Legal News (2)

Carmarthenshire County Council may be struggling in this age of austerity to find money for schools (at least in less favoured parts of the county), road repairs, libraries, museums and a whole host of other services, but there appears to be plenty left in the pot when it comes to keeping London's fat-cat lawyers in clotted cream and caviar.

We learned from Caebrwyn recently that the council is funding the chief executive's libel case out of its own resources, rather than resorting to its insurers.

In recent months the council also reacted very angrily to attempts by residents groups in Llanelli and Llandovery to seek judicial review of the council's decisions on the Stradey Park housing development and Ysgol Pantycelyn. Although the chief executive told the press that he was unable to comment on the Towy Community Church bowling alley project during an election, he nevertheless had no such inhibitions when it came to attacking the Stradey Park and Llandovery groups and warning that the council would seek to recover its costs.

This was because the Stradey Park and Llandovery disputes involved council policy, he helpfully explained. Presumably the council's £1.4m plus funding package to the church is not council policy. But I digress.

Another issue on which the chief executive found himself unable to comment was the BBC's Taro 9 programme documenting the appalling saga of abuse of an adult with learning disabilities at a council-run day centre in Johnstown, just outside Carmarthen.

Complaints about the council's management of the affair found their way to the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales, who delivered a damning report (here) back in 2009. Although the case revolved around one particular victim, it was acknowledged that the abuse was widespread.

As is usual for such reports, the local authority found itself obliged, with gritted teeth, to publish the findings on its website, although you may have missed that if you blinked.

Carmarthenshire Council has been keeping the Ombudsman busy ever since, and he has now completed a 130-page report on a complex case involving planning enforcement (or lack of) and the council's Kafkaesque complaints procedures. This involved, among other things, putting the couple who initiated the original complaint on the Council's Persistent Complainers list without telling them, and they are now understood to be suing the council for defamation as a result.

Caebrwyn reported here on the flurry of correspondence leading up to, ahem, non-publication.

We learned that the Ombudsman, Peter Tyndall, had responded to a request for information from the Minister for Local Government, Carl Sargeant expressing his frustrations:

I can confirm that we have experienced difficulties with the Council in respect of complaints handled by my office. These include delays in responding to requests for information, delays in commenting on draft reports and lengthy delays in implementing my recommendations.

I drew my concerns to the attention of the Chief Executive some time ago and requested a meeting to which he has failed to agree. I now intend pursuing this matter with the Leader of the council.....

Mr James is a very busy man, of course, but it will not improve the Ombudsman's mood whenever he reads the Western Mail, Carmarthen Journal and other publications, including of course the Madaxeman blog, to find that the chief executive has time to express his views there but none for Mr Tyndall.

Now, in the latest development, the Council appears to have rejected the Ombudsman's new report, and is seeking judicial review (just like the Stradey Park and Llandovery groups). Fancy that!

It is unlikely that the chief executive will be packing a copy for relaxing pool-side reading this summer, but the Ombudsman is understood to be keen for the council's leadership to provide the elected councillors with copies to while away the dog days of August.

Perhaps the Council will agree to this request, but the track record suggests otherwise.

Cneifiwr would be interested to hear from anyone who knows whether any other Welsh councils have ever sought to challenge the Ombudsman's findings in the courts. As things stand, it appears that Carmarthenshire may once again be boldly going where more timid authorities have not ventured before.

Legal News (1)

While doing a bit of housekeeping, Cneifiwr accidentally deleted a post with this headline. Many thanks to Emlyn Uwch Cych for saving the day by fishing out the original:

Investigations into an alleged breach of electoral law by one of Carmarthenshire's recently elected Independent councillors have now been passed by the police to the Crown Prosecution Service, Cneifiwr understands.

Councillor Ieuan Wyn Davies was elected to represent Llanybydder, although the ballot paper gave a home address in Swansea.

For anyone not sure of their geography, Llanybydder is just about as far away as you can get from Swansea in Carmarthenshire, a distance according to the AA of 45 miles.

Of course, Cllr Davies may still qualify under one of the following provisions, but Inspector Knacker seems to have his doubts:

•You are a registered local government elector in the local authority area, both on the day you are nominated and on election day. You can check whether you are registered by contacting the Electoral Registration Officer at your local council.
•You have occupied, either as an owner or a tenant, any land or premises in the local authority area during the whole of the 12 months before the day you are nominated and election day.
•Your main or only place of work during the 12 months before the day you are nominated and election day has been in the local authority area.
•You have lived in the local authority area during the whole of the 12 months before the day you are nominated and election day.
Under the second of these, you could rent an acre or two of rough grazing somewhere in Carmarthenshire and plonk a couple of sheep on it in order to stand for election.

