used to answering questions than others, before going on to refer to Wales as a "principality" (which it is not).

His answer was no more use than the contents of those black bags.

It was not clear who Cllr Evans was referring to when he spoke about some board members being less experienced at answering questions, but unless he was criticising Kevin Madge (unlikely), it would seem that the jibe was aimed at Cllr Jeff Edmunds (Lab), who had given a very clear and exemplary answer about Llanelly House that was free of political tribalism.

In answer to the next question, Kevin Madge revealed that the council had paid £26,800 for the services of Tim Kerr QC (that was to defend the unlawful pension and libel indemnity payments).

A 16 second answer, with no further questions allowed.

A Stock Market Collapse

A few minutes later Kev was back on his feet whipping himself into a manufactured frenzy about the implications of Scottish independence for the financial markets.

Anyone seeking financial advice would be well advised not to ask Cllr Madge who reckoned that investors were pulling their money out of Scotland, and that there could be a stock market collapse in the event of a yes vote.

Judging from the synchronised head nodding on the Labour benches, this was a script from Labour HQ sent out to coincide with Mr Milliband's trip with his Tory chums up to Scotland. As we now know, the headlines Kev was referring to turned out to be a lot of manufactured hot air and recycled press releases, a subject Kev knows rather more about than the financial markets.

Budget Shock

We didn't have to wait long to see an example of Kev's idea of prudent finance - just a few minutes, in fact. One of the big promises in his manifesto - apart from not bringing in charges for blue badge holders - was that he was going to start building council houses again. To hear him talk, you would think that new estates were springing up everywhere, whereas all we have so far is a handful of old people's bungalows in Llanelli and Kidwelly.

Councillors were presented with a report which showed that there had been a budget overrun of £100,000 on this development. Cllr Tegwen Devichand blamed it on problems with land stability, whereas Robin Staines, Head of Housing Services (cor blimey, guv'nor), said it was all a budget technicality. Strangely, a report dated 16 September 2013 said that the bungalow project had incurred additional costs of £511,000.

After an intervention by Cllr Winston Lemon who asked about the tender process for the bungalows, Mr Staines said there had been a tender process within the council's contractor framework. In plain English, then, this was not a competitive tender process in the normal sense, but one limited to a small number of preferred "partners". Lessons had been learned, he said, and the council would be reviewing specifications, etc.

Perhaps the overrun was not a budget technicality after all, but either way these are without a doubt the most expensive small bungalows ever built in Carmarthenshire.

Someone has made a great deal of money out of it.

Speaking of which, Cllr Winston Lemon (Plaid) wanted to know why there were plans to build yet more office space on a brownfield site adjacent to North Dock in Llanelli when there was a desperate need for affordable housing. The office space in North Dock (see Management speak for a possible explanation) was still empty four years after completion.

Mr Staines said that there was a shortfall of 2,000 affordable homes in the county and appeared anxious to see more. Perhaps he should have explained why in that case the council in its latest version of the Local Development Plan had decided to cut the allocations for affordable housing.

A Barrier

This just left one final great mystery. In the minutes of a recent Executive Board meeting the subject of the council's Welsh in Education Strategic Plan 2014-17 had come up.

Bearing in mind the council's declared new-found respect for the Welsh language, the minutes contained the following sentence:

"Whilst recognising the importance of securing the future of the Welsh language, concern was expressed that it should not become a barrier to attracting overseas investors."

What evidence was there to suggest that the Welsh language was a barrier to overseas investors, councillors wanted to know. 

Silence.

Who had made these remarks?

Silence. 

This continued for some while. Someone had expressed these "concerns", but in the newly open and transparent Carmarthenshire, nobody was prepared to own up.  

You don't need to be Miss Marple to work out that the prime suspect is Cllr Meryl Gravell, who unfortunately had better things to do than attend the meeting.

This was followed by one of those bizarre procedural wrangles that we are so used to in Carmarthenshire. Minutes are like holy writ. They cannot be altered. So could councillors express a view on them? No, said Mrs Rees Jones and the Chief Executive.

Councillors are there to receive what is put before them, and that's that. Express an opinion? Whatever next?

The next meeting of the full council is scheduled for 8 October when, it is expected, the WLGA Review Panel will present its findings and recommendations on governance. Let's hope that they were watching this latest masterclass.  

Meryl's Millions - The story so far and some more questions

Usually murky business involving Carmarthenshire County Council has a very slow burning fuse. The pension and indemnity liability scandals, for example, took more than a year to come out fully.

But things have moved with lightning speed in the case of Meryl's £2.63 million grant to JBCH, and some of the fog at least has now lifted.

Because just about everything involved in this case is under lock and key in County Hall and very few people have access to the information, trying to piece together what has happened is not easy, but let's start with a summary of what we know so far. Some of this corrects information set out in previous posts.

The facts

19 April 2012 - Cllr Clive Scourfield sits down with a large number of council officers in a private "decision meeting" to approve a huge swathe of grant applications. The minutes can be found here. Among the decisions was an award of £1,990,500 to JBCH Developments Ltd for a food grade industrial unit in Cross Hands.

Cllr Scourfield stood down at the local government elections a few weeks later, but he was one of Meryl's right-hand lieutenants in the so-called Independent group. Meryl herself was still Council Leader and would have been aware of this grant, which was one of the largest awarded by the council that year. The money came from the South West Wales Property Development Fund, a pot of EU money which Carmarthenshire administers on behalf of several councils (Swansea, Neath Port Talbot and Pembrokeshire being the others).

It turns out that JBCH Developments was a dormant company which had never traded and which had just £2 of paid up share capital.

Everything then goes very, very quiet for a long time.

25 April 2013 The council's Planning Committee considers and approves an application from JBCH Developments Ltd to build a food grade industrial unit at the site, which is described as an "employment plateau". The application attracts strong objections from local residents concerned about noise and smell.

