Chaos in County Hall

The live broadcast of Carmarthenshire County Council's monthly meetings has until today been executed professionally, with good camera work and generally clear sound, but today's meeting appears to have been a shambles from beginning to end. The broadcast was unavailable for a huge chunk of the session, including the entire presentation by the Scarlets to councillors. If that was not embarrassing enough, the interpreter seems to have disappeared at some point, forcing everyone to switch to English, and then there were repeated problems with the sound. Sometimes it was because councillors forgot to switch on their mikes (and the Chair forgot to remind them), and sometimes the sound was just switched off; mysteriously this only seemed to happen to councillors such as Labour's Bill Thomas, who was cut off in the middle of some comments which won't have gone down well with the bosses.

All of this may be coincidence, but the powers-that-be have been making increasingly threatening noises about the future of filming the monthly council meetings, and it is obvious that there are those in senior positions who would dearly like to see this experiment in transparency brought to an end. The argument put forward at a meeting of the Democratic Services committee at the end of November was that the demands of filming the meetings are such, that staff are severely over-stretched.

Hey presto, a couple of weeks later and the public and councillors were given a taste of what the senior officers meant.

The numbers of viewers may be relatively low, and today's episode won't help, but far, far more people have watched council meetings online than ever used to sit in the gallery.

So while more and more Welsh councils start filming their meetings, it seems that Carmarthenshire is about to turn the clock back, and insist that the only way the public can find out about what happens in council meetings is by taking time off and perching uncomfortably in the gloomy surroundings of the public gallery.

The farce continued right up to the final seconds after the Chair had closed the meeting. As he turned to leave the meeting he spoke to Dave Gilbert, Director of Regeneration, who was standing in for the absent Mark James. "And I thought it was going so well.....", he complained before the mikes went dead.

Tomorrow's Council Meeting - a Christmas Special

It is unlikely that seasonal cheer and goodwill will be much in evidence at tomorrow's meeting of Carmarthenshire County Council where the rap sheet seems to grow with every week that passes.

A large chunk of the short time available for democratic debate and asking questions on behalf of the people of Carmarthenshire will be devoted to another corporate presentation. This month it is Scarlets Regional Ltd who have recently been handed the best part of £2 million in interest write-downs and most of the loot from the sale of a piece of council-owned land.

Last month it was BT, and some very interesting questions are being to be asked about that company's marketing tactics and lavish entertainment of senior council officers and civil servants in Wales and on the other side of Offa's Dike.

With the dire budget settlement looming, perhaps we'll be treated to a show from Wonga at the January meeting.

Also likely to feature at tomorrow's meeting will be serious questions about the conduct of the council in the row about the chief executive's pension arrangements. The Plaid Cymru group has put out a statement (below) setting out some of the questions which need to be answered.

Will Kevin Madge have time to work up another show of incoherent verbal fireworks? Will Meryl and Pam  rehearse their pantomime routines? Will Calum need a neck brace after nodding a little too vigorously in support of Kev?

Tune in and find out.

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Searching questions are being asked of Carmarthenshire County Council Leader Kevin Madge after his Executive Board backed down over a disputed £16,350 payment to Chief Executive Mark James in lieu of pension contributions, as a tax avoidance measure.

The Plaid Cymru opposition group in County Hall are demanding that the Leader should explain exactly what's happened.

“This matter has been one of intense public interest since the Wales Audit Office declared the payment to be unlawful,” said Cllr Peter Hughes Griffiths, who leads the 28-strong Plaid group on the council. “The Executive Board, after insisting all along that the pay supplement policy to senior officers was perfectly lawful, has now done an u-turn by saying it will be withdrawn on "procedural grounds”. I’m asking the Leader to explain exactly what that means.

 “Despite being told by the Wales Audit Office that the payment to the Chief Executive was unlawful, the Executive Board insisted on taking their own legal opinion from a leading QC, in the hope of proving otherwise. It’s quite obvious they’ve been advised to back down by the barrister, but they still deny that the arrangement is “intrinsically unlawful.”

“This is quite an incredible situation, which shows that the Labour-Independent regime which runs this council has made a shambles of the whole affair,” said Cllr Hughes Griffiths. "The taxpayers of Carmarthenshire have a right to know exactly how much this sorry affair has cost us to date. We, in Plaid Cymru, feel that those responsible should be called to account.”

Flame retardant underwear

Readers of the South Wales Guardian were treated last week to a lengthy interview with Calum Higgins, Labour councillor for Tycroes. More on that later this week, but the piece kicks off with Calum complaining that he has been given a rough time in the blogosphere for his attendance record.

