Village Care and a lot of wise monkeys

Carmarthenshire County Council was back in the news again yesterday, with the BBC reporting on the claims of two whistleblowers that care workers employed by Village Care, ultimately a part of the Mitie Group, were being paid less than the minimum wage and that home care visits were being cut short because of the company's employment practices.

One of the women who spoke to the BBC earlier this week said that, as a supervisor, she had a duty of care to staff and their clients, even though that meant being paid just £1 an hour for helping out colleagues when she was on call.

Neither the company nor the council appears yet to have acknowledged their own duty of care. Mitie is conducting an investigation into itself, while the council's reaction was every bit as shoddy and dishonest as we have come to expect.

Anyone who has experienced home care of this kind will tell you that the biggest headache is carers not turning up or curtailing their visits.

This was confirmed by the whistleblower who spoke of having to deal with a constant stream of complaints from relatives and clients about missed or curtailed appointments.


A council spokesperson told the BBC that nobody had complained to the council, presumably to justify its inaction.

It is reasonable to expect that complaints would have been logged, and also that the council would contact clients and their relatives from time to time to find out if they were happy with the service.

Judging from the council's response, that does not appear to have been the case. Unlike the whistleblower, the council does not seem to have felt that it had a duty of care, and no monitoring of the service or the pay and conditions of care staff would appear to have been carried out while all of this was happening under its nose.

Neither would it appear that the council read a report from the care and social services inspectorate, CSSIW, which raised concerns about pay and conditions.

This not being a "good news story" (see the council's revised Press and Media Protocol), that was about all the council had to say. Nobody from County Hall was "available" to be interviewed. Not Mark James, Kevin Madge, Jake Morgan, the head of social services, nor Jane Tremlett (Executive Board member responsible for social care) nor either of Kevin Madge's two deputies, Pam Palmer and Tegwen Devichand.

Only two weeks ago, it will be remembered, Jane Tremlett was holding forth in the council chamber about how her efforts were being rewarded with less than the minimum wage, a statement which only holds water if she is putting in more than 90 hours a week into her job.

It remains to be seen whether councillors will be allowed to discuss this scandal when they next meet, but as a first step they should insist that the council's plans for yet more outsourcing of care should be put on hold.

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Another aspect of outsourced social care which has not featured in this story is the quality of some of the staff used by private sector care companies.

Both of the women who spoke to the BBC seemed to be genuinely compassionate and caring individuals, but extremely low pay, lack of job security and other employment conditions mean that some of those who end up looking after the sick and vulnerable are not the kind of people most of us would feel comfortable about letting through the front door.

Meet "Mick", a 40-something refugee from London who for about a year lived just down the road from Cneifiwr. Mick is an alcoholic and a known drug user, and he could often be heard screaming and shouting abuse at his girlfriend of an evening.

The day after one particularly heavy session, I asked her if she was OK. Yes, she replied, and she went on to express hope that Mick was now getting himself back together, having landed a job as a carer. A few months later, Mick disappeared again and is now believed to be back in England.

£1 an hour

The BBC reported on allegations that MiHomeCare was paying care staff less than the minimum wage a couple of weeks back (story here), but it seems that nobody in County Hall in Carmarthen was paying attention.

Roll forward to yesterday, and the BBC was in Carmarthenshire with two former MiHomeCare employees who told the reporter for Radio 4's Today Programme what it was like to work for this company, which is providing its services to Carmarthenshire County Council as Village Care. You can hear the interview here at 1 hour 48 minutes in.

The service provided is domiciliary care, mainly for the elderly living at home, and comprises short visits interspersed by often long journeys to the next patient. MiHomeCare has, it seems, been indulging in "clipping", which means paying just 5 minutes travel time for carers who have to travel long distances around the countryside between appointments. 16.1 miles being the example quoted in the interview.

One of the women had also been employed as a supervisor, and was paid just £10 (before tax and NI) for a 10 hour shift on call.

