Keeping it in the Family

One of the more intriguing discussions which took place at this week's monthly meeting of Carmarthenshire County Council concerned an abortive attempt to appoint a new Technical Services Director, whose portfolio of responsibilities includes refuse collection and roads.

In response to very strongly worded criticism by Peter Hughes Griffiths of the way in which the meeting to appoint a candidate had been handled, the council leader, Kevin Madge, told councillors that uncertainty about a possible future reorganisation of local government was the problem, while the chief executive blamed it on a political split among councillors.

It now seems that the truth was rather different.

There were three candidates on the shortlist, and the final choice was between two of these. One had extensive experience of managing the technical services department of another Welsh council and was a Welsh speaker. The other was a candidate from England with no knowledge of Welsh, although the job description stated that verbal skills in Welsh were essential (albeit with it a little get-out clause stating that the successful applicant would be sent on a course to give them very basic Welsh if they did not meet the criteria).

The Plaid and Labour members initially supported the local candidate. Unsurprisingly, Labour's Calum Higgins was absent from the meeting, although he did manage to send in an apology. It is understood that at one point a senior Labour councillor either proposed or seconded the appointment of the local man.

The senior council officers present preferred the candidate from England, however. They do not have a vote, and are supposed to be there in an advisory capacity, leaving it to elected councillors to decide. Obviously things are rather different in Carmarthenshire, and a fierce rearguard action was mounted to stop the councillors from having their way.

It was at this point that one of the senior Independents stepped in, confirming the description which has often been applied to them as the political wing of the senior officers, with a proposal to re-open the application process.

In the ensuing wrangling, the Labour councillors who had previously backed the local candidate suddenly switched sides, and voted with the Independents.

As some councillors pointed out on Wednesday, this farce cost a lot of money and did a great disservice to the candidates.

Peter Hughes Griffiths also pointed out at the council meeting that a second appointments committee set up to appoint service heads had also been ignored, with officers unilaterally appointing at least one service head recently without bothering to get the approval of elected councillors.

This point was side-stepped at the council meeting, as the chief executive wrung his hands over the politicisation of the appointments process.

Readers with long memories will recall that Carmarthenshire County Council has form when it comes to this sort of thing, and the Director of Education owes his job to the chief executive who initially used special powers to appoint him without referring the decision to councillors.

The hyper-active Head of Law and Administration is also there in an acting capacity only, although her predecessor retired nearly two years ago.

What the Papers Say

The South Wales Guardian reports on this week's meeting of Carmarthenshire County Council, and quotes Cllr Glynog Davies saying that the scandals at County Hall have become the hot topic among residents.

It also carries a story about Calumgate and the revelations that Cllr Calum Higgins does not have much time left for his various duties as a county councillor.

"Calum is like a breath of fresh air - a real man of the future", says Council Leader Kevin Madge, who went on the rampage at the council meeting earlier this week, accusing opposition members of bringing politics into the council chamber.

Readers may remember that Kev also gave his full backing to Shahid Hussain, Labour's candidate in Brynamman in last year's county council elections. Shahid got into hot water for a string of postings on Twitter, where he made highly offensive remarks about women, Tottenham Hotspur fans and David Jenkins, the respected chair of the council's Audit Committee. Shahid also regaled Twitter users with tales of his nights out clubbing with Calum.

Viewers of the live broadcast from County Hall may well have been puzzled about the role of politics in the council when later in the meeting Peter Hughes Griffiths, the leader of the Plaid group, made a strong attack on the conduct of a meeting to appoint a new director of technical services.

The committee was all set to appoint one of three candidates when suddenly, out of nowhere, a motion was produced and a vote took place, with a Labour-Independent majority deciding not to appoint anyone after all. Kevin Madge sought to explain this by saying that there was uncertainty about a possible future local government reorganisation.

Clearly the hymn sheets had not been aligned before the meeting, because the chief executive blamed the fiasco on a straight political split on the committee.

While Kev apparently believes that politics have no place in a meeting of elected councillors, it seems he has no such qualms when it comes to appointing senior officers.

Meanwhile, the people in Quarter Bach who want to know what is going on about the pension and libel indemnity scandals or Calumgate clearly don't read the Carmarthen Journal, which has nothing whatsoever to say about the goings-on at County Hall on its website.

The big news in Carmarthenshire, according to the Journal, is that an elderly grandmother in Carmarthen has got a Facebook page set up by a neighbour. The paper has been devoting acres of newsprint to "Super Gran" for weeks, and the hot news this week is that she now also appears in a video.

A Bad Week for Calum

It looks as though Labour's 2015 election campaign in Carmarthen East and Dinefwr is over before it even started. Fresh revelations about Calum Higgins have appeared in the normally Labour-leaning Western Mail here.

The full-time postgraduate course in Cardiff; the part-time paid job with Llanelli AM Keith Davies; the role as county councillor for Tycroes; a whole string of committee memberships and vice chair of the council's Working Group on the Welsh language; add to that Calum's recent adoption as Labour's official candidate for the 2015 general election and his decision to move to Cardiff.

There is no doubt that Calum is highly ambitious and thrust himself forward, but the real blame for this debacle lies with the Labour Party in Carmarthenshire which must surely have known that all of these jobs and responsibilities could not possibly add up.

What they have shown once again is utter contempt for the people of Carmarthenshire in the belief that you can stick a Labour rosette on anything and it will get elected.

Well, not round here.

Question Time on the Titanic

Cneifiwr managed to catch the last half hour of today's monthly meeting of Carmarthenshire County Council. Anyone with a strong stomach can watch the whole thing here when it comes online in the archive, probably from tomorrow afternoon.

The final half hour included the minutes of the now famous Audit Committee meeting at which it emerged that the Wales Audit Office had objected to two payments to the chief executive. That was back in September, and it has taken almost two months for the item to make an appearance in front of the full council and give councillors their first opportunity to even mention the scandal without being told to sit down.

When this tawdry episode in the history of Carmarthenshire is over, it is likely that people will look back at the Audit Committee meeting as the moment when it became clear that the great unsinkable liner had struck an iceberg.

After Captain Kevin Madge backed out of his promise to arrange a debate and provide "all the necessary papers" the week before last (the same week that he told the South Wales Guardian that the debate would be going ahead), it was clear that anxious passengers and crew asking for more information were not going to end up any the wiser after today's meeting.