Calum tries to have his cake and eat it by saying that the blogs (actually, this blog) have got their facts wrong, before going on to admit that he has taken on too much and will have to adjust his workload.

The facts are simple enough, with Calum accepting a string of appointments to various council committees and the Mid and West Wales Authority, while also embarking on a one-year full-time postgraduate law course in Cardiff as well as accepting nomination as Labour's prospective parliamentary candidate for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr.

Calum has been too busy to attend meetings of the Fire Authority since the AGM in June, but he did turn up to a meeting of the Resources Committee last Monday where he put forward a motion calling for a reduction in proposed cutbacks.

Later in the same meeting Plaid's Cllr Elwyn Williams put forward a second motion calling on the authority not to close any fire stations. The motion was lost by one vote, although we shall never know how Calum would have voted because he had already left the meeting.

Calum has been paid an allowance of £1,106 for his membership of the authority this year.

Bedtime Stories: The Finder's Fee

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

Once upon a time Carmarthenshire County Council cooked up an extraordinary deal to ensure that some £600,000 of the £850,000 sale price of council-owned land at Parc y Scarlets went to the club rather than the taxpayer.

In the break-down provided by Cllr Jeff Edmunds, £30,000 was described as a finder's fee for the Scarlets to recognise the club's role in reeling in Marstons Inns and Taverns.

A further £280,000 was paid to the Scarlets as "allowable expenses" to cover the cost of  fitting out the Scarlets' Red Room in the Llanelli Eastgate development, owned and developed by Henry Davidson Developments Ltd.

Without the participation of the Scarlets, who did not have the money to pay for the Red Room, it is likely that the development of Eastgate would not have gone ahead, or would have been delayed because of lack of interest from commercial tenants.

As it happens, Henry Davidson and Marstons have done business together before, including the sale (report here) by Henry Davidson to the pub chain of a plot on the Bannerbrook development near Coventry, where construction work was due to begin in January of this year.

Quite how much effort the Scarlets really put into "finding" Marstons is an interesting question which the Wales Audit Office may want to look into.

And so the cash-strapped rugby bosses found their handsome prince, and everyone was a lot richer except for the poor old council taxpayers. But then who cares about them, boys and girls?

An expensive and grudging climbdown

The Executive Board of Carmarthenshire County Council has finally backed down in its dispute over the payment of employer pension contributions to the Chief Executive. Minutes of the meeting (here) state:

"Whilst the Board was not prepared, at this stage, to accept that the principle of the policy, aimed at encouraging recruitment and retention of senior officers, was intrinsically unlawful it did accept that there may have been shortcomings in the procedures by which it had been adopted. The Board, not wishing to incur further unnecessary expenditure in this matter, therefore

UNANIMOUSLY RESOLVED

4.1. without conceding that it is intrinsically unlawful, that the pay supplement policy be withdrawn on procedural grounds."

The matter will now be handed over to one of the Assistant Chief Executives to sort out.

What we don't know is whther the chief executive will now repay the pension contributions, but it is racing certainty that he will not be expected to cough up the untold thousands in legal and other bills which this has cost the council's taxpayers.

What will happen over the disputed libel indemnities awarded to Mr James remains to be seen. 

Democracy postponed

Having said that it would not go in for a comprehensive reorganisation of local government, it now seems that Carwyn Jones's dithering administration is inching towards a major shake-up. One of the strongly rumoured changes will be a merger of Ceredigion and Powys to create a gigantic rural council.

The last round of local elections was in 2012, and voters would normally have headed back to the polls in 2016. Thanks to a decision by Carl Sargeant, the date was pushed back by a year to 2017 in order to avoid holding elections to the Senedd at the same time. The Senedd elections themselves have been delayed by a year to avoid a clash with the Westminster general election.

Now it seems that there may be a further one-year delay to 2018 while the government reshuffles the local authority pack.

Good news for rotten councils everywhere which will not have to face disgruntled voters for six years.

A preposterous and entirely fallacious claim

It is sometimes said that attack is the best form of defence, and this is a tactic observers of Carmarthenshire County Council's monthly meetings have seen deployed on several notable occasions. Sometimes this takes the form of a burst of synthetic outrage about accusations made by nobody, leaving observers and most councillors scratching their heads and wondering if they have missed something.

Back in June of this year the monitoring of Cllr Siân Caiach's e-mails by council officers was raised in the chamber. This was a serious matter for several reasons, not least because it should make members of the public think twice before sending an e-mail to their elected representative in the belief that what they are communicating is in confidence.