The planning officer's report notes:

"The unit is speculative at this time as the prospective end user has no interest in the site at this point, therefore speculation of jobs being transferred from Carmarthen and traffic from relocated workforce is not relevant."

This comment is particularly interesting because it shows in the light of subsequent events that the planning officers knew very well who was in the frame to take on this site. Not to put to fine a point on it, members of the planning committee were having the wool pulled over their eyes.

Also:

"The application seeks full detailed permission for a speculative industrial unit for meat processing and storage. The unit is speculative as the applicant is a development company and the land owner is the County Council rather than an end user."

Among the conditions attached to the grant of planning permission is a stipulation that the developer will pay £21,540 towards a mitigation scheme for the marsh fritillary butterfly. 

Also:


Prior to its use by vehicular traffic, the new access road shall be laid out and constructed with 7.3 metre carriageway, 1.8 metre footways, and 10 metre kerbed radii at the junction with the Industrial Estate road.

Cllr Irfon Jones (Ind) declared an interest in the application on the grounds of "professional and friendship" ties to the applicant.

18 July 2013 Just a few weeks later Edwina Hart pops up in Cross Hands and announces that Celtica Foods is to be given a £1 million repayable grant to finance the development of a meat processing plant. Most of the jobs at the new plant will be existing jobs relocated from Carmarthen - something dismissed by council officers at the end of April as irrelevant speculation.


24 January 2014 JBCH acquires a piece of land from Carmarthenshire County Council in Cross Hands. The purchase is financed by Finance Wales, an entity set up by the Welsh Government to help finance small and medium sized companies, and security for the loan is the land itself and JBCH's contract with Celtica Foods and Castell Howell. As a government-backed loan, we are talking about yet another subsidy.

If there were not already enough subsidies and grants tied up in this project, Carmarthenshire County Council gives JBCH Development a hefty discount on the sale of the land. 

The land was sold to JBCH for £252,000 plus VAT, but from this sale price were deducted £21,540 for the marsh fritillary butterfly (plus VAT) and a further £76,200 for the roadworks. The net payment to the council was just £154,260 (source FOI request).

The risk to JBCH Developments Ltd in all of this is nothing, unless you count the £2 share capital.

6 March 2014 Time for the spin machine to go to work. The council's press office releases a story featuring Council Leader Kevin Madge (Lab) wearing a hard hat and fluorescent jacket pretending that he is about to dig a hole.

The cost of the project has escalated from £2.8m in July 2013 to £4.4m, and the new plant may now eventually employ "more than 100" people compared with "more than 80" according to the Welsh Government a few months previously. Kev acknowledges the role played by the South West Wales Property Development Fund in making all this possible (that would be the grant approved 2 years earlier by Cllr Scourfield).

25 June 2014 In another of those private "decision meetings", Cllr Meryl Gravell, acting with just two officers, signs off a further grant of £2.63m to JBCH Developments Ltd from the SWWPDF in just 15 minutes.

This grant is also for a food grade industrial development at Cross Hands, but is apparently not linked to the £1.99m previously awarded to Celtica Foods.

In an interview on Radio Cymru, it emerges that this is also a speculative development (i.e. there is no client and no land as yet). 

This brings the total awarded to JBCH Developments Ltd, which was still showing up as a dormant company after the first grant of £1.99m, to £4.62 million. On top of which is the subsidised Finance Wales loan, the discounted land deal and the £1 million awarded by Edwina Hart to Celtica Foods.

Questions

Perhaps, just perhaps, the truth will come out as a result of the current WAO investigation into the affair, but among the questions which need to be answered are the following:

1. Why does the Council appear to making a habit of awarding very large grants for speculative projects? In the case of the first grant, there was a gap of around 2 years between the grant award and the start of work.
2. Is it not unusual, to put it mildly, for a company with no assets to speak of and which declared itself dormant to receive so much public money?
3. What are the links between the council and the owners of JBCH? There clearly seems to be a relationship in the case of Cllr Irfon Jones.
4. Is it acceptable to earmark and commit so much money from the SWWPDF for non-existent projects so far in advance?
5. Why did council officers tell the planning committee that suggestions Celtica was about to up sticks from Carmarthen were "irrelevant speculation" when they were almost certainly aware that this was precisely what was in the pipeline?
6. How does the extremely favourable treatment of JBCH compare to other businesses? EU competition rules exist to ensure that there is a level playing field. Is the playing field really level when one business is receiving so much backing from the council that there is no element of risk for the owners?
7. Not least, why is JBCH receiving the grants rather than the companies for whom it is building these plants? Presumably Celtica/Castell Howell will be paying for the meat processing plant, so is JBCH being paid twice for the same work? Or is this just a way of circumventing the rules on what SWWPDF funds can be used for?

Wise monkeys

The summer holidays over, Carmarthenshire County Council will today hold its first full meeting since early July. Very unusually the agenda has been amended twice, and for the first time ever it features questions to members of the Executive Board.

It's worth pausing for a moment to think about that. Questions...in a meeting of Carmarthenshire County Council! Good grief.

Does this mark the end of attempts by the Chief Executive and other members of the top brass to turn the monthly meetings into management seminars with Death by Powerpoint, even removing the right of councillors to ask questions about the minutes of the various committee meetings?

We'll see.

In the meantime, five questions have been submitted, and they all come from opposition Plaid Cymru councillors.

No surprise there because apart from the 10 councillors on the governing Executive Board, very, very few Labour or Independent councillors rarely ever have anything to say, let alone questions to ask. Two Independent councillors have never spoken since being elected (Anthony 'Whitey' Davies and Theressa Bowen), and Labour's Keri Thomas has attended only one meeting of the full council in the last 12 months. He didn't speak then, either.

At the Extraordinary meeting earlier this year at the height of the libel and pensions scandals panic broke out among the journalists, bloggers and political junkies in the public gallery because nobody recognised some of the speakers. "Who on earth is that?" went up the cry. In once case the answer was Philip Hughes, Independent councillor for St Clears, formerly a member of the Executive Board. Such is the mark he has made as an elected councillor.