Not mentioned at today's meeting were whispers in the media that someone not a million miles from Kev now thinks that the scandal is much worse than he first feared, and there had obviously been a pre-meeting meeting to agree tactics for handling awkward questions.

The strategy was to say nothing and let Linda Rees Jones, the council's acting Head of Law, do all the talking.

The Captain and the First Officer left the bridge, and Linda was running the show. She was clearly determined to go down with the ship, and she hung on grimly.

Peering from under a thatch of wild white hair and over some suitably scary half-moon specs, she told councillors that the letter she had received from the Wales Audit Office was "very frightening". Nothing further could be said about it at the moment.

A succession of councillors asked the Leader, Kevin Madge, for answers on a whole series of matters relating to the pensions and libel indemnity payments. Kev sat grimly in silence, and up popped Mrs Rees Jones to say that she could not say any more. The chief executive had also taken a vow of silence.

Cllr Alun Lenny (Plaid) pointed out that the council was justifying its silence on a piece of law which had long since been superseded. Silence.

Cllr Darren Price (Plaid) wanted to know if the police had been in contact with the council. Silence.

Cllr Cefin Campbell wanted to know what all this very expensive legal advice was costing the council. Mrs Rees Jones replied that the matter was still ongoing, and so she could not put any numbers to it, before she finally snapped. The council had to take the best legal advice available, and she resented criticism of the council's decision to spend accordingly.

Cllr Campbell added that he was being asked questions by voters and was embarrassed by what was going on.

For any readers who feel that Cneifiwr is showing bias and only reporting what Plaid councillors said, it would have been a pleasure to report on what the Labour representatives in the chamber had to say. What we got from them was total silence.

While Linda clung desperately to the wheel on the bridge, the grizzled Independents seem to have decided that their job was to provide the on-board entertainment, with Cllr Pam Palmer conducting the orchestra in a rousing rendition of Abide with Me. 

There was nothing to be embarrassed about. The audit report was excellent, apart from a couple of minor points. No other council in Wales could boast of such a fine report (stop sniggering at the back, all you readers in other Welsh councils).

Older readers may recall that someone once quipped that if Harold Wilson had been captain of the Titanic, he would have informed passengers that the ship was merely pausing to take on more ice for its champagne bar.

So it was that Pam told councillors that they should go back to their voters and tell them what a great job the council and its officers had been doing.

This was a wonderful report, and glug, glug, glug.

News Round Up and Today's Council Meeting

Don't forget to tune in to Carmarthenshire's monthly council meeting today at 10.30. The live broadcast can be accessed here. For those, including Cneifiwr, unable to watch live, an archived version should be available by tomorrow afternoon assuming that someone doesn't pull the plugs for, ahem, legal reasons.

An interesting thing to watch today will be how the puppet masters seek to prevent any discussion of the pension and libel indemnity scandals.

And as Caebrwyn has picked up, a Plaid motion calling for a debate on the latest Scarlets bailout has been rejected. The bailout was agreed with exquisite timing at the same time as the council was announcing draconian cutbacks to the sports facilities used by the public, and ahead of the annual round of budget discussions.

The full text of the Plaid press release is available here.

In other news, the South Wales Guardian is reporting that the Wales Audit Office may publish its long-awaited public interest reports on the pensions and libel indemnity scandals in approximately one month from now. Article here. The newspaper's Opinion column adds that sources within County Hall now fear that the issues flagged by the auditor may be more serious than they first thought.

Cneifiwr's understanding is that senior Labour councillors are finally waking up to the realisation that assurances they have been given by officers that everything is going to be all right could well turn out to be wildly optimistic.

And finally, staying with the pensions scandal, it seems that the trustees of the Dyfed Powys Pension Fund were kept in the dark about what Carmarthenshire County Council was up to.

The plot thickens.....

Coastal - the Movie

Update 13 November

Thank you to Anon for finding a link to a COASTAL project meeting held in September 2012 which provides some details of an investigation into allegations of maladministration which was being conducted by WEFO (the Welsh European Funding Office) at the time. Here is the link.

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Carmarthenshire County Council's branch of the COASTAL project has used part of its very generous funding to produce a film (here) to tell us what it does.

The film is nicely produced, although someone should have used a spell checker for the small amount of text which appears, and it runs to just over 16 minutes. There is some nice upbeat music, lots of shots of people making things in craft workshops, and short interviews with people who have been helped.

There is no doubt that many of the people who have taken part have enjoyed the experience and learned some new skills, but the film and the project itself suffer from a fundamental problem. The goal, and the reason why the EU provided so much money, was to get people into full-time, long-term employment. Training courses and teaching people new skills were meant to be the means to that end. By that measure, COASTAL has been a truly epic failure.

The original budget for the COASTAL project was £51.7 million spread over six local authority areas across four and half years, and the project is now coming to an end. What the final cost will be is not known, but the film ends with the following message:

"By the end of the COASTAL Project we will have 

• worked with nearly 1,000 people
• supported nearly 600 to gain a qualification
• helped nearly 100 to get a job"

The basis on which COASTAL was granted funding in the first place was that it would help 9,000 people, support 5,400 to gain a qualification and put 2,870 into long-term employment.


What is noticeable from the film is that quite a few of those who have found jobs have found them in the council's staff canteens or at council-supported ventures, such as the Botanic Gardens.

Very, very few have found jobs in the private sector, and it is questionable how sustainable and long-term some of the jobs that have been found really are.

By chance, an article on this blog about COASTAL coincided with a short piece in Private Eye pointing out that the Westminster Government's decision to close the Remploy factories had been a disaster. Two thirds of the those thrown out of work had been unable to find employment, while a good many of those who had found work were former Remploy staff in Halifax and Fforestfach in Swansea. There the workers came together and formed a cooperative with their redundancy money (BBC story here).

One other aspect of the film which is extremely disappointing is that it is all in English. Not a word of Welsh anywhere, even though statistically around half of COASTAL's target client base in Carmarthenshire will be Welsh speakers. Having watched the film, it is a fair bet that quite a few of those interviewed can speak at least some Welsh, and several were more than likely brought up with Welsh as their first language.

There will also be potential clients of COASTAL in Carmarthenshire who are much more able to express themselves in Welsh than English. What about them?

It is fair to say that some of COASTAL's clients with learning disabilities might struggle to learn a second language, but for those who can speak the language or are capable of learning it, an ability to speak Welsh can be a very important asset when it comes to finding jobs in many parts of the county.