The main drift of the replies Cllr Caiach got was that the council was fully entitled to monitor councillors' e-mails, and the chief executive went on to launch an angry tirade. Accusations, made by nobody, that there was a department of officers sitting monitoring e-mails was "completely fallacious. There is no truth to that at all".

Employing a group of people just to monitor councillors' e-mails would indeed be preposterous, but there does appear to be an established monitoring operation on Jail Hill.

Earlier this week another blogger submitted a Freedom of Information request to the council. The details of the request will have to wait for another day, but the issue involved is one which extends way beyond the borders of Carmarthenshire.

Within hours of the request having been made, the blogger noticed that Carmarthenshire County Council was busy reading and searching her blog for information linked to her Freedom of Information request, because she uses a standard software package which can show which companies and public bodies are accessing the blog.

So it's a big hello to the boys and girls reading this in County Hall. Despite the unprecedented spending cuts coming down the line, you can probably relax in the knowledge that your jobs are not under threat.

Difficult Decisions - the Carmarthenshire Pensions Scandal

Update 4 December

In an interview with the South Wales Guardian (here), Kevin Madge acknowledges that the row over the pension and libel payments to the chief executive has damaged the council's reputation, before going on to maintain that the council is convinced that it was right to do what it did. He suggests that the imminent publication by the Wales Audit Office will allow the council to come out fighting and put across its side of the story.

The interesting question now is the purpose of today's meeting of the Executive Board, which is understood to be set to approve changes to the council's policy on pension arrangements for senior officers.

If the council is convinced that it was right to do what it did, logic suggests that the Board will today be battening down the hatches and telling the WAO to get lost. Common sense, on the other hand, suggests that they should back down.

Time will tell.

In the meantime, Kev says that there is "no question of the police becoming involved". How does he know? Have words been had with the top brass in Dyfed Powys Police, or does the WAO see a fundamental difference between what happened in Carmarthen and Caerphilly?

It is interesting to note that when the Caerphilly case was referred to the police, the investigation was handed to a force from across the Severn Bridge rather than the local boys in blue.

____________________________

This blog speculated last week that a meeting of the county council's ruling Executive Board scheduled for 4 December would be tackling the tax efficient pension arrangements of the council's chief executive. The agenda contains a single, highly misleading sentence stating merely that the board will be reviewing supplementary pay policy for senior officers, and the meeting will be held behind closed doors.

This speculation seems to have been borne out by a story in this week's South Wales Guardian, which reports that the meeting is being held just a couple of weeks before the expected publication by the Wales Audit Office of public interest reports on the pensions and libel indemnity scandals.

In theory at least the Board will first have to decide whether public and press should be excluded from the meeting, but we can take it for granted that they will opt for secrecy.

Whether that is justified is quite another matter because the main facts of the case are known. We know that the chief executive has been receiving employer pension contributions as part of his salary, and we know that these payments run to a little over £16,000 a year.

Other questions about the pension arrangements remain to be answered. Who commissioned the report recommending that the pension contributions should be paid as a part of the officer's salary? How was the arrangement approved, and what has all the specialist financial and legal advice cost the council's beleaguered taxpayers? It is unlikely that any of that will come up for discussion at the Board meeting.

Not only is the public interest exemption test a hollow sham, but we can be sure that the meeting itself will be a mere formality without any debate or questioning of what has happened. When the minutes are finally published - probably after the New Year - the likelihood is that they will show that the meeting ran for considerably less than 30 minutes, and that the decision was reached unanimously.

In reality, any discussion and the decision itself will have taken place already, and the Board meeting will be held only to give the outcome a legal seal of approval.

Having got that out of the way, we can now speculate what this latest difficult decision facing council leader Kevin Madge might be, and the likelihood is that it will come down to whether to continue this arrangement and so throw down another gauntlet to the Audit Office, or whether to reverse the decision and presumably put arrangements in place to claw back the money already paid.

From the point of view of the public, we lose either way.

If the Board backs down and reverses the arrangements, a five figure sum will have been wasted on independent financial advice and legal bills.

If the Board decides to plough grimly on and stick to its guns, the money wasted so far will be just a foretaste of costs to come, because as the Board knows, the Wales Audit Office is likely to take the matter to court.

Common sense would suggest that the Board will back down rather than risk protracted and very expensive litigation, and possibly even criminal proceedings as in the case of Caerphilly. The fairest outcome, and almost certainly the one we won't get, is a decision to claw back the payments and the cost of all the financial and legal advice from the chief executive.