It is worth remembering that the council's constitution describes meetings of the full council as

"a forum for the debate of matters of concern to the local community and the place at which councillors are able to hold the executive board and committee chairs to account."

With only one or two exceptions (Bill Thomas, Lab. for example), if you have a Labour or Independent councillor there are no matters of concern, and as for holding anyone to account, forget it.

Tune in today at 10 o'clock to find out if any of them break their vows of silence.

Council of Despair: The WI Party Conference

Autumn is upon us, and it's conference season. Here our occasional special correspondent Sali Malu-Cachu, fresh from a retsina-soaked holiday chatting up the waiters in Greece, gives us her account of one such recent gathering.

________

The last of the delegates had finally crossed the room with the aid of a zimmer frame and been helped into his seat by the nursing staff when the double doors swung open.

"Will you please all stand for the anthem", Pamela called out.

From the desk in front of her, Pamela seized a loudhailer which emitted an ear-piercing squeak. She yelled,

"I said, ALL STAND FOR THE ANTHEM!!"

As the assembled delegates struggled to their feet, Miss Tremble struck up a rousing rendition of "God Save The Queen" on the piano and Muriel finally entered the room, resplendent in her new grousemoor autumn outfit which cunningly combined a range of browns with flashes of gold, crimson and old damson. Topping off the hand-woven Harris tweed suit was a magnificent tangerine Pekinese fur kindly supplied by Woofers Rescue Centre from surplus stock. Moving sedately across the Axminster, she waved regally at her followers.

Muriel took her seat at the centre of the top table, flanked by her fellow members of the executive. Four women and one elderly gentleman. Pamela, dressed in her familiar brown trouser suit, rose to address the room.

"It is a great honour to welcome you all here for the annual conference of the Women Independents executive, or the WI as we call ourselves for short. Not forgetting Jim, of course, who if I may be so bold is now an honorary old woman".

Pamela paused for appreciative applause. Miss Tremble tittered politely, but otherwise the room was silent but for the sound of wheezing, a snore and a muffled fart.

"Hilarity aside, in a moment I shall hand over to Muriel who will look back on another successful year and forward to our plans for the next twelve months. Muriel has also kindly agreed to speak on behalf of the rest of us, after which we will conclude proceedings with afternoon tea and a special performance of patriotic tunes by young Giles on his xylophone, ending in traditional manner with a rendition of Jerusalem."

"So please show your appreciation for Muriel, our President for Life."

Sensing she had lost her audience, Pamela seized the loudhailer once again and shouted,

"I said CLAP!"

To a ripple of applause Muriel stood and launched into her keynote speech.

"As some of you will be aware, the gutter press is once again trying to besmirch my name over a modest £2 billion grant I awarded to some nice men running a company called ACME Enterprises.

"'Muriel', they said to me, 'we have jotted down some ideas on this envelope which will bring immense prosperity to a local family business and which may, in the fullness of time, create jobs, jobs, jobs! £1.5bn should do it, but call it £2bn just to be on the safe side.'"

"Well, how could I refuse? So I signed away the activities budget to show that we are always open for business."

"Unfortunately the Treasurer took exception to this and complained to those interfering beancounters we have had so much trouble with. Mark and Ms Klebb from the press office are now dealing with that, and the Treasurer has gone into retirement - not before time, if you ask me! And of course, while we always defend our staff, I have made it clear that if anything goes wrong, it is all their fault."

"Such is the burden of this great office - the prying eyes, the carping, the nit-picking criticism from these reptiles - that I sometimes ask myself if it is all worth it."

"And then I remember the immortal words of that great hymn:

"And was Jerusalem builded here?"

"Well, look around you. Pondos Chicken Shack; Arkansas Flame Grilled Kreme Donuts; the Wimpy Grill; Grab-Brookes, the horse racing investment specialists; the Pissed Newt - all these businesses have voted with their feet, thanks to our grants. We have builded Jerusalem and more to make this a paradise for business. We have brought in Robbie Cabbage, the international business mogul and former Take This singer to develop a booming hotel industry alongside my beautiful racecourse, and where once were dark satanic mills shall arise a gleaming sausage factory."

"I say to the carping critics that the sword shall not sleep in my hand until Mark and I have completed our glorious mission. Bring me my Chariot of Fire!"

"Any questions?"

An elderly man raised his hand.

"What is it Ivor?"

"Will there be chocolate eclairs at the buffet?"

"There most certainly will, Ivor. But before that, I think it's time to vote on the programme I have just outlined. Pamela!"

Pamela rose. "Thank you Muriel for a most inspiring vision of what you and Mark have planned for us. So I suggest that we adopt this as policy. All those in favour, raise your hands."

Seeing the lack of response from the floor, Pamela once again impatiently resorted to the loudhailer.

"I said HANDS UP!"

There was a muffled cry from the back of the room.

"What is it Tom?"

"The Germans have landed! The Germans have landed! We must alert the Home Guard."

Shouting through the loudhailer, Pamela's patience finally snapped. "For God's sake, no. Hands up to vote, you old fool. We are voting on Muriel's plan. Now put your hand up!"

Pamela surveyed the room. "That's unanimous, then!"

"Ah, democracy in action," purred Muriel.

Pamela picked up the loudhailer for the last time. "RIGHT, THE BUFFET IS NOW OPEN. FORM AN ORDERLY QUEUE."

Management speak

One of the concerns the WLGA Governance Review in Carmarthenshire has heard expressed from several contributors is the way in which the process of appointing senior officers has been manipulated to ensure that the Chief Executive has ended up with a hand-picked team who share his vision and way of doing business.

The process can be manipulated in several ways, but the easiest is simply to exercise delegated powers to parachute in a protegé without having to advertise a post and put a shortlist of candidates in front of elected councillors who might, heaven forbid, have ideas of their own.