Doing the maths

Responsible for social care for the elderly in Carmarthenshire is Cllr Jane Tremlett (Independent). As Cadno pointed out in last week's Carmarthenshire Herald, viewers of the recent council webcast of a meeting which "debated" Leighton Andrews' proposals for local government reform could listen to Cllr Tremlett inviting the public to do the maths on councillors' allowances which she reckoned worked out at rather less than the minimum wage.

Mrs T is paid £29,000 a year (plus expenses and other perks such as a generous local government pension scheme), which Cadno works out is the equivalent of working just over 90 hours per week, or 13 hours a day for 7 days, on the minimum wage.

Cllr Tremlett is currently overseeing plans to outsource what is left of the council's domiciliary care services to private sector operators like MiHomeCare.

Value for Money

Even more fortunate is her party boss, Cllr Pam Palmer, who picks up £31,000 for being a deputy without having responsibility for an actual department within the council. That's 96 hours a week for someone working down on the recycling lines at CWM (the responsibility of Cllr Colin Evans, Lab, £29,000), or rather longer if you work for a company contracted to provide care services for the council.

Since being elevated to this lofty position in May 2012, Pam has held five "decision meetings". 2013 was a particularly busy year with three such meetings, but business has been slow since then. The most recent meeting, where she rubber stamped a secret protocol on the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, took place in May 2014. The RIPA meeting took 25 minutes, and a second session later that day took 20 minutes to approve "revised information governance policies". Governance and information governance in particular were areas where the subsequent WLGA peer review panel felt there was considerable room for improvement in Carmarthenshire.

That's one 45 minute meeting in 18 months.

When she isn't slaving away in decision meetings, Pam's other duties include being Youth Ambassador for Carmarthenshire. To put it kindly, the world was a very different place when Pam was a girl. Britain still had an empire and there was rationing for a start.

While she is entitled to a free bus pass, she recently voted to introduce charges for children aged 16+ using school buses and a raft of other cuts which will hit young people.

The reason for this state of affairs, boys and girls, is that Pam is entitled to a free bus pass, and the bad news is that while she is entitled to free travel on her salary of £31,000 plus pension plus perks, she does not think your children should be allowed to live the life of Riley and lounge around on school buses for free.

As we know, Pam is none too keen on Leighton's proposed reforms, which among other things would see the pay and perks of deputies pruned back.

Back in May 2012 Kevin Madge decided that he could not cope with just one deputy, and so we now have two, the other being Cllr Tegwen Devichand (Lab., £31,000). That was about the same time that he got the council to order a second Mercedes black limo so that he did not have to share with Cllr Siân Thomas while she was Chair of Council.

How much deputising these two veterans actually do is a mystery. When Kevin Madge was absent from a council meeting recently, neither of them was willing or able to stand in for him and answer questions addressed to him.

Brother Madge

Going further up the greasy pole, we come to Cllr Kevin Madge (Lab), scraping by on just £48,000 basic. Let's call it £50,000 with expenses. To earn that, someone on the minimum wage would have to work round the clock, 7 days a week.

Of course, all this is chicken feed when we get to the big performers among the council's senior officers. One chief executive costs almost as much to keep going as the 20 Polish-speaking workers one of CWM's sub-contractors was looking to recruit recently.

How screwing very low paid council staff - even if they are fashionably "at arm's length" - squares with the socialist and/or Christian beliefs these members of the Executive Board like to wear on their sleeves is a question for us all to ponder.

Llanelli Hustings

Plaid Cymru is proposing that the political parties come together to hold hustings in all of the wards in the Llanelli constituency where Vaughan Williams is challenging Labour's 93-year grip on the town in the general election.
  
This is a very ambitious plan and is designed to increase voter participation, with Plaid's agent Cllr Gwyn Hopkins, citing the extraordinary level of engagement by voters of all ages and backgrounds across Scotland in the independence referendum as an example of what can be achieved.
  
Vaughan Williams has been fighting what must be the most energetic campaign anywhere in Wales, and he has worked particularly hard to involve young voters. This picture of Vaughan's core campaign team tells its own story:

Plaid has asked the various party agents to meet as a matter of urgency to try to get the ball rolling.