Calum flies in

There is not much left of local democracy in Carmarthenshire, and the Appeals Committee is to all intents and purposes the only remaining body in which ordinary, democratically elected councillors can challenge and overturn decisions made by unelected officers.

It will come as no surprise to hear that the officers would dearly love to abolish the committee, and several attempts have already been made to send it off to the great archive in the sky.

Members of the public and council staff who feel that council officers have made unfair decisions in certain areas can appeal to their elected representatives and ask for the decisions to be overturned. Most of the cases which come before the committee involve decisions by the Education Department to refuse free school transport to children, but occasionally the committee also hears appeals against dismissal.

Membership of the committee is restricted to just seven of the 74 elected councillors, and unusually committee members who cannot attend meetings for one reason or another may not nominate a substitute. Currently there are three Plaid Cymru members, two Independents and two Labour members.

For members of the public exercising their right to appeal against decisions they consider unfair, the Appeals Committee is hugely important, and the appeals process means having to complete paperwork, taking time off work and travelling to Carmarthen to appear in person. Committee members are under a strong moral obligation to take their work seriously, therefore.

Despite this, and despite being vice chair of the committee, Calum Higgins, Labour's student councillor for Tycroes, often has more important things to do.

Yesterday's meeting kicked off at 10 o'clock with no sign of Calum, and no apology for absence. On the agenda were four appeals against decisions not to provide free school transport.

Calum sauntered in at 12.10 as proceedings were drawing to a close, saying that he had been helping one of the four cases heard that day.

One of the Labour members turned to a Plaid councillor to say, "He's standing for the Assembly", referring to young Calum.

"No, he isn't", the Plaid councillor replied, before explaining to the Labour councillor that Calum is hoping to represent us all in Westminster as a Labour MP in 2015.

"What him? Good gracious", came the reply of the bemused Labour councillor who clearly has not been keeping up with the goings-on in their own party.

Back behind closed doors....

Following the recent outburst of transparency by a member of Carmarthenshire County Council's ruling Executive Board when Cllr Jeff Edmunds gave Cllr Siân Caiach the low-down on the increasingly byzantine tactics used to funnel more money into Parc y Scarlets, the Board is returning to form next week with two separate meetings, both of which contain exempt (i.e. secret) items.

The second meeting, on 4th December, is the more interesting, but there is no point in any readers going along because the meeting will be applying a public interest test to determine whether the sole agenda item should be discussed behind closed doors.

One of the certainties of life in Carmarthenshire is that the Board will decide that press and public should be excluded.

The mysterious item is advertised merely as "Review of the Authority's Pay Supplement Policy to Senior Officers". You can read the policy for yourselves here, and it's a pretty anodyne document.

If the Board were doing what it says it is going to do on the agenda, i.e. review the policy, it is hard to see why the item should be exempted from disclosure because tweaking the rules would be unlikely to reveal any sensitive information. However, that has not stopped the council from slapping on exemptions in the past when it feels that it needs to hide its blushes.

Perhaps, and we can only speculate here, there is a clue in paragraph 10.2 of the document, where we are told that senior officer employment contracts deal with matters such as salary, telephone allowances, and oh, pension contributions. Who'd have thought it?

This may be pure coincidence, but we are rapidly approaching the time when the Wales Audit Office has threatened to publish two separate public interest reports dealing with the libel indemnity and.....pension contributions. 

This may take some time, but watch this space.


The first meeting deals with a range of issues, including community asset transfers and a very weighty report on Swansea Bay City Region Economic Development Strategy 2013-2030. Boiled down to manageable proportions, the report concludes that the region is underperforming economically, and that more emphasis needs to be put on creating jobs. Turning to how those goals might be achieved, the sea mist rolls into Baglan Bay.

Here's a flavour of what the report says needs to be done in the form of four "cross cutting themes":

● Thinking and Delivering Together for City Region Success (effective partnership working);
 ● Quality and Intelligence-driven Leadership and Action (long term Vision; strong and capable leadership; decisions based on robust evidence and intelligence);
● Being and Acting Connected (strengthening links within and outside City Region); and
● Understanding Sustainable Growth (embracing long-term solutions to deliver growth for present and future generations).

Bearing in mind that Meryl Gravell and Chief Executive Mark James both played a prominent part in a recent Swansea Bay City Region conference, readers can probably work out for themselves what vision and strong and capable leadership mean.

The council's management summary notes that this "bold and ambitious" plan has no financial implications, but at least it's creating employment for the report writers and conference organisers.