Employers looking to take someone on in a shop, a cafe or any other business which has significant numbers of Welsh speaking customers will naturally regard an ability to communicate in Welsh as either essential or a very desirable skill.

Perhaps there is a Welsh-language version of the film out there somewhere, but if so it has not been publicised by the council. Was the use and promotion of the language part of the agreement underpinning the public funding package in Carmarthenshire? If not, why not? Is this in fact just another example of the council's two-faced approach to the language, saying one thing in public, and completely disregarding it otherwise?

A couple of times during the film COASTAL managers express the hope that the project will continue in some form or other, but serious questions need to be asked before any new funding is agreed, and the Welsh Government and the participating councils need to ask themselves whether the money would not have been better spent helping set up cooperatives, as in Fforestfach.

A genius at work

Carmarthenshire County Council has engaged the services of Mr Timothy Kerr QC to help it with those uppity people at the Wales Audit Office in the matter of the allegedly unlawful payment of employer pension contributions to the council's chief executive.

As Caebrwyn has discovered, Carmarthenshire engaged the services of Mr Kerr before going on to introduce him to Pembrokeshire, and the two councils are now sharing the bills. When Pembrokeshire councillors asked how much this was costing, they were told that this was an ongoing engagement, and the legal taxi meter seems set to go on running for some considerable time.

Mr Kerr specialises in the law as it applies to local government, education, health and social care, as well as sports. His clients are made up of "public bodies, particularly local authorities, employers, schools, colleges, universities, national and multi-national corporations, sports governing bodies, players and athletes", and according to his profile on his chamber's website (here), they love him.

Strong stuff for the middle-aged executives in suits who must make up the bulk of his clientele, and his profile continues with a quote that, "although he is a genius, he is very human with it".

It is probably safe to assume that Mr Kerr's services do not come cheap, and that the clients who shower him with their love and affection have very deep pockets, or rather access to the public purse in many cases.

Mr Kerr's profile goes on to note that one of his specialities is advising and representing local authority pension funds. He has also helped councils deal with judicial reviews brought against them by people worried about care home closures and breaches of equalities legislation.

No wonder they love him.

Meanwhile, a second legal taxi meter is clocking up the ££££s in the matter of the chief executive's libel indemnity.

Calum Higgins - a progress report

Calum Higgins, Labour's councillor for Tycroes near Ammanford, was recently selected to be the party's candidate for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr in the next Westminster elections, and is still in his early twenties.

Growing up in the 1990s, his earliest political memories will be of Tony Blair's dramatic first election victory, and the wave of hope and idealism which swept New Labour into power before things turned sour, and we woke up to find that Blair had dragged Britain into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other scandals followed, of course, such as the cash for honours affair.

One of the consequences of all that was that Labour Party membership plummeted; young people became disillusioned with politics in general, and with Labour politics in particular.

As Calum reached his teens he would have become aware of the Carmarthenshire Labour Party which around that time entered into what seems to be a permanent coalition with the closet Tories and assorted self-servers who make up Meryl Gravell's Independents.

The combination of Blair's bitter legacy and getting into bed with the likes of Meryl Gravell and Pam Palmer would have put most young people off getting involved with Labour in Carmarthenshire. But not Calum.

In Westminster Ed Milliband is championing the Living Wage, and some Labour controlled councils in Wales have implemented this policy for their low-paid workers. Carmarthenshire under its Labour leader has rejected the idea, and it is now about to embark on cutbacks which will see hundreds of low-paid staff being given the sack, and many more being transferred to the tender mercies of private sector care agencies and the like.

The cuts are unlikely to extend to the council's fat cats, and Kevin Madge currently finds himself having to defend what the Wales Audit Office considers to be unlawful payments to the chief executive who is, thanks to Meryl and her Labour allies, one of the highest paid public sector employees in Wales.

Whatever it is that motivates young Calum as he pursues his political career, there is not much evidence that it is idealism or a desire to stand up for the people who elected him.

Calum has now got himself into a spat with Plaid Cymru after he attacked MP Jonathan Edwards for not voting for Labour's proposed temporary energy prices freeze gimmick. The South Wales Guardian quotes Calum as saying that Plaid MPs couldn't be bothered to turn up for the vote (story here).

Not turning up is something Calum knows quite a bit about, and Plaid has responded by pointing out Calum's very poor attendance record for some of the committees he sits on (see announcement below).

Despite his age and the fact that he was elected to the council only last year, Calum has picked up quite an impressive string of committee memberships and jobs.

He is a member of the council's Audit Committee; a member of the Appointments Committee which is responsible for appointing senior council officers; a member and vice chair of the Appeals Committee which deals with appeals from parents against decisions not to provide children with free school transport, staff  dismissal appeals, etc.; in addition, Calum is a member of the Education and Children's Services Scrutiny Committee and vice chair of the Census Working Group which is looking at the council's approach to the Welsh language.

Anyone who has watched broadcasts of council meetings will be familiar with the sight of Calum sitting behind Kevin Madge, nodding vigorously in approval whenever his leader gets up to speak. That is quite an achievement in itself because most people are hard put to make any sense out of Kev's ramblings. To date Calum has missed only three meetings of the full council since June 2012.

The Appointments Committee has met only once, and Calum missed that one.

The Appeals Committee, of which Calum is the vice chair, has met 17 times to hear appeals, mainly from parents fighting decisions not to grant free school transport to their children. Calum has missed 9 of the meetings for which there are minutes.

The Education and Children's Services Scrutiny Committee is one of the most important bodies on the council. Three meetings have been held since Calum became a member, and he failed to turn up to two of them.

In fact, reading through committee minutes it is striking how often you come across "Apologies: Cllr C.P. Higgins". On at least four occasions it seems Calum was too busy elsewhere, probably giving interviews in the media, to make an apology.

Overall, Calum, there is considerable room for improvement. Don't you agree?

___________________________

‘Actions speak louder than words’, Labour councillor told.

Candidate’s attendance record ‘highly embarrassing’, says local Plaid Councillor

Plaid Cymru County Councillor for Saron ward, Councillor Alun Davies, has responded to the Labour party’s attack on his party by exposing the attendance record of Labour’s Carmarthen East and Dinefwr candidate for the 2015 Westminster election.