The best known example of this is the current acting Head of Law and Administration, Mrs Linda Rees Jones, who has been acting almost as long as Dame Maggie Smith. As we saw recently, eminent lawyer Sir David Lewis is not exactly a fan. The quality of legal advice being served up is "cavalier at best and incompetent at worst", he wrote.

So while a draft of the Governance Panel's report has apparently been circulated to a very small audience, there is just time to rush through a few more appointments and parachute in another protegée before any new regime is ushered in.

Descending under a canopy of the finest silk is Ms Wendy Walters, currently Head of Economic Development. Ms Walters may not be a household name, but she is a key player in the council's controversial regeneration programme where she has helped bring many a white elephant into the world.

Ms Waters is married to a director of WRW Construction, one of the council's preferred partners. Major WRW projects include Ffos Las and North Dock, as well as various school building and refurbishment schemes for the Council.

Talking about work is no doubt strictly off limits in the Walters household.

Chief Executive’s Department

Following the departure of Mr Chris Burns, Assistant Chief Executive ( Customer Focus & Policy) I should like to introduce an interim ‘acting up’ arrangement which will allow for the continuity of service provision until such time that I have had the opportunity to consider the current structures that are operational within my department. I consider that this interim arrangement will provide a significant opportunity for better alignment and efficiency savings in a number of service areas. This will be essential to meet the financial and service pressures the Council faces over the coming years. It will also lead to an immediate financial saving of circa £90k per annum in senior management costs. Therefore under the delegated powers afforded to me under the Scheme of Delegation within the Council’s Constitution, I recommend the following to the Appointments Committee ‘B’: 

Recommendation: To confirm that Ms Wendy Walters, the current Head of Economic Development, undertake an acting-up role of Assistant Chief Executive ( Customer Focus and Policy) on an interim basis, pending the outcome of a structural review.

Meryl Speaks to the Nation

Update 8 September

According to a reliable source, the £2.63m grant approved by Meryl in June was not for Celtica Foods, but a separate speculative development.

Update 7 September

Thanks to Redhead (comments below) for drawing attention to an award of £1.99 million to JBCH Developments Ltd for a "food grade industrial unit" in Cross Hands in April 2012. This was approved by Meryl's colleague, Clive Scourfield, who stood down at the May 2012 election.

The mystery deepens, not least because the company's accounts for that year show it was dormant with no activity whatsoever.

The £1.99m grant does tally with a story put out in March of this year by the council's press office. There we are told that the total project cost is £4.4m - (£1.99m+£2.63m=£4.62m).In addition to that is a subsidised loan from Finance Wales and a £1m repayable grant (or interest free loan) to Celtica for the same plant.

Records show that JBCH did not actually acquire the land at Cross Hands until January 2014 - almost two years after the first £1.99m grant was approved.

Update 6 September

The latest revelations came yesterday in a report on Y Post Prynhawn, BBC Radio Cymru's main early evening news programme. The story was not carried on the BBC's English language news programmes. The local press has also so far been silent except for the Llanelli Star which has a version very close to the report in the Western Mail. That does not imply plagiarism, merely that both newspapers were working off the same misleading account put out by the council's press office.

A link to any online BBC article will be posted if and when it becomes available.

Developing the industrial and retail estate at Cross Hands is one of the council's biggest current projects, and as we saw with Meryl's interview yesterday, we can expect the top brass to dismiss any criticism of their actions by claiming that this is all about creating jobs.

To put things into perspective, most of the jobs at the meat processing plant are being relocated from Carmarthen, although "it is hoped" that up to 32 new jobs will be created there over the next five years.

Just a short hop from the JBCH site is a large branch of Co-op which is understood to have cut its workforce by 62 in the last few months. The planned new Sainsbury's superstore at Cross Hands (a development enthusiastically supported by the council) is expected locally to deliver the final blow and bring about the eventual closure of the Co-op supermarket there - all rather ironic for a Labour-led council.

_____________________

BBC Cymru has followed up the Western Mail's report earlier this week on the £2.63 million grant awarded to a company in Cross Hands with more truly shocking revelations.

Firstly it has emerged that Meryl Gravell approved the grant (in a 15 minute meeting behind closed doors) after the council's Director of Resources, Roger Jones, had asked the Wales Audit Office to investigate the application. Mr Jones acted after an unnamed councillor had expressed serious concern about the way in which the grant was awarded.

It is hard to believe that Cllr Gravell would not have been aware that the application had been referred to the WAO, so why press ahead and approve it, knowing full well that the WAO has called the council's grants management into question, and despite the turmoil over the WAO's public interest reports earlier this year?


To make matters worse, the grant was awarded before JBCH Developments Ltd had entered into a contract to build the meat processing plant, or even it seems, before any company had decided to move to the site. As the BBC reporter, Aled Scourfield, put it, this was "a speculative development". Perhaps speculative grant would have been more accurate.

As the BBC pointed out, the £2.63m went to a company which was incorporated in 1997 but which had never traded and has a share capital of just £2. Remember also that the land on which the new plant will be built was sold by Carmarthenshire County Council to JBCH for an undisclosed sum in January 2014, with the help of a subsidised loan from Finance Wales.

All of this calls into question the honesty of the response the Council gave to the Western Mail only a few days ago. The newspaper was led to believe that everything was in order, and the impression was conveyed that the Council had asked the WAO to take a look just to make sure that all the rules had been followed.

County Hall appears to have realised that this looks very bad indeed, and so Meryl took the highly unusual step for her of answering questions from the media. What we got was exactly what we have all come to expect. Her job was to make sure the council's officers had done their job properly, she said. Everything was fine, and it was all about creating jobs, jobs, jobs. "This is a good news story", she said.

Asked why the grant had been approved before there was even a client for the site, Cllr Gravell said that had not been a problem "for us" because the officers had made sure everything was OK.

Twice during the interview Meryl ("we always defend our officers") appears to shift responsibility onto the officers who processed the grant.