The Scarlets, the Red Room and some puce faces

If Carmarthenshire County Council were not already mired in enough scandals, it now seems that the council gifted the Scarlets around £600,000 of the £850,000 sale price of an overflow car park site next to Parc y Scarlets. While council leader Kevin Madge (Lab) was kept in the loop, and Cllr Jeff Edmunds (Lab) and some senior officers were directly involved in the decision, there are suggestions that other members of the ruling Executive Board may have been unaware of just how generous the council had been when they recently signed off the recent bailout package to reduce interest on the club's outstanding £2.6 million debt to the council.

It has taken a long time for this information to come out, with the council unsurprisingly vetoing a Freedom of Information request and a subsequent appeal from Cllr Siân Caiach. In a surprising turn of events, it was Cllr Edmunds himself who spilled the beans in the end despite last-minute attempts to stop him.

Why Cllr Edmunds decided to come clean is something that he himself will no doubt explain in due course.

The Executive Board gave outline approval for the sale of the land at a meeting in July 2012, with councillors delegating authority to negotiate a deal to the head of Corporate Property in consultation with the "appropriate Board Member" (Cllr Jeff Edmunds). The Board also agreed that an independent valuer should be appointed to determine an appropriate split of the proceeds.

In a written answer to Cllr Caiach in July 2013, the head of Corporate Property confirmed that a sum of £850,000 was paid for the land leased to the Scarlets under a 150 year lease. He added that following "normal negotiation and agreement of allowable costs etc", the remaining proceeds were shared equally between the Freeholder (the Council) and the long leaseholder (the Scarlets), as would be legally expected.

There was nothing normal about this transaction, however, not least the fact that the club has never actually paid for the lease from which it has benefitted so spectacularly.

The £850,000 sale price is understood to break down as follows (numbers rounded off):

Fees to agents and architects                      £50k

Allowable expenses to Scarlets                  £280k

Finders fee for buyer  to Scarlets                £30k

Compensation to club for loss of lease        £76k

Share of remainder :-             Scarlets  -     £220k

        Carmarthenshire County Council  -     £200k    

"Allowable expenses" were the costs of fitting out The Red Room, the Scarlets' new bar and shop in the private Llanelli Eastgate development, developed and owned by leasing company Henry Davidson. The Eastgate shops were supposed to be 70% let before the build, and the Scarlets were offered some units to make up this number, as there was difficulty getting commercial commitments to let. The club could not afford to fit out the shop and restaurant, and so were advanced the money by the landlords in order to make up the numbers.

It seems that the £280,000 in "allowable expenses" were subsequently used by the Scarlets to repay the temporary loan from Henry Davidson.

The officers' justification for this part of the deal was that the Scarlets shop would create jobs and increase footfall in the Eastgate development.

Readers may also recall that the council has been moving hundreds of its staff into an office block in the Eastgate development. The official explanation for this is that emptying council-owned buildings and paying rent to Henry Davidson will save the council money. It is understood that the council is paying £250,000 a year for the offices on a 20-year lease.

If you believe that the office deal is a cost saving measure, you will probably also believe the council's line that slashing interest on the Scarlets loan is a fantastic commercial deal, and that 4% is better than 7%. To quote the (highly misleading) minutes of the most recent meeting of the Executive Board, "The Board was also advised that the Council was now receiving a higher sum of interest on the loan than for each of the last three years".

The truth of the matter was that the council was receiving 7% interest, but with a sum equivalent to 4% being rolled up into the loan. In cash terms, the council is now very slightly better off as a result of the deal (about £8,000 a year at current rates), but overall the council will forfeit somewhere between £750,000 and £1 million of revenue over the remaining 10 years of the loan.

And finally, Cneifiwr was recently taken to task by a reader for publishing a transcript of Kevin Madge's recent rant on the subject of the Scarlets. Stripped of the waffle and meaningless platitudes, the transcript contains the following interesting sentences:

And I am proud of what has been achieved here, and what has been done with the Scarlets. They've asked us for a little bit of help here, and we've supported them.....So at the end of the day, Chairman, I think that those two decisions needed to be done. Again, we make the tough decisions. We are answerable here now. I've asked the legal, erm, Linda, to give the, erm, run-down on that, but I think we have got the power to do what we did.

Cneifiwr understands that several public spirited individuals have now asked the Wales Audit Office rather than Linda (the council's Head of Law) to give the legal run-down on one of Kev's tough decisions, and the council's own internal auditors have been asked to look into what happened.