The 28 members of the Plaid Cymru councillor group on Carmarthenshire County Council had offered to form a coalition of all parties to help manage the circa £30million of cuts the county council must find.  This has been turned down by the Labour and Independent groups which run the council. 

As a result, Plaid Cymru refused to take part in the council’s recent ‘cuts seminar’ which voted to consult on a range of “savings” which will come out of the pockets of parents and schools, motorists and bus passengers, taxpayers and almost all who use the county’s services.  The Plaid group instead promised to scrutinise the decisions made and endeavour to suggest alternative ways to making the books balance.

In last week’s South Wales Guardian Labour’s candidate Calum Higgins said Plaid Cymru councillors were doing a disservice to their constituents by not taking part in the Council’s cuts agenda.  "This will only be detrimental to their own constituents who won’t be represented properly”, he said.

Later in the week the Labour candidate decided to attack hardworking Plaid MP Jonathan Edwards for abstaining on a vote in Parliament.

But Councillor Alun Davies has reacted to the Labour candidate’s comments by exposing what he brands a “highly embarrassing” attendance record at council meetings, stating that the young candidate cannot be trusted to turn up to do a job of work.

As a member of the County Council’s Appeals Committee, Calum Higgins has attended just 29%of the meetings this year.  As a member of the Education and Children Scrutiny Committee, Calum Higgins has attended just 33% of the meetings this year.  Furthermore, as a member of the Mid and West Wales Fire Authority, Calum Higgins was absent at the recent meeting which discussed the fire authority budget and the potential downgrading of Ammanford fire station. 

County Councillor Alun Davies said:

“It’s a bit rich for Labour’s young councillor to have a go at Jonathan for his principled abstention against labour’s election gimmick.

“Calum’s attendance on the council’s Appeals Committee and Education Scrutiny Committee is appalling – 29% and 33% respectively.  The scores of parents in Carmarthenshire that have had to battle for school transport for their children,  or have fought decisions to close county schools have been let down badly by the labour candidate who just hasn’t shown up to these meetings.

“Action speaks louder than words.  The labour candidate’s highly embarrassing lack of action speaks volumes.

“He’s attacked Plaid Cymru councillors for not attending Labour’s cuts seminar, but where was he last week when the fire authority was discussing the cuts his Labour colleagues are imposing on the fire service?  Ammanford fire station will potentially be downgraded but Labour’s part-time representative was nowhere to be seen.

“In stark contrast, Plaid Cymru MP Jonathan Edwards is recognised as one of the hardest working MPs in Westminster – making over a thousand contributions in Parliament in just three years.

“The people of Carmarthen East and Dinefwr quite rightly deserve an MP like Jonathan who works tirelessly on their behalf.  In the short period that he’s been a councillor, the labour candidate has demonstrated this year that he cannot be trusted to turn up and do a job of work.  The people of this constituency deserve better.”

In the dark

The Leader of Carmarthenshire County Council, Kevin Madge (Lab), has written to his fellow councillors to explain the sudden U-turn over his promise to set aside time to discuss the pensions and libel indemnity scandal at next week's meeting of the full council.

In addition to allotting time to discuss what the Wales Audit Office considers to be unlawful payments to the chief executive, Kev had been hoping to provide councillors with what he calls a "full report" on the matter.

They won't be getting that either, although in all likelihood the "full report" would have been a very one-sided document explaining why the council was right to protect the chief executive from the tax man in his old age, and why the taxpayer should foot the bill for Mr James's legal adventures.

Instead of rolling over and agreeing that the council was right all the way along, the auditors have presented the council's top brass with what are known as "consideration reports", and the WAO has asked for a response by 22 November.

The consideration reports will effectively be advance copies of the public interest reports which the WAO has been threatening to publish, setting out its own findings.

There are two consideration reports, and it is reasonable to assume that one covers the pensions contributions payments (an identical document has almost certainly landed in Haverfordwest), while the other covers Carmarthenshire's unique libel indemnity arrangements.

The WAO has warned that under no circumstances should the council publish or disclose the contents of the two reports.

Although the debate scheduled for next week and the council's own report would not have constituted publication or disclosure of the WAO reports, the arrival of the documents in the post from Cardiff has given the senior officers a no doubt very welcome excuse to scrap the debate and allow councillors to concentrate on enjoying a corporate Powerpoint show from BT instead.

The one enduring mystery in all of this is why Kev promised a debate in the first place, as it has been known for some time that the WAO was likely to go ahead with its public interest reports procedure.

An agenda item to "receive" the minutes of the Audit Committee meeting at which the WAO's findings were first aired should give councillors their first chance to raise the scandals in the council chamber, although without the benefit of having seen any of the various reports, and with the council executive pleading the fifth amendment, they will be as much in the dark as the rest of us.

The WAO Factor

Kevin Madge, Labour Leader of Carmarthenshire County Council, promised twice in the last month, most recently in an interview last week, that councillors would get a chance to discuss the pensions and libel indemnity scandals at the next meeting of the full council on 13 November (South Wales Guardian story here). He also promised that all the necessary documents would be laid before councillors.

The print on the Guardian's story barely had time to dry before it emerged that there would be no debate at the next council meeting after all because the Wales Audit Office has, contrary to the council's expectations, failed to roll over and change its mind about the lawfulness of the disputed payments to the chief executive (who also happens to control what appears on the agenda).

The scandal broke in the final week of September when it came up before the council's Audit Committee. All efforts by councillors to raise the matter since then have been blocked.

Garnant's finest was asked to make a statement ahead of the October meeting, but refused. An attempt by Darren Price (Plaid) to suspend standing orders so that the subject could be aired at the end of the October meeting was blocked, and so toxic is the issue that he was not even allowed to say why he wanted to suspend standing orders before the chief executive declared the meeting closed.

"I am at a loss to think what more we can do to be as open and transparent as we possibly can.....To suggest that there is a lack of openness or that members of the council are being silenced is ridiculous", Kev later fumed in an interview with the Guardian, as a squadron of porkers flew past.

He ended by suggesting that any councillors who wished could table questions to the council leader for the next council meeting. Cneifiwr understands that a councillor decided to do just that, but was advised that the council would be holding a debate instead.

Expect more fun and games at the November meeting as the legal artillery is brought in to prevent the dreaded pension and libel words from being spoken in another show of openness and transparency Carmarthenshire style, although they may get an opportunity when the minutes of the Audit Committee meeting are "received".