Let's hope for Cllr Davies's sake that evidence of these sheep or one of the other qualifications turns up in time to prevent a prosecution and by-election. Or perhaps Mr Davies was one of the thousands who commute daily from Swansea to the international business hub of Llanybydder, clogging up the lanes.

Llanybydder is famous for its horse fairs, which are held on the last Thursday of every month, but anyone wishing to buy a donkey could do worse than head up there. I remember hearing a farmer from Llandeilo telling Dai Jones Llanilar on the popular Cefn Gwlad* that you could never go wrong with a donkey as an investment.

* For English readers, Cefn Gwlad is a tiny bit like Countryfile, only without the Range Rovers and green wellies.

Kev's Big Day Out (Part 2)

Excitement is mounting in Ammanford at the prospect of the Executive Board meeting of Carmarthenshire County Council, which will be held in the Town Hall on 30 July. Pensioners and school children alike are talking about little else.

The agenda for the meeting has not yet been published, but Cneifiwr can exclusively reveal that one of the key decisions to be hotly debated will be whether to waive parking charges for shoppers for a period of up to 8 weeks while building work is carried out in the town centre.

Oh, all right, it's not really exclusive because the Council's PR department has issued a press release saying that the proposal will be "considered".

Back in the real world, what this means is that the decision has already been taken, but any public and press who turn up on 30 July will be treated to a phoney "debate" in which Madge & Co will use the air time to impress on locals how grateful they should be for the wisdom and generosity of the administration before the rubber stamp is applied and the decision is taken UNANIMOUSLY (the council's caplocks, not mine).

Rumours are also circulating that the people of Ammanford may be treated to the ancient ceremony of the application of the public interest test pursuant to the Local Government Act 1972 in respect of an item which may contain exempt information as defined under Schedule 12A of said Act.

This involves fierce debate and soul-searching by the Board as it wrestles with its desire to be transparent in its dealings with the public on the one hand, and the feeling that there are in local government many things which it is better for the public not to be told.

At the end of this ceremony, the Board will decide UNANIMOUSLY that public and press should be bundled out of the hall so that an extra special rubber stamp can be applied to the item in question.

Cneifiwr understands that the item in question may be a ground-breaking new piece of litigation to silence an increasingly vexatious critic in one of the most innovative uses of the ancient writ of Scandalum Magnatum ever seen in the London courts.

Danish lessons

Anyone who has read the letters columns of our local newspapers would think twice before dipping a toe into the debate about wind energy, but having mentioned Denmark in a previous post, it is worth taking a slightly more detailed look at how another small country has gone about tackling its energy problems.

Most of the information here is taken from a recent article in Der Spiegel, a respected German current affairs magazine.

Back in the 1970s Denmark was hit hard by the dramatic rise in oil prices at the time. Denmark did not have coal, and it had not yet developed its small offshore oil and gas fields at the time. The country also had (and still has) a health and social welfare system the like of which we in Wales can only dream about.

By the beginning of the 1980s, high public spending and borrowing and an almost total reliance on energy imports had brought the country to the brink of disaster. One of my first jobs, as it happens, was covering financial and economic news in the Nordic countries, and I can well remember the dire headlines in the Danish press.

A farmer's son in Jutland developed the first prototype of a commercial wind turbine which was sold in 1979 to Vestas, a company which then manufactured tractors and cranes. Vestas is now the world's largest producer of wind energy technology.

24% of Denmark's electricity is now produced by wind energy, more than any other country worldwide, and it aims to raise the share to 50% by 2020. By 2050 Denmark aims to have eliminated its dependence on fossil fuels.

Opposition to wind turbines is not confined to Britain, so the question is how has a small country which is one of the most democratic, liberal and transparent nations in the world managed to pursue such a radical energy policy without getting bogged down in endless planning battles, court cases and parliamentary enquiries? How has it managed to persuade its people that there is something in this for everyone?

An example of this is a wind farm built just 3 kilometres offshore from central Copenhagen. There are 20 turbines, each around 100 metres tall and each capable of generating 2 Megawatts. The development attracted just 4 objections, and it went into production in 2001. At the time it was the largest of its kind in the world.

The company which operates the wind farm is a cooperative. 8,600 members own 50% of the shares, with the rest being held by a state energy company.

Individual, small private investors in Denmark played a key role in getting the industry started, and it developed into something of a popular movement. The huge projects being developed now need far larger sums of capital, however, but alongside the overseas investors, Danish local government and the country's pension funds are also key players.

A decisive factor in all this has been the country's emphasis on showing its people that they can benefit directly from this investment.