Acutely aligned - the South Wales Evening Post

It didn't take long for the South Wales Evening Post to respond to directions from Local World chairman, David Montgomery, to open up the newspaper to content provided by a key "partner" in the shape of Swansea City Council, and it has now added an exciting new tab on its website headed Swansea Council News.

Clicking on the tab takes readers straight to what appears to be an undiluted feed of "news" produced by the Labour council's own press department, complete with what is presumably "aligned" advertising for private health insurance ("Jump NHS Queues!"), a property letting agency, an advert placed by ING Bank promoting wind power financing, teeth whitening and an online gambling site.

The paper has not got around yet to adding a tab for Neath Port Talbot council news, but if it had, it is probably unlikely that it would carry a report on the arrest of Labour councillor Mark Jones after police searched his house in connection with suspected drugs offences.

Nye Bevan would be so proud!

It surely cannot be long before readers of the group's Carmarthen Journal are treated to something similar, with the Ministry of Spin on Jail Hill being given its own official platform to complement the unofficial control it exerts over the rest of the paper.

Cuts consultations

The county council is holding a cuts roadshow in different parts of the county. Yesterday it was the turn of Newcastle Emlyn, although thanks to very poor publicity, hardly anyone turned up.

The council team came armed with banners and stacks of questionnaires and booklets explaining what the exercise is all about. The team itself was made up of Chris Moore, the council's Head of Financial Services,  Cllr Jane Tremlett, Executive Member responsible for Social Care and Health, and for some reason a representative from the council's press office. But perish the thought that this is a PR exercise.

The three VIP visitors were squeezed into a broom cupboard in the town's library, which has probably also been ear-marked for closure.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the exercise is that while lots of work has gone into producing questionnaires and glossy brochures outlining very broad proposals for people to comment on, almost no detail is available.

For example, the council is proposing that one area of savings would be to start charging for school transport for children aged 16+. If you are a parent, there are a number of questions you might want to ask.

• Will the charge apply to all children once they have reached their 16th birthday? If so, that will hit a good many children in the year running up to their GCSEs.
• Will the charge be based on mileage, or will it be a flat fee?
• What happens if you have two or even three children who are aged 16+?
• Will there be means testing to ensure that families who really cannot find the money are not hit and forced to take children out of school? And if so, what would be the cost of means testing?

Mr Moore and Cllr Tremlett do not have the answers, as it seems that these little details have not been worked out yet. But they would like you to put a tick in a box saying whether you agree or disagree anyway.

Cllr Tremlett's brief includes residential care for the elderly. Which homes is the council planning to close? She does not know.

The council is very keen on independent living because that saves lots of money on residential care. So is it a good idea to ramp up charges for home care services? And can she really guarantee that transferring home care services to private operators will make no difference to people who receive the service despite saving £1.5 million a year? And what difference will it make to council staff currently employed as home carers when they are transferred to the tender mercies of the profit-driven private operators?

Anyone who has read the council's very glossy annual reports will know that we are apparently all healthier, happier and better off than before thanks to Carmarthenshire County Council, and healthy living is something which County Hall is very keen to tell us about.

You might wonder, for example, how plans to hive off playing fields and ramp up charges for using council sports facilities contributes to healthy living. You might also wonder how cutbacks at leisure centres is healthy living. Or how will the health and fitness of children be helped when schools are told to find money they don't have to pay to use the leisure centres which were built purposely alongside them? Especially when those schools lack gyms and other sports facilities precisely because they were built alongside leisure centres?

You might like to ask these questions and more when the roadshow comes to a place near you (assuming that you know it is happening), but it is unlikely that Mrs Tremlett or anyone else from County Hall will be able to give you an answer.

So just put a tick in the box, and make them happy.

Ebenezer Madge's Christmas Message

The latest 42-page edition of Carmarthenshire News has just arrived at Tŷ Cneifiwr, with jolly Christmas messages on the front page. Rather less jolly is Kevin Madge, our council leader, on page 2 warning of drastic cutbacks and belt tightening, and he urges us to turn to pages 6 and 7 of the council rag to read about where some of these cuts may fall.

The list is by no means as extensive as the ideas presented to attendees at the now famous Ffwrnes Farce, but most of the big ticket items are there, together with an invitation to readers to have their say.