Apart from Vaughan Williams for Plaid and Nia Griffith for Labour, the line-up in Llanelli includes Siân Caiach (People First), Ken Rees (LibDem Ukip) and Selaine Saxby, the Wiltshire-based sports bra entrepreneur standing for the Tories.

Labour's has not yet said whether it will go along with the idea, but has indicated that it is prepared to meet the other agents. 

Meanwhile things are hotting up in Ceredigion where Mike Parker for Plaid is challenging Mark Williams for the LibDems.

In a sign of desperation, the LibDems have taken to carpet bombing Newcastle Emlyn with Mark Williams leaflets, presumably in the hope that voters in Carmarthen East and Dinefwr will flock across the Teifi to vote for their man.

Breathtaking

Carmarthenshire News may not have had anything to say about the recent budget with its swingeing cuts to public services and massive hike in council tax and other charges*, and the press office's "Newsroom" may not have had anything to say about the recruitment scandal at CWM Environmental or the serious concerns expressed by inspectors about Rhydygors school in Carmarthen, but when it comes to reporting on the things that really matter, you can be sure that they will churn something out.

So when there was a partial eclipse of the sun last Friday, it was obvious that Meryl would feature in the story somewhere.

There was fevered speculation ahead of the event that the press office would do something about Meryl and solar panels - praising the performance of the vast array of panels on the rooftops at Stradey Business Park in Llangennech, perhaps (now with retrospective planning permission!) - but somehow solar panels and the temporary disappearance of the sun just didn't seem right.

Fortunately Baroness Randerson, elected by nobody but still a LibDem Welsh Office minister, shipped up in Lanelli to meet Meryl and admire the eclipse:

Welsh Office Minister watches Eclipse in Llanelli


Lady R joined the thousands of visitors now "making their way to the breathtaking Millennium Coastal Park" to experience "first hand the breathtaking views and attractions the park has to offer" [all a bit too breathtaking, Ed.]. And once there, she joined a crowd of three others already scanning the heavens:

So without further ado, here is this week's caption competition:

* Rather oddly, several weeks after the budget was passed, the press office yesterday put out a story announcing that "school crossing patrols, flood defence, coastal protection and remedial earthworks have all been saved from budget cuts". No mention of the much longer list of services which have been cut.

Interesting times

The arrival on the scene three weeks ago of two new local newspapers - the Carmarthenshire Herald and the Llanelli Herald - is already making itself felt in the ranks of the existing titles where managed decline has been the motto for years.


Last week the Cambrian News was handing out free copies in Cardigan, which is at the extreme southern end of its range.

The Cambrian News is not a newspaper which features much on this blog, so it was good to get a chance to become re-acquainted with it. It is well written and produced, although its coverage of the Teifi Valley is on the thin side.

Unlike its competitors, the Cambrian has an edition which is squarely focused on Ceredigion, and that should be a strength in the new turf war. Whether a paper costs 60p or 50p or is occasionally handed out for free is neither here nor there, but content certainly is

It remains to be seen if the Cambrian News can make readers in the Teifi Valley feel that they are at the centre of the action rather than outposts teetering on the brink of the vastness of outer space, or as we know it, north-west Carmarthenshire and the northern bit of Pembrokeshire.

Over on the final frontier in Ammanford, the South Wales Guardian editor Steve Adams has been  giving himself a pat on the back for breaking all the paper's first quarter targets. Readers should be warned that he is very fond of hashtags:



It would be rude to ask what those targets actually were, but something which has clearly rattled Stevo is the activities of other, nameless, competitors:

 
The heavy discounts would appear to be a reference to the Carmarthen Journal and Llanelli Star which have allegedly responded to the Heralds by slashing the cost of advertising space to what industry observers consider to be suicidally low levels.

One source told this blog that a quarter page in the Journal could have been yours last week for just £40, but the paper vehemently denies this.

The Journal also recently went through a minor revamp, and has got rid of the "local pull-out" in the centre of the paper which made navigating though it like wading through a vat of tepid semolina.

Freebies, price cuts and slashing the cost of advertising are one way of fighting a war, but none of these tactics will produce a healthy local press, and they are in nobody's long-term interest.