The next opportunity for councillors to question Cllr Madge and the chief executive himself will not be until 11 December, just five days before the Court of Appeal settles down to examine Jacqui Thompson's appeal.

As things stand, the appeal relates to a point of law arising from Mr James's counter-claim (that's the bit of the case which was funded by the council direct). It would appear that Mr James's costs are being funded under the original indemnity approved in secret back in January 2012, an indemnity which the WAO has since branded unlawful.

An interesting question is whether the WAO will now act to prevent the indemnity from being given a second outing, since standing by and watching the council indulge in yet more unlawful expenditure would be very hard to explain away.

Meanwhile, Cneifiwr understands that recriminations are already flying inside County Hall, with an e-mail written by what has been described as a "very senior officer" attacking the integrity of several opposition councillors.

Grillo - Planning Refusal Upheld

In an important judgement, the High Court has come down against Carmarthenshire County Council and a developer, Castletown Estates Ltd, and upheld a decision by the Welsh Government to refuse planning for the former Grillo Zinc Oxide Works at Burry Port.

The judicial review would seem to mark the end of a long and complex battle which saw the application approved by the council and upheld at a planning inquiry. That is unless the council decides to throw more money into further court battles.

You can read the judgement in full here, but perhaps the most important line in it reads as follows:

Throughout the whole period of the planning application the flood maps have shown the extreme flood outline running across the site – it is a straight line at one point. The relevant DAM [Development Advice Map] has a significant part of the site within zone C2, the remainder within zone A.

Under national planning policy, what is termed "highly vulnerable development" should not be permitted in a C2 flood zone, and residential development is classed as highly vulnerable. Castletown intended to build 230 houses on the site along with a retail/leisure component.

Unlike some of the more controversial developments approved by the county council, the proposed development at Burry Port appears to have had support in the local community, and it is understandable that people would want to see the redevelopment of an eyesore.

Rather less understandable is the council's zeal in supporting an application which always had a question mark about flooding hanging over it. Residents in Penybanc will also note that once again the council bent over backwards for a developer holed up in an offshore tax haven - the Isle of Man in the case of the Grillo site, and Guernsey in the case of Penybanc.

What both the Isle of Man and Guernsey offer is both very favourable tax treatment and an almost complete lack of transparency when it comes to finding out who is behind companies registered there, but as we have seen from the ongoing pensions scandal, allowing the rich and powerful to find ways of avoiding tax is absolutely fine in the eyes of County Hall.

The Grillo judgement will also be read with considerable interest by people objecting to the council's Stradey Park development in Llanelli. They will note that if the Grillo site was questionable, the Stradey Park scheme is doubly so because unlike Grillo, the development at Stradey will have a detrimental effect on neighbouring properties.

Unfortunately for the people of Llanelli, the council long ago managed to tie the Welsh Government up in knots.

A Beauty Blog

The Cwmoffit Journal

In this week's soaraway scorcher of an issue, our editor and beauty products specialist Ms Glenda Fluff tackles readers' questions on men's skincare in her Beauty Blog.

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"Dear Glenda

For years I have been applying rouge on my husband to cover up unsightly blue blotches, but recently the problem has been getting worse. What do you advise?
Mrs M, Garnant "
Well, Mrs M, your husband seems to be suffering from what we skincare specialists call "Redtoryitis". I have tried various products, sometimes with disastrous results such as the case of Mr P.H. in Neath, who turned a violent shade of orange and now has to live in a super-heated house to stop him from turning blue all over. The only effective concealer I have found is frequent applications of whitewash. A bucket a day should do the trick.

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 "Dear Glenda
I live in a castle on a hill and own a mirror which used to tell me whatever I wanted to hear in rather quaint old-fashioned language, such as "Thou art the fairest of them all", but just lately it has started making very unkind and possibly libellous remarks. I had a Mr Barrett come all the way from Cardiff to look at it, and to my horror he said that it was now working just fine, and that the mirror had obviously been on the blink when it said there was none so fair in all the land. Please help!
Yours in desperation
Mr J (FFS, KPMG, LLB)
Mirrors can be so unkind as we girls know, Mr J, and there comes a time when creams and ointments will no longer do the trick. Your best hope is to secure the services of a very expensive QC and get him to slap an enormous writ on the offending wall glass. Costs can be horrific, but judging from your address, you should be able to get the peasantry to pick up the tab. Just don't tell Mr Barrett!

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In the next issue Glenda will be solving more readers' problems, including advice to two ugly sisters in the run-up to the Christmas ball season.

 

Mercy Ministries in Carmarthen

Mercy Ministries, the controversial US-based religious group, has been operating in Ammanford for a while, and it is now finally making an appearance in Carmarthen.

A banner displayed outside St John's Church in Priory Street this week reads "Drug Addicts Freed - Healings - Salvation....All Welcome From All Church's (sic)".

The banner describes Mercy Ministries as "the outreach ministry of the Maranatha Fellowship", a movement which says it is not a church but a collection of Christians from different denominations. It has a fundamentalist and highly conservative view of the world, and believes that God chose to issue a prophecy to the people of Britain in 1993 through the book of Ezekiel, warning about the dire state of society, the collapse of public morals and the assault of secularists on the church.

What was so special about 1993? Well, Kenneth Clarke took over from Norman Lamont as Chancellor; Ford launched the Mondeo; UKIP was formed; and John Major launched his famous 'Back to Basics' campaign which collapsed under the weight of juicy scandals and revelations about Tory MPs.

 Cneifiwr will be off-line for a couple of days, returning on Sunday.

Carmarthenshire's Budget Seminar

As Emlyn Uwch Cych notes on a previous post (here), this week's Carmarthen Journal has published a 2-page souvenir guide to the cuts, which has been cut 'n' paste from a council press release. As canny Cardi readers know, you can easily save yourselves 65p these days by logging on to the council website to read what will be appearing in the James Journal. And no annoying adverts either!

A link to the document on which the press release was based can be found below.

_______________________________

The seminar held at the Ffwrnes Theatre in Llanelli on 21st October was not one of the council's greatest PR triumphs, with protests outside, "Independent" councillors trying to get the Plaid Cymru councillors who were there in an observing capacity ejected, and the chief executive asking the branch secretary of Unison, Mark Evans, to leave because his presence might put some councillors off their buffet lunch voting for mass redundancies.