This is rather more honest than some previous "consultation exercises" which presented residents with a set of fixed options. At least this time people can write in with suggestions such as scrapping the Carmarthenshire News, making do without a chief executive, or cutting back on the number of assistant and deputy chief executives. Perhaps a ban on extremely expensive litigation by the chief executive might be up your street, or perhaps you think the council should stop funnelling money into fringe evangelical churches and be slightly less generous towards the Scarlets at a time when it is planning to cut its support for the sports facilities used by children and ordinary members of the public.

Whether any of these suggestions would be acted upon is another matter.

Honesty and openness have their limits, of course, and so the council paper talks in very vague terms about saving £1.7 million on residential care for the elderly, without specifying which homes it might close.

It also says that it could save £1.5 million a year by transferring all long-term home care for the elderly to "independent" (i.e. private sector) providers, adding that "there will be no impact on service users".

Clearly all the recent scandals about the quality of care provided by some private sector providers have escaped the council's notice, including what several prominent charities have described as the disgrace of 15-minute care visits.

Acutely aligned segmentation

A quick rummage through the pages of this week's Carmarthen Journal showed that the newspaper must be raking in the advertising revenue at the moment, with pages and pages of special advertising features and other promotions. Rather more difficult to find were actual news stories, which is generally pretty high up on most people's list of reasons for buying a local newspaper.

Reading the blog of the great Robert Lloyd, elder statesman of journalism in Carmarthenshire, suggests that those of us who still naively cling to a belief that local newspapers are about reliable reporting of local news need to wake up and smell the coffee, at least as far as the titles belonging to the Local World group are concerned (the Journal, Llanelli Star and South Wales Evening Post).

Robert carries the text, without comment, of a bizarre, jargon-ladened fatwa delivered by the group's chairman, David Montgomery, to the earthlings who work for the newspapers. Here is what he has to say, for example, about reporting crime and police stories:

"the publisher acts as the main conduit for police information of every type - not for the odd photofit in a dramatic crime but for all humdrum information like crime prevention that the police seek to promote. In return the journalist will offer an attractive platform for this content and a large measure of control presumably by the police information office." 

In non-Newspeak what that seems to mean is that the newspapers will create a nicely designed platform (something Mr Montgomery reckons most 12 year-olds can do nowadays) into which the PR merchants can channel their output, pretty much free of editorial interference.

In case that message was not altogether clear, Mr Montgomery adds, "the senior journalists. ...will extend further the principle of partnership, with third party institutions supplying an increasing amount of content."


That does not mean to say, he says, that the newspapers won't report on things that the police bosses don't like, but the relationship between the press and police will be "insulation from the inevitable stresses and strains between the media and the public services".

Just in case you think he is talking just about the relationship between the press and the police (rather a hot topic in recent times), he goes on to make it clear that this new approach to journalism will extend to all sorts of other public bodies, such as health boards, sports clubs, schools, businesses large and small and presumably, although he does not say so, local government.

They will churn out their press releases and have a large measure of control over how they appear in the Journal, etc.

In other words, the newspapers will be very much like the good old Carmarthenshire News, but with rather more advertising.

Come to think of it, that's not far off what we have today. After the Carmarthen Journal got into trouble with the control-freaks in County Hall a couple of times for running stories the council top brass did not like, Cneifiwr was reliably informed that an understanding had been reached whereby the newspaper would generally print what the council wanted us to hear in return for lots of lovely advertising. As a fig-leaf, the newspaper retained the right to report on stories the council is less keen on, occasionally even from a critical angle.

Needless to say, that right has not been exercised in the last couple of years, and the partnership policy is now set to be extended to Hywel Dda Health Board, companies and other champions of free speech and transparency.

While Mr Montgomery's message is full of talk of segments, enrichment of the user experience and the need to acutely align content with the commercial operation, readers will search in vain for old-fashioned terms such as independence and integrity.

Legless down at the Quercus Petraea

The sessile oak, or quercus petraea, is a species of oak which grows over much of Europe and parts of western Asia. Someone or other designated the tree as the national tree of Wales, and Bruce suggests derwen ddigoes as the Welsh name. Derwen ddigoes translates literally as 'legless oak'.

Perhaps the marketing executives at Marstons who came up with the name "The Sessile Oak" for their new pub next to Parc y Scarlets were cracking a little joke.

The Sessile Oak

The pub stands on a site leased to the Scarlets by Carmarthenshire County Council for 150 years. Despite never having paid anything for the lease, the club nevertheless received a hefty chunk of the £850,000 paid by Marstons for the plot. Quite how much the club received, the council refuses to say, although the club will presumably have to disclose the figure when it publishes its next set of accounts.

It is also rumoured that legal fees consumed an unusually large share of the proceeds, something which perhaps reflects the rather unusual nature of the transaction.