The WAO confirmed that it was still investigating the grant and that it hoped to meet the council soon to discuss its findings.


This one is set to run and run.

Meanwhile there have been more extraordinary twists in the grants scandal in Pembrokeshire, with another outstandingly informative report from the Pembrokeshire Herald.

Dear England....

With just 9 days to go before the Scottish referendum the debate has really caught fire. For all those of us south of the border it is hard to gain a sense of what is happening because of the very one-sided nature of most of the reporting, but whatever the result it is already clear that two of the biggest losers will be the Labour Party and the BBC. The Labour Party because its hierarchy has jumped into bed with the Tories and Ukip, and the BBC because its reporting has lost the confidence and trust of so many people in Scotland.

The referendum could turn out to do for Labour what the First World War did for the Liberal Party.

Over the summer quite a few people from Wales have travelled up to Scotland to help the Yes campaign, and reading their accounts and impressions has been fascinating. In the next few days this blog will take a look at what some of the European press has to say, but if there is anyone out there who has been to Scotland in the last few weeks who would like to share their impressions, please get in touch.

Here is Cllr Siân Caiach who has been spending her holidays up in Perth and Kinross. Yes, councillors are allowed holidays.

She says that the impression many people have got south of the border, and in Wales, is that the referendum is all about nationality. The reality on the ground in Scotland is different:

"This is about opportunity more than nationality, the corruption and inequality inherent in the UK state and building a better and fairer country to live in. This allows recruiting not only non political and general interest groups, but other main stream political party members......I have no doubt that overall this is a political battle between the right and the left."

Siân's point is underlined by the following open letter written by English people living in Scotland who have joined the Yes campaign.

____________

Dear England,

During the course of this referendum campaign, you have been told many distortions of the truth and fabrications about Scotland and why people in Scotland are voting Yes.You have been told by the likes of Andrew Marr and Jeremy Paxman that there is a strong anti-English feeling in Scotland driving support for independence, or that people in Scotland are voting yes because they want to break away from English people. You have been told by the likes of Taxpayer’s Alliance and UKIP that Scotland is a ‘subsidy-junkie’ leaching off the English taxpayer to pay for universal public services. You have been told by the likes of the Daily Telegraph and Kelvin McKenzie that Scotland is a resourceless nation, an economic desert, which has little to offer this island or the world. And finally, you have been told by your own politicians – David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband – that independence will hurt you in England as much as it will hurt us in Scotland.

We write to you, as English people living and working in Scotland, to tell you that this is false. The movement for a yes vote has proven again and again what its real intentions are, and if the media in the UK will not listen we feel it is our duty to set the record straight.

First, as English people involved in the independence movement, we feel we are confident in saying that sentiment against English people has been virtually non-existent in our movement. What people in Scotland want to escape is the Westminster regime, not the English people. The yes movement is about a multi-cultural Scotland, a Scotland based on diversity, and is vociferously opposed to the racist, anti-immigrant sentiment of the likes of UKIP. An independent Scotland would attempt to learn from people in England, welcome people from England, and extend our hand of friendship as equal nations.

Second, it is untrue that Scotland is a ‘subsidy-junkie’. Scotland pays more in taxation to the Treasury than it gets back in funding. We have universal public services in Scotland like free prescriptions and free tuition fees because Holyrood has been responsive enough to the wishes of the Scottish people. It would be entirely possible to have the same in England if your politicians got their priorities correct. We hope, as an independent country, Scotland can prove that world-class universal public services is affordable, and that people in England who believe the same can use our example when deciding who to vote for.

Third, Scotland and her people have great potential, just like England and her people do, and we want to be an independent nation so that we can make the most of that potential. We are currently held back, just like the North of England is held back, by a UK economy and political system which supports international finance against all other industry sectors. In the UK we have the greatest regional inequality in Europe. That is a problem for Scotland and for the rest of the UK. We want independence to start addressing that problem.

Lastly, the politicians of the UK’s main parties are simply wrong. Independence will be good for Scotland, and it will be good for England. Yes voters in Scotland have no bitterness or resentment towards people in England; in fact we believe the relationship north and south of the border will grow stronger, as we both treat one another as serious partners and friends economically, socially and politically.

Yours faithfully,

English Scots for Yes

Meryl's millions

Update 5pm

As Meryl Gravell has told as all ad infinitum, she always defends the council's officers, and they always do a tremendous job. Strange then that at the last meeting of the full council in July where councillors queued up to give their thanks and best wishes to Roger Jones, Meryl remained silent. Stranger still when you recall that they would have worked together on a daily basis for at least the last 15 years.

______________

The Western Mail reports today that the Wales Audit Office is investigating a £2.63 million grant awarded by Cllr Meryl Gravell at a 15 minute private meeting in June.

Extraordinarily, the decision was referred to the WAO by Roger Jones, the council's Director of Resources who has just retired.
 
On 25 June 2014 Meryl held one of her decision meetings as Executive Member for Regeneration and Leisure. The public and press are excluded from these meetings, but according to the record, Meryl sat down at 2pm with just two officers. One of those carries the title of "Physical Regeneration PDF" Officer (PDF being short for Property Development Fund), while the other was from Democratic Services representing the Monitoring Officer. The Monitoring Officer's job is to ensure that decisions conform with the law and correct procedures are followed - a statutory function which in Carmarthenshire has been rendered less effective than a chocolate fire guard.


They then wrestled with their desire to be open and transparent while applying the public interest test. After what must have been several nano-seconds of soul searching, they decided that the report they were about to consider should be exempt from publication and kept secret.

It must have been a very short report because minutes later, at 2.15pm to be precise, the show was over and a grant of £2.63 million had been awarded to a company called JBCH Developments Ltd. for the development of a "food grade industrial unit" at Cross Hands.

Don't be surprised if you have never heard of JBCH Developments because although the company was incorporated in 1997, it has never traded, although in its rather long and quiet life it has had three different names.