Despite strenuous attempts by the council to prevent details of the proposals from leaking out to the public, Caebrwyn and Cneifiwr managed to get their hands on a fairly accurate breakdown of the cuts.

The Press Office, confirming its status as the Welsh equivalent of Zimbabwe's Ministry of Information, was adamant on Twitter that journalists had not been told that they could not report details of the proposals in reply to a tweet from Caebrwyn:

"Carms | Sir Gâr ‏@CarmsCouncil 25 Oct

@caebrwyn The invitation was to participate in the seminar, there was no restriction on reporting."

Funny that some of the more reputable members of the press corps seemed to have rather different recollections of what they were told, and funny that neither the BBC nor any of the local press reported on details of proposals which would normally be expected to be front page material.

Be that as it may, the Council has now published a document (here) which gives a breakdown of the proposed cuts which were discussed in the theatre.

The document sets the record straight on a number of points, and so it is only fair to report them:

• The council says that 40 councillors participated, which means that 11 Labour and Independent councillors must have been absent.
• In addition to the proposals aired at the seminar, the council is working on a package of "managerial" cuts worth £16 million over three years (i.e. internal cuts rather than cuts to frontline services).
• The value of the cuts discussed in Llanelli is £14 million over three years.
• Some councillors have submitted their own proposals, and those will be looked at internally and may go forward as part of more detailed proposals.

The proposals will eventually go to public consultation.

Anyone who looks at the document will notice that transparency only goes so far. Many of the proposals are given a very broad description, such as "Catering Services" (proposed saving of £1.2 million) with no indication of how the saving would be achieved.

Although a few of the votes were close, what is striking is how many proposals were waved through by a large majority. Proposals to slash spending on school transport encountered very little opposition from the Labour and Independent councillors who took part. And not one single councillor voted against the idea of a £50 "administration fee" for every child in secondary education using school buses.

Cllr Calum Higgins (Lab), who hopes to represent Carmarthen East and Dinefwr after the next general election, reckons that Plaid Cymru councillors were shirking their responsibilities when they decided not to participate in the PR farce at the Ffwrnes.

No doubt voters hit with higher council tax bills, huge new charges for school transport, higher car parking charges and cuts in a huge raft of other council services will show him how grateful they are in 2015.

Readers in Newcastle Emlyn and the surrounding area may be interested to hear that the town's leisure centre is singled out for cuts totalling £35,000, besides which pupils from the adjoining Ysgol Gyfun Emlyn school will no longer be able to use its facilities. Cneifiwr is considering getting up a petition to rename what's left as "Canolfan Calum Higgins" so that Calum's contribution to our welfare is not forgotten.

Canolfan Calum

Council to debate allegations of unlawful payments

Kevin Madge, Labour leader of Carmarthenshire County Council, has told the South Wales Guardian that councillors will be given an opportunity to discuss the row over the Wales Audit Office's findings that pension and libel indemnity payments to the chief executive, Mark James, were unlawful.

It seems that an item will appear on the agenda for the November meeting, and Cllr Madge has promised that "all the necessary" papers will be made available.

Anyone expecting Mr James to tell councillors and the people of Carmarthenshire that the payments were a terrible mistake, and that he should not have accepted them will be in for a disappointment. Backbench councillors on the Labour and Independent benches will have had their arms twisted and be whipped to within an inch of their lives to ensure that they stand by their man and support the council's view that there was nothing wrong with the payments.

The outcome of what will certainly be a carefully choreographed show is not in doubt, not least because Kevin Madge, Pam Palmer, Meryl Gravell and the rest of the council's leadership approved the payments in the first place, and they are not about to plead guilty to misusing taxpayer funds.

The promise to make all necessary papers available is an interesting one, and much will depend on what Kevin Madge, or rather Mark James, considers to be necessary. As we saw recently in Pembrokeshire, the council leader refused to disclose legal advice on the pensions tax dodge which was jointly commissioned by the two councils because only he had a need to see it.

But let's imagine for a moment that the council does decide to put all its cards on the table. Which papers might councillors need to see in order to form a reasoned and balanced judgement? The list is a long one and should include all of the following:

The Libel Indemnity

• The report which went before the Executive Board in January 2012 recommending the award of the indemnity. This is subject to a public interest exemption and has never been published.
• The legal advice given to the Council which concluded that Carmarthenshire could side-step Welsh Assembly rules prohibiting the use of taxpayer funds to bring actions for defamation.
• All correspondence, records of discussions and meeting minutes which led up to the decision to award the indemnity. In particular, councillors need to know:
• Who exactly initiated the suggestion that the chief executive should make a counter-claim
• Who approved expenditure on obtaining external legal advice before the award was approved
• Who, if anyone, approved the chief executive's letter to the Mad Axeman blog before it was sent
• The terms of the agreement under which Mr James was awarded an indemnity. Is it, for example, open-ended? Does the chief executive need a second indemnity to cover the appeal scheduled for December? Is there any ceiling on how much may be spent?

•  The Wales Audit Office's public interest report on the matter (currently not published).

 The Pension Arrangement

• The external legal advice provided both before and after the arrangement was put in place. Given that Pembrokeshire has so far refused to make this public and given that the neighbouring authority apparently has to approve disclosure, it will be very interesting to see if this information is suddenly made available.
• What is the cost to date of the legal and specialist advice obtained by the council?
• Who approved that expenditure?
• Who initiated the original decision to commission external legal advice? In order to see that everything was above board and the rules adhered to, councillors will need to see the correspondence and any meeting records involving senior officers and/or senior councillors.
• As with the libel indemnity, councillors will need to see the Wales Audit Office's own report into the matter. Whether that will be published in time for the November meeting is not known.

It seems unlikely that councillors will be presented with even a fraction of the information they need to read and understand in order to form a reasonable view, and it remains to be seen whether the council will invite along representatives of the Wales Audit Office to ensure that councillors hear more than just the council's justification.

The reality is that in a meeting scheduled to last three hours with lots of other matters on the agenda, the debate on the unlawful payments will probably get just half an hour. Moreover a meeting of the council is not a court of law or committee taking evidence.

The suspicion has to be that the council's leaders have decided,

a) that refusing to allow any discussion of the scandal does not look good
b) it would be quite handy to get the full council to sign up to the decisions and approve the payments even though the horse bolted long ago.