While the terms and conditions of the deal remain secret, what does seem clear is that the council did not consider it necessary to insert a clause ensuring that the brewery group respected the Welsh language, which is entirely absent from the bungalow-like exterior of the pub.

Of all the regional clubs, the Scarlets have the strongest connections with the language. A recognition of those traditions, perhaps choosing something like Y Sosban, would have cost nothing in a deal which was otherwise all about money.

The sessile oak is not just the designated national tree of Wales, but also the symbol of a rather more endangered species, the Welsh Conservatives. Perhaps that was part of the little joke as well.

Carmarthenshire and the Bedroom Tax

The campaign to kill off what is left of democratic debate and decision-making in the council chamber in Carmarthen is hotting up. Caebrwyn recently reported on discussions which have taken place in the shadowy Business Management Group, and this blog looked at proposals for new-look council meetings back in October (see A Managed Democracy).

In a nutshell, the top brass would like to stop the practice of putting committee minutes before the full council and fill the vacuum with Powerpoint presentations by visiting company executives and other external bodies. Increasing use is also being made of the chief executive's powers to veto motions or divert them away from councillors to the Executive Board. This has happened twice this month, with a motion calling for a debate on the Scarlets bailout being vetoed, and another motion on the bedroom tax being diverted to the Executive Board which dispatched it on Monday. More on that in a moment.

At last week's meeting the acting Head of Law took Cllr Darren Price to task for thinking that the full council was, in her words, "a super scrutiny committee", i.e. with the right to hold the executive to account.

Because of constant tampering with the constitution over the last few years, the much-amended document can be read to support almost any argument, but of course the only arguments which count are those made by the executive. There are certainly some key passages of the constitution which entirely contradict the line being taken by Mrs Rees Jones and the chief executive.

This is by far the most serious assault on democracy in Carmarthenshire to date, and there will be at least some backbench Labour councillors who feel uneasy about what is happening, not least because there will come a time when Labour finds itself in opposition and on the receiving end of the measures it has waved through.

The latest motion to be diverted away from the full council was a Motion on Notice submitted by Cllr Alun Lenny, calling on the council to follow the lead taken by some other councils, such as Brighton, and halt evictions of tenants who fall foul of the bedroom tax.

Labour has promised to scrap the measure if it comes back to power in 2015, and it could well have won a vote on the matter in the House of Commons last week if 40+ of its MPs had not decided to stay at home. All the Plaid, SNP and Green MPs voted for the Labour motion, which was defeated by just 26 votes.

Back in Carmarthenshire both Kevin Madge and his deputy Tegwen Devichand (responsible for housing) have both stood in the chamber to deplore the bedroom tax on several occasions recently. Here was a chance for them to do something about it.

Brighton, an authority which is roughly the same size as Carmarthenshire in terms of population, has set aside just £70,000 to fund its no evictions policy over the next year. Set against what Carmarthenshire spends on consultants and QCs, that is small beer, and as Cllr Lenny has pointed out, the cost of evictions and having to re-house people made homeless because of the change will be much higher.

Normally in a democratic institution motions are debated, with the proposers speaking in favour. Not in Carmarthenshire, where the Executive Board decided not to allow anyone else to speak.

The motion was dealt with in five minutes, with nobody speaking in favour of a non-evictions policy, and Tegwen Devichand wielding the axe.

For its part the council says that it is assessing people on a case-by-case basis, but the problem is one which is likely to affect tenants across the county. A proper discussion in the council chamber in front of the cameras should not be a problem, unless the Labour leadership is trying to keep the issue away from its backbench councillors and out of the public eye.

A five minute hatchet job in a meeting which is not filmed, on a Monday morning when very few observers could have been present is simply not acceptable.

Speaking after the Executive Board meeting, Cllr Lenny said,

“A large number of councils across the UK have already introduced a no eviction policy for tenants who genuinely cannot pay their rent due to this nasty little tax. But the Labour-Independent regime in Carmarthenshire obviously care little for tenants who fear the heartbreak of being evicted from their homes. They also seemed unaware that covering families’ rent shortfall and using Discretionary Housing Payments would be more economical than evicting and relocating families. So it’s a blow to taxpayers as well.

“It’s also disappointing that the Plaid Cymru motion was not debated in Full Council, but referred to the so-called Socialists and closet Tories on the Executive Board – with predictable results. We had a lot of crocodile tears at today’s meeting, but no action to protect tenants who may face losing their homes in the run-up to Christmas.”