Companies House records show that in its last set of accounts published in 2013, JBCH was dormant, with no assets and a paid up share capital of £2.

All of that changed suddenly in January 2014 when JBCH acquired a plot of land at Cross Hands from Carmarthenshire County Council. The value of this transaction is as yet unknown, but the money had to come from somewhere, and Finance Wales, a vehicle set up by the Welsh Government to fund small and medium sized businesses, provided a mortgage.

The mortgage is secured against the land and against a contract JBCH had won to build the "food grade industrial unit".

JBCH's registered address - its company headquarters if you like - is just across the road from the building site, care of Ajax Machinery, a company specialising in plant and machinery hire for the building trade.

The contract will involve JBCH building and fitting out what is in reality a meat processing plant to be operated, and presumably owned, by Celtica Foods, a sister company of Castell Howell, the food wholesaler which already has a substantial presence in Cross Hands, and the contract with JBCH was entered into by both Celtica and Castell Howell.

Celtica currently employs just under 50 people at a boning plant in Pensarn, Carmarthen, and those jobs will now be relocated to Cross Hands. The company hopes that the new plant will create up to 32 new jobs over the next five years, and in July 2013 Edwina Hart announced that the project would receive £1 million in grant assistance under the Welsh Government's repayable business finance scheme.

The cost of the new plant was put at £2.8 million, and the fact that a local company is expanding and creating jobs for local people is undoubtedly good news.

But let's return to Meryl.

The £2.63 million grant is coming out of the South West Wales Property Development Fund, a pot of money managed by Meryl and Carmarthenshire County Council, for a number of other local authorities across the region. A large part of the money in the SWWPDF fund is EU aid.

The fund's website says that certain industries are excluded from assistance. They include retail, house building, leisure and primary food processing. However, a footnote says that under some circumstances companies operating in these sectors may still be eligible.

One of the odd things about this award, aside from the fact that the money is going to a company with no track record and no assets to speak of until January 2014, is why the grant was awarded to the company developing the factory rather than the company which will own and operate it and presumably pay for it.

If you tot up the value of all of the grants and interest free or subsidised loans handed out for this £2.8 million development (that was the value according to the Welsh Government last year), you will come to around £4 million. Again, if Celtica is buying the plant, which is what we have been led to believe, why did the grant go to JBCH?


The decision also raises fresh concerns in the ongoing debate over governance in Carmarthenshire. Is it right that one councillor acting alone in secret, in a closed meeting can sign off such large sums of money, with no need to refer the decision to the Executive Board, let alone the full council?

In its carefully worded response to the Western Mail, Carmarthenshire County Council gives the impression that the investigation is perfectly normal.

Why did the grant go to JBCH rather than Celtica? Well because JBCH applied for it, comes the reply, which goes on to describe the process which grants are supposed to go through. The council decided to refer the grant to the WAO just to make sure everything was in order.

Cneifiwr understands that reality was subtly different. The grant decision was referred to the WAO because of concerns over possible irregularities.

Roger Jones, it should be remembered, also tried to stand up for the interests of the county council and council tax payers in the Marstons deal in Llanelli, only to find that he was over-ruled.

Satire

As Welsh blogs go, WalesEye is something of a newcomer. It set out with the aim of being a sort of Welsh Private Eye, combining satire with investigative journalism, but there has always been something deeply puzzling and rather un-Welsh about it from the start.

Un-Welsh because one of the defining characteristics of Welsh culture, whichever language is being used, is a sense of humour. Irreverent, earthy, self-mocking humour. WalesEye is a humour-free zone, and it takes itself extremely seriously. Which often makes it an unintentionally hilarious read.

The blog has sometimes carried some interesting pieces exposing fat cats in academia in particular, and only yesterday Cneifiwr linked approvingly to a WalesEye piece about newspaper sales, but until very recently there was nothing on the site which most of us would call satire.

Good satire is difficult, and there is not very much of it around in Wales, at least not in English. In Welsh there was Cnex, and then there was Ddoe am Ddeg:

The Welsh Government got pretty annoyed with LlywodraethCymru.org and had Twitter remove its account. The wonderful Dim Byd will hopefully make a welcome return soon, and then there have been truly world-class series such as Con Passionate and Tair Chwaer, gently sending up small town Welsh life.

English language contributions are harder to find, but here is something which popped up on Twitter yesterday.

Perhaps it's just me, but WalesEye's attempts at satire with a couple of pieces about supposedly overheard conversations between Labour politicians weren't funny. And let's face it, Edwina Hart, Carl Sargeant and Carwyn Jones are God's gift to satirists.

It's unlikely that WalesEye will heed Cneifiwr's advice, but it may be better to preface future satirical pieces with a statement:

This is a hilarious satirical piece which you will find very funny. If you don't, expect to hear from our lawyers.

It would also help if WalesEye included prompts in its satirical pieces, such as [Laugh here] and [Now split your sides].

Jac o' the North had the temerity to point out that WalesEye's attempts at humour were belly flopping, and last night he found himself the subject of a fairly typical WalesEye piece.

Apparently a "special investigation" may be about to be launched into "bloggers who use the internet". Are there bloggers who prefer semaphore to the internet?

"Some experts" believe that Jac's views could be libellous, and now "a special police investigation is underway into possible breaches of the law generally".

And so on, and so on. South Wales Police probably have more important things to deal with, but WalesEye is suggesting in its usual hint-hint-unnamed sources-maybe-possibly-it is claimed-sort-of-way that we bloggers (at least those of us who use the interweb) could be about to receive a 3am knock on the door.

Unlike the mainstream media in Wales, the blogosphere is alive and kicking, and just as in Scotland, most of the best Welsh blogs are written from a nationalist perspective, whether it's the Plaid-supporting Blog Menai (winner of the Welsh political blog of the year in 2014), the thoughtful, analytical and independent Borthlas, or Jac o' the North, politically incorrect, often very funny and some way to the right of the rest of us.