Backbench Labour and Independent councillors who are being asked to give their backing to the chief executive's exotic remuneration schemes may want to think long and hard about whether they are prepared to put their names to actions which could well end up being investigated by the police (just look at Caerphilly) without having seen all the evidence. That could be a rash and very dangerous thing to do.

What councillors should do, but almost certainly won't be allowed, is to vote on a motion to suspend the chief executive and have a full and thorough independent investigation of the affair. If Mark James, Kevin Madge, Meryl Gravell, Pam Palmer and the rest have nothing to fear, they should welcome an opportunity to set the record straight.

Coasting to disaster

Coastal (Creating Opportunities And Skills Team Alliance) is a collaborative venture between six local authorities, from Bridgend in the east to Ceredigion in the west, set up to promote "vocational guidance, employment, skills training and lifelong learning" for people with disabilities, long-term physical or mental illness, young people moving from long-term care into adulthood and those with substance misuse problems.

Targets

The organisation's business plan (here) says it aims to "comprehensively identify need in the participant group and to link these with the needs of the local economy and labour market, in order to develop bespoke training and educational packages for participants, [which] will be of great benefit in addressing the needs of both groups, by providing individuals with the appropriate skills required to match the needs of the labour market."

The Business Plan, published in October 2008, was asking for £24.7 million from its local authorities and "delivery service agents", with a further £27 million coming from European Structural Funds. This funding would take it through an initial period of 4.5 years.

Almost all of the target client group will be surviving on benefits, and back in 2008 Coastal said that the average annual benefit (excluding Council Tax benefit and housing benefit) was £5,500.

The financial justification for the project was to reduce the benefits bill by getting people back into full-time paid employment:

"If the number of individuals projected to enter employment as a result of engagement with the project, i.e. 2,870, were to enter sustainable employment and remain so for more than 12 months, the annual saving on benefit cost to the Treasury would be @ £15,785,000. (N.B. This cost does not take into account additional cost elements such as Housing and Council Tax Benefits.) Such a saving would mean that the project could become cost neutral in two years."

That was a very big "if", as we shall see.

Overall, the Business Plan said that Coastal would aim to help "an estimated" 9,000 people, with 5,400 of those gaining a qualification.

Those were the targets in October 2008. The costs can be cut and diced in a variety of ways, but one measure is to work out the cost of getting 2,870 people into full-time employment through Coastal. Over 4.5 years, that initial target worked out at £17,770 per individual.

If we spread the costs over the estimated 9,000 people expected to receive help, the cost per person works out at £5,666 over 4.5 years, or slightly more than the cost of one year of benefit payments. The annual cost works out at £1,260 per person.

Results

In October 2011 a firm of consultants, Wavehill, was engaged to evaluate the results to date (report here). The goalposts had shifted somewhat since 2008, with a significant reduction in proposed targets:

                                             2011                                          2008
Target group                      8,500                                         9,000
Sustainable employment     1,000                                         2,870
Gaining a qualification         6,500                                         5,400
"Positive outcomes"            8,100                                         8,570

Three years in, and the target which was the initial financial justification for the project had been reduced from 32% of participants gaining full-time employment to 11.8%. The ambition of becoming cost neutral had clearly been missed by a mile.

Getting people with serious long-term disabilities and mental health problems into full-time paid employment was always going to be very difficult, hence the shift of emphasis to the much easier targets of qualifications and positive outcomes.

No doubt Coastal has defined what constitutes qualifications and positive outcomes somewhere.

By the end of June 2011, Coastal had provided support to just 2,194 people. In other words, it was way off its original target of 9,000.

Even worse, the number of participants gaining full-time employment was just 37 (1.68%) or 31 (1.4% of those supported), depending on which bit of the Wavehill report you believe. Pointing out the obvious, consultants Wavehill noted,

"Clearly, at the current rate of progress, far fewer participants will achieve employment outcomes than anticipated when the COASTAL project was planned."

The number of participants gaining a qualification by June 2011 was just 114, or 2% of the target of 5,400, while those achieving "other positive outcomes" was just 23% of the original target (according to Wavehill, although the numbers do not add up).

Apparently things were going rather better in Carmarthenshire, where the first Coastal newsletter in July 2012 claimed that 89% of participants had achieved a positive outcome. Strangely, the Carmarthenshire team did not provide any numbers for people finding a job or gaining a qualification.

The problem with all this, Wavehill noted, was that the terms of the ESF contract (to get people into employment) were not being met, and there was a serious risk that European funding would be lost. One of the key recommendations was to consider whether a chunk of the participants unlikely ever to find a job should be taken out of the project and allocated to social care.

Bringing us up to date

The Wavehill report takes us up to June 2011, and the project's initial enthusiasm for publishing targets and reports has cooled somewhat since then. In fact, there is no published data to show us how Coastal has been doing in the last two years.

The Wavehill report shows that there were concerns about whether Coastal would be able to retain its ESF funding, but nobody seems to have been worried about whether the £24.7 million pledged by the councils was safe. Since Coastal is run by the local authorities, perhaps they were right to take that for granted.

What the Wavehill report does not tell us is how much of the £51.7 million had been spent by June 2011, which was 2.5 years into the 4.5 year initial project duration. If spending was anything like on target, the project represents spectacularly poor value for money, given the results. In fact, based on the results, Coastal did not need a single penny of the ESF money, and it should have been able to survive on a fraction of the local authority funding pledged.

Assuming that Coastal was fully funded during the period and managed to get through all of its annual budgets, the cost of placing those 31 or 37 people in employment was either £926,000 or £776,000 per person.

The only way we could hope to get near the truth is if Coastal were to publish an annual statement of accounts, which it does not. The complex delivery model and set-up involving multiple local authorities and delivery agencies also means that there is plenty of scope for creative accounting hidden in a thicket of cross-charges.

Another job for the Wales Audit Office, perhaps.

The Client Experience

The reports we have looked at are all written in the weird and opaque language of management consultants and local authority-ese. To get an idea of what Coastal actually means to participants, you could try looking at some of the projects listed on the Coastal website (here).

You could try, but many of the links are broken.

So here are a couple of real-life examples, with names and some details changed to help protect their identities.

Ray is 53 years old and lives in sheltered housing. He has mental health issues and a low IQ. He has had jobs in the past, but has never been able to hold them down for very long. His most recent job was in a charity shop, but he resigned because he felt that he should be managing it, and the charity thought otherwise.