An old-fashioned idea, but one which may yet win the day, is investing in journalism.

Mixed messages

News that a sub-contractor of CWM Environmental, Carmarthenshire County Council's wholly-owned waste management business, was seeking to recruit 20 staff on the minimum wage and that an ability to speak Polish would be an "advantage" was widely covered in the local and national press just over a week ago, but all has gone very quiet since then.

The council's own "Newsroom" has had nothing whatsoever to say about this council story, preferring instead to churn out pictures of Kevin Madge wearing a hard hat and various council dignitaries, including the Chair of Council, Daff Davies, bowing and scraping when they met old Big Ears.

Let's hope nobody told Charles about Daff's role in the Dylan Thomas Memorial Wind Turbine saga.

Psst, want to buy a wind turbine, Sir? Never used, honest.

Cneifiwr has however seen one on-the-record response to a query about what was going on at CWM, and another, decidedly off-the-record opinion.

Milk and Honey

The official line was provided by Wendy Walters who signs herself as Assistant Chief Executive (Acting) in response to a letter from Cymdeithas yr Iaith.

It turns out that the controversial job advert was published in November last year. Following the, um, discovery, the council's own Policy and Partnership Team has held discussions with CWM, she says, and the agency which was seeking to recruit the staff has since apologised. CWM will also monitor all future job ads.

Ms Walters goes on to note that there are regular meetings between CWM's management and members of the council's Environmental and Public Protection Scrutiny Committee, and that questions regarding the use of Welsh feature regularly. The wording here is rather vague, but if the use of Welsh has indeed been raised with CWM, it has clearly had no effect whatsoever because CWM's website is in English only, in addition to the small matter of the job advert.

You do not get to be Assistant Chief Executive (Acting) without being able to spin difficult news, and having dealt rather vaguely with recent events, Ms Walters goes on to ladle out a large helping of honeyed words.

"CWM Environmental understands its responsibilities and the opportunities which exist for it as a company, and they are keen to develop this further after a successful period at the National Eisteddfod in August 2014."

Players of the popular game of bullshit bingo will gasp in admiration at that winning sentence which contains not only the words "responsibilities", "opportunities" and "develop", but also a completely irrelevant reference to the Eisteddfod.

The upshot of this is that the council and CWM will at some unspecified point in the future meet with Welsh Language Commissioner to discuss the development of a Welsh Language Policy for the company.

It will no doubt take months, and involve lengthy meetings and a great deal of recycled paper to come up with a plan when the council already has detailed policies of its own.

Off the record

A rather less diplomatic assessment of the situation came from another senior officer who told Cneifiwr that the whole business was a "fairy tale" and "Plaid propaganda".

Decide for yourselves which of these two different versions really reflects the view of the top brass.

What both Anon and Ms Walters could agree on was that CWM Environmental suffers from a high staff turnover, hence the need to recruit all these additional staff.

That staff turnover is high should come as no surprise given the dire pay and conditions on offer, but a third source from within the council told Cneifiwr that the real reason CWM needed 20 people in November was that it had kicked out another sub-contractor and the local staff employed by them.

Essential and "an advantage"

And finally....

Readers of this blog will know that whenever the council advertises for a senior officer, it states that the ability to speak Welsh is essential. Almost invariably it ends up recruiting people who cannot speak any Welsh on the basis that they will attend a few lessons.

One notable example of the council's interpretation of the word "essential" is the chief executive himself who after 14 long years has a decidedly weak grasp of the language. About all you ever get to hear are the words "diolch", "bore da" and "ymddiheuriadau am absenoldeb" (apologies for absence).

In Carmarthenshire, however, words often have a very different meaning to the ones you will find in the dictionary. Essential actually means "wholly unnecessary", while "an advantage" means "essential if you want to keep your job".

Come the revolution when Mr James and the rest of the ancien régime are packed off to man the sorting lines at CWM, and it is unlikely that the words "przepraszam za nieobecność" (apologies for absence) will be enough to keep them in the job for very long.

"Do widzenia", as they say in Nantycaws.