I like Jac. To me, and I suspect some other Welsh bloggers, Jac is the black sheep uncle your mother and aunts hope won't show up at the wedding, but you know he will liven things up.

Jac's biggest recent coup was his revelations about Nathan Gill, to the shame of all Wales now a Ukip MEP who supposedly represents us in Brussels. It's a sad reflection on the mainstream media that they didn't pick up on Gill's less than wholesome past.
  
Funnily enough, WalesEye recently quoted Ukip's infamous Rod Richards approvingly as an authority on Welsh poetry, so perhaps Jac's attack on Nathan Gill may also be a contributory factor which has led to the "special investigation" which may, or may not, have been launched, possibly by Inspector Dai Knacker, or possibly just in WalesEye's imagination.

Time will tell.


I used to think that WalesEye was run out of Labour's spin machine in Cardiff, but perhaps it is really a Ukip front. Either way, it's hard to tell the difference.

Read all about it while you still can

Update

Thanks to the ever-alert Caebrwyn who has provided a link to a story on the extraordinary cat fight going on between the Pembrokeshire Herald and the Western Telegraph. 

The old established press titles will be aghast at this very public airing of dirty linen. The Herald has certainly got balls.

________________

I grew up in a small village (population around 300 back then), and my first paid job was as a newspaper boy starting at £1.50 a week. A van would turn up every morning at about 6 o'clock, and I had to sort the bundle it dropped off before setting out on my bike for the morning round.

Nearly every house took a newspaper. A couple of the posh addresses took The Times, and I think there was one Guardian reader. Probably Russian spies.

The dailies were joined by a scattering of weekly magazines. Nothing very exciting: Woman's Weekly, Woman's Realm, Farmers Weekly, People's Friend and one historical curiosity called Red Letter which featured romantic fiction for old ladies as opposed to Marxist-Leninist dialectics.

Quite a few of the houses also took a local paper once a week, and most but not all took a Sunday newspaper.

Roll forward 40 years, and newspaper boys and girls are a dying breed. I suspect that the large shoulder bag I used to carry, blackened and shiny with newsprint, would be a great deal lighter now.

This stroll down memory lane was prompted by a report over on Wales Eye covering the latest disastrous sales figures for the Western Mail, Daily Post and South Wales Echo, among others. As the blog points out, if the slide continues none of these titles is likely to be around in five years from now, at least not as dailies.

But what about the smaller local weekly titles in this part of Wales?

Here are the latest ABC figures for average sales in 2013:

Carmarthen Journal      13,713    -4.7%
Llanelli Star                  11,070    -9%
Tivyside Advertiser         6,075    -4.7%
South Wales Guardian    5,236    -3.7%
Western Telegraph        15,753   -13.8%

Not available are the 2013 figures for the Cambrian News, but the BBC reported that it had a circulation of 24,800 in 2006, and that was down to 19,800 by the end of 2011. The figures will be somewhat lower by now.

The dramatic decline in the readership of the Western Telegraph is probably largely explained by the arrival on the scene of the Pembrokeshire Herald which launched in mid-2013. Audited sales figures for the second half of 2013 do not appear to be available, but it sold 21,000 copies on launch. Average sales will be rather lower than that, but it seems certain that the bulk of its sales are coming from people who were not previously buying a local paper or who had given up on the established titles.

In other words, the Herald showed that extinction of the local press is not inevitable.

Compared with its long-established rivals, the Herald is a barely house-trained upstart. It is irreverent, daring at times and has pulled off a whole series of blinding scoops. The image of Bryn Parry-Jones angrily waving a copy of the Herald at a dawn meeting in the bunker is surely advertising gold.

Here is a list of its ten most popular recent stories, according to its website:

• Bryn to take 'leave of absence' following Herald revelations 
• New council group will tip balance of power 
• No confidence ballot 'likely to go against Bryn Parry', say unions 
• Bullyboy Bryn caused Audit Chair to resign 
• Jamie Adams remains as Council Leader, for now
• Labour leader calls for action over chief 
• Cabinet member fails to back leader over Bryn 
• Motorcycle fatalities prompt police statement 
• Bryn knew of Smith allegations in 2005 
• Secret session discusses unlawful Bryn payments 

Observant readers may have spotted that 9 out of 10 are about the County Council, and Bryn is, probably for the first and only time in his career, top of the pops with no fewer than 7 chart entries.

Whether the Herald will find life quite as easy when Bryn Parry-Jones heads off into a gold-plated retirement only time will tell, but for the moment he is the gift that keeps on giving.

So while some of our other local papers have been going through relaunches, radical overhauls of their layout, introduced "crisp" and interactive new websites or become politics-free zones, the Herald has done something which is likely to be far more valuable in the long-run: it has developed a distinct character.

If the other local titles ever get round to holding a focus group with a branding consultant, one exercise they might want to try is asking the public to draw pictures of what their newspaper would look like if it was a person. Maiden aunt? Middle-aged man with slight paunch watching sport on the telly? Mum dressing up in teenage clothes and rocking to Justin Bieber?

And equally interesting, what do the newspapers think their readers look like?


Amazingly we got through this without mentioning the 'Carmarthenshire News' and the way it continues to undermine our local newspapers.

Our Time

One of the remarkable aspects of the Scottish independence referendum has been the flowering of a rich and varied alternative to the mainstream media. It uses blogs, Twitter, Facebook - pretty much anything to get its message across. It is often passionate, inventive, well written, well researched and frequently very funny.

This week the No campaign broadcast a short film of a woman making her mind up as she sipped from what looked very much like an empty mug in her kitchen. It is fair to say that the film bombed and was instantly the subject of hundreds of memes, spoofs and send-ups, collectively using the tag Patronising BT Lady (BT standing for Better Together).