Ray was born in Wolverhampton, and has no family locally. He survives - just - on benefits, and for three or four days each week he says he eats porridge. He cannot afford a telephone, and has no access to the Internet.

Coastal has sent Ray on lots of courses. Some of the courses were entirely unsuited to Ray's abilities, but he did his best. Some were actually quite a bit of fun, such as a one day course in how to use a fire extinguisher.

Attending the courses probably went down as "positive outcomes", while the fire extinguisher certificate may have counted towards the qualifications statistics.

Two years after becoming involved with Coastal, Ray is still hoping to get a job.

Joan is 55 and has severe learning difficulties along with other physical problems. She suffers from epilepsy, and is often unable to leave home for several days at a time because of her health problems.

Coastal has also been arranging courses for Joan, but just as with Ray, some of the courses required literacy and cognitive skills she simply does not possess.

Joan's health problems mean that she is rarely able to complete courses.

Remember the "bespoke training and educational packages" which Coastal said it would develop for its participants? The nasty sting in the tail for people like Ray and Joan and other Coastal clients who find themselves on inappropriate courses is that non-attendance or dropping out mean that they are likely to be sanctioned (i.e. lose benefits).

The Future

Despite its record, Coastal seems set to carry on. The fact that it is still with us suggests that the review of funding Wavehill was so worried about back in October 2011 somehow passed off without too much trouble.

The initial four and a half years of the project was up in the middle of this year, but it seems that someone concluded that it had been so successful that it was given a further lease of life.

In Carmarthenshire the council and the European Regional Development Fund together put £2 million into the redevelopment of the Coleshill "Centre of Economic Inclusion" which re-opened in spring 2012. Now the council is proposing to unload the centre, which is the flagship of its part of the Coastal project, onto an unnamed social enterprise.

The tragedy for Wales is that European funds meant to regenerate and develop the Welsh economy have been frittered away by Carmarthenshire and other local authorities in a way which is not much different to what happened in Greece.

Meanwhile the tried and tested Remploy model which did provide employment to many people with disabilities in Wales has been butchered by the UK government which believes that there are more effective ways of getting people into work. Let's hope it wasn't thinking of Coastal.

What can we learn from Llangyndeyrn?

Celebrations to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the "Battle of Llangyndeyrn" are coming to an end, but if you can, it is worth making the effort to watch a superb documentary broadcast last week on S4C before it disappears into the archives. It can be accessed here for a couple more weeks (English subtitles available).

There is also an excellent community website which tells us about the events of 1963 here.

For those not familiar with the story, it is simple enough. The village of Llangyndeyrn lies between Carmarthen and Pontyberem, and in the early 1960s Swansea Corporation decided that it wanted to create a reservoir covering a large part of the valley above the village. The plan would have led to the loss of a good many family farms and a lot of fertile farmland.

The first most people in Llangyndeyrn knew about it was when they read a report in the local newspaper, but the community came together, formed a committee and set about fighting the plan with ingenuity, humour, determination and a lot of hard work.

Against all the odds, they won, although officialdom then as now was never going to admit that it had lost. Swansea Corporation chose another site instead, and the people of Llangyndeyrn learned of their victory only when they read about the decision to build at what is now Llyn Brianne in the papers.

The S4C documentary was more than an exercise in nostalgia, because what emerged was a lesson in how communities can campaign and win which is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago.

Llangyndeyrn is a small village which united against an external threat. There are some press reports from the time which claimed that there were splits, but they seem not to have amounted to anything. In fact the villagers knew that their campaign of civil disobedience might mean that some of their number could end up in prison, and they even agreed among themselves who would go to jail if necessary in order to minimise disruption to family life and work.

As in any campaign, the villagers had some luck on their side. They were lucky that Swansea Corporation was ill-prepared, and that they had a "spy" working on the inside of the local authority who tipped the campaigners off and kept them one step ahead of the municipal juggernaut. The village was also lucky to have two natural leaders, Cllr William Thomas and the Rev WM Rees, but Cllr Thomas and the Rev Rees would no doubt have been the first to acknowledge that they could not have pulled it off without the active support of so many other members of the community.

To a very large extent, then, the village made its own luck and seized on opportunities as they presented themselves.

The villagers also decided early on not to make the campaign "political". Of course, everything about the campaign was political, but they wisely decided not to accept overt political support and so risk turning the campaign into a party political controversy. That surely has to be one of the most important lessons for any local campaign group. Keep your campaign local and do not allow it to become tied to any single political group or other pressure group, no matter who they are.

What also emerged from the documentary, and what is even clearer from the village's website, is how adapt the campaigners were at public relations, long before anyone had even heard of PR. This was David versus Goliath, and the defence committee played on that image for all it was worth.

Not only did the villagers have no PR training, they also lacked any expertise in civil engineering. Nevertheless, they identified an alternative site which turned out to be much better than what the experts and planners in Swansea had come up with.

In every way, the Davids of Llangyndeyrn outwitted and outflanked Swansea Corporation which initially appeared to hold all the cards in its hands.

Watching the S4C documentary and reading up on the campaign on the village website brought back memories of the two-year battle which was fought out in Newcastle Emlyn against plans to build what would have been a gigantic supermarket in the middle of town - gigantic in that it would have been bigger than all the other shops in town put together.

Opinion in town was not quite as united as it had been in Llangyndeyrn, but in a community of around 1,500 souls, we collected around 900 names on a petition.

Just as in Llangyndeyrn, the "experts" were demonstrably wrong. Two pensioners spent one Sunday morning out in the town with tape measures, measuring the road and pavement widths to prove that the figures given in the consultants' report were rubbish. And if Llangyndeyrn had its bell ringer to warn of the approach of the men from the Corporation, the planning committee was greeted in Newcastle Emlyn by a tractor and muck spreader, a coal merchant's lorry and a wagon load of fox hounds mysteriously passing up and down the main street several times to contribute to the usual traffic chaos.

The campaign ended two years ago with Carmarthenshire County Council approving the plans despite the evidence and despite the feelings of the community. But thanks to the campaign, planning approval came with a very long list of conditions attached, and two years on there is no sign of anyone wanting to take on the site.

But if anyone gets any bright ideas, a special screening of Brwydr Llangyndeyrn will be arranged to remind everyone what a community can achieve when it sets its mind to it, and the muckspreader and hounds are on standby.