 

The unionist camp dismisses this new alternative source of news and opinions as the work of cybernats. The word is used contemptuously to convey an image of obsessive, nasty people who sit in their lonely garrets spewing out their bile on social media. Unpaid and probably unwashed alternatives to the sort of thing produced by the good old mainstream newspapers and broadcasters who are, of course, overwhelmingly against Scottish independence.

Here is a columnist in Murdoch's The Sun commenting on the Salmond/Darling debate:


"I'm not sure where they rented the audience for the latest debate between Alastair Darling and Alex Salmond. But by Golly, weren't they ghastly.

I have always believed we should keep the union.

But watching that awful crowd cackle, jeer and applaud Fish Features as if they were at the football made me think again.

Do I really want to share our green and pleasant land with a bunch of jeering monkeys so excited by Salmond's lies they start beating their chests and foraging amongst each other for fleas?

No I do not. I am tempted to say we should leave them to congratulate each other in their dreadfulness."

Last night the main evening news on the BBC ran a piece about Jim Murphy, the Labour MP who has been campaigning against independence. Jim has decided to suspend his campaign after someone threw an egg at him and he was subjected to heckling. He was the victim of "nationalist mobs" and is now consulting with the police.

Mentioned in passing was news that another man had been questioned by the police after death threats were made against Alex Salmond.

The egg was clearly much worse than death threats in the eyes of the BBC news bosses.

Here is a beautifully written account of one of Jim Murphy's soapbox sessions by Ray MacRobbie on his blog Still Raining, Still Dreaming.

The BBC's news bulletins are very carefully controlled and have been consistently slanted against the Yes campaign, but the BBC is a very big place and there have been examples of much more balanced programmes. This blog recently mentioned a debate chaired by Jim Naughtie at the Edinburgh Festival, for example.

It was also rather subversive of someone at the BBC to broadcast this week's edition of Who do you think you are? in the middle of the independence campaign.

This featured the Irish comedian Brendan O'Carroll of Mrs Brown's Boys fame. O'Carroll emerged as a very likeable, eloquent and highly intelligent man who wanted to find out who had gunned down his grandfather at  home in Dublin in 1920. The answer turned out to be an elite unit of the British army deployed in the Irish capital to try to suppress the movement for Irish independence with a campaign of murder and dirty tricks.

But back to the present day.


The defection of Tory MP Douglas Carswell to Ukip; claims that he is just the first of a number of other Tory and Labour politicians planning to run into the arms of Nigel Farage; the imminent return of Boris Johnson to Westminster; the uncertainty created by Cameron's promise of a referendum on EU membership; Labour's decision to continue George Osborne's austerity programme - austerity for everyone except the rich, that is: if you live in Scotland and can vote in the referendum on 18 September, why on earth would you want to sign up to this?

Voting for independence is looking increasingly like the least risky option.

Sadly for Wales, we have no choice at the moment. Whether we like it or not, we are passengers on the good ship Better Together which seems determined to set sail in stormy and unchartered seas with several gaping holes in the hull. Third mate Carwyn Jones is handing out the concrete life jackets, and telling us that he will veto any attempt by Scotland to use the pound.

Carwyn doesn't have the power to declare a bank holiday leave alone any say in what the Bank of England does. Somebody had better tell him.

That is why it is important that as many people as possible turn out in Cardiff on 13 September to show Carwyn, Owen Smith and all the rest that a lot of people in Wales support independence for Scotland and are becoming increasingly worried about being shackled to a right-wing, xenophobic state which panders to the prejudices of Clacton man (and woman).

Details of the event can be found here, and there is an impressive line up of speakers. There will also be buses leaving from different parts of Wales, including Aberystwyth via Carmarthen. Again details can be found on the same website.

We started with a quote from The Sun. Let's end with something rather more inspiring.

Whistleblowers

"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." - Albert Einstein.

This quote came up on Twitter the other day, shortly after I had received a detailed account of the experiences of several county council employees who had decided to do the right thing and report a case of abuse.

Since starting this blog, I have been contacted by a number of people who have had similar experiences, and although each one is different, their stories have a great deal in common and they have all been through hell.

More often than not what begins as an attempt to flag abuse of vulnerable people in the care of the Council or abuses of process ends up with the whistleblowers themselves being subjected to disciplinary procedures and dismissal.

These cases usually drag on for many months or even years, and the staff involved find themselves caught up in a Kafka-esque nightmare as the bureaucratic machinery is turned against them, senior managers close ranks, people change statements, reports are shelved and not acted on, key information is withheld and rules are turned upside down. Frequently they are subjected to bullying and find themselves ostracized.

Not surprisingly, these experiences are deeply traumatic, and complainants find their reputations trashed, future employment prospects ruined and their lives turned upside down. They are let down by the bodies which are meant to protect them. The Ombudsman is powerless to act, the CSSIW fails them; the unions often act half-heartedly. Appeals to senior management are ignored, and some elected political representatives turn out to be useless.

A common thread in all these cases is that the complainants begin to doubt themselves. "You probably think I am obsessive", they say. "You probably think I am unhinged".

As an outsider it is natural to wonder, especially when you hear that there have been charges of misconduct and disciplinary procedures, whether these are not just embittered former employees who have an axe to grind.

And of course, that is almost certainly what we are all supposed to think. But why, you end up asking yourself, would someone get in touch, identify themselves, provide very detailed accounts of what they have been though, and ask you not to write about their cases?

The Council has whistleblower procedures, and perhaps they are applied correctly sometimes and we never get to hear about it. But that seems to be far from true in the cases I have seen.

Concerns over the treatment of whistleblowers was one of the points I raised in my submission to the current review of governance, but this is a huge and complex subject. I suspect that as often as not councillors never get to hear about the real-life cases.

The horrific events in Rotherham are a timely reminder of what is at stake and why whistleblowers need to be taken seriously and given protection.

I hope that this is something the council's Audit Committee will take up and examine in detail in the months to come.

For those of you wondering whether the series on grants has now come to an end, there is one more thrilling installment to come next week.