Unlike other countries, in Denmark it is the government which decides where it wants turbines, in cooperation with local government. It also carries out all of the technical and environmental analysis on the sites chosen before inviting tenders from investors.

This central planning process also means that investors can be sure that they will not get bogged down in appeals or have to jump through more hoops, while the state can be reasonably sure of hitting its targets.

The transparency of the process is also a key ingredient in ensuring that the public has faith and trust in it, and it also makes corruption a near impossibility.

It would be wrong to claim that there is no opposition to wind farms in Denmark, particularly when it comes to onshore developments, but here the Danes go out of their way to make schemes attractive to local people. Part of the profits from the turbines is fed back to local government to pay for environmental improvement projects; home owners are compensated if their property values are affected, and the state provides local operators with financial guarantees.

The senior civil servant in overall charge of the country's wind energy policy told the German magazine that there certainly would be something rotten in the state of Denmark if the public responded to every new project with protests and court cases.

As usual, we can learn a lot from looking at our neighbours, and not just those across Offa's Dyke..

Ask Carwyn

One of the biggest and most frequently voiced criticisms of Carwyn Jones and his government in Cardiff since he came to power last year (it seems a lot longer ago somehow) is their lack of energy and vision for Wales. For anyone who takes an interest in what happens in Cardiff Bay, it is also becoming increasingly depressing to see the First Minister routinely refusing to answer questions and talking about the opposition parties instead.

Recently Delyth Jenkins raised the question of why day centres for people with learning difficulties are exempted from inspection by CSSIW, the government agency which inspects care homes and other social services in Wales. The response, which you can read on Caebrwyn's blog here, was the familiar mix of PR-management-speak which, boiled down, told us that nothing is going to happen any time soon. They intend to issue a consultative white paper next year, which means that this gaping hole will not be plugged, if at all, for several years to come.

Extending CSSIW's remit would not be difficult or expensive, and it would not need new primary legislation.

That is just one example of the drift and lethargy which characterises the Welsh government, and I am sure readers can think of many more.

Denmark, with a population not much larger than that of Wales, is an example of a small country which keeps popping up in the media and academic studies as a world leader in an impressive range of fields, including pension fund management, tackling obesity and public health, the environment and a very successful energy policy. In some respects, particularly in energy policy, Wales has significant natural advantages over Denmark, but unlike Denmark we have a slow and reactive government.

So why not call Carwyn Jones when he appears on the Jason Mohammad programme on Radio Wales today, and tell him what you think?

Details are as follows:

It's your chance to quiz Wales' First Minster today, as Jason Mohammad puts your questions to Carwyn Jones from 1.15 PM. Call 03700 100 110 when we're on-air, text 81012, tweet @jasonmbbc, or email jason@bbc.co.uk

Kev's Big Day Out

Leafing through the electronic pages of the South Wales Guardian yesterday in the wake of the news that Carmarthenshire County Council is once again bullying the local press, my eye was caught by an exclusive (here) revealing that council leader Kevin Madge has decided to hold a meeting of the council's Executive Board in Ammanford Town Hall on 30 July.

This is the first time this august body will have met outside the confines of County Hall in Carmarthen, and Kev says he wants to show us all that he "means business".

The Guardian was quite taken with the idea, and ran an editorial praising the decision. This is not a rabid, council-bashing newspaper by any stretch of the imagination, so the council's decision to withdraw advertising when the paper stepped ever so slightly out of line and criticised the management of a regeneration project is even more remarkable and worrying.

In its editorial, the paper says that critics will complain that nothing much has changed on the council,

"But the fact a Garnant-based councillor is now at the helm really should make a difference as far as the Amman Valley is concerned. 

And it refers, in a slightly cheeky way, to the pork barrel politics of local government,

Just look at the amenities the home villages of past leaders now enjoy!"

But back to the meeting of the Executive Board.

In recent years, beginning I think with Gordon Brown, the British government has hit the road several times and held cabinet meetings in places such as Birmingham and Manchester as part of a PR exercise to try to convince voters that the government is aware that there may be life outside the M25.

Whatever else Kev is, nobody has ever accused him of being an original thinker, and it is pretty obvious where he got this idea. As for "meaning business", any Ammanford residents intending to go to the meeting will be bitterly disappointed if they are expecting lively discussion and debate of the issues that matter to them.

The fact is that there are two meetings of the Executive Board. The first is held in private, with the public and press excluded. This is where decisions are made.

The second, which is what the people of Ammanford will see, is purely a Soviet-style PR exercise. Little speeches will be made (or in the case of Kevin Madge, interminable, waffling and meaningless monologues) in praise of the administration and its supreme wisdom in all matters. And every item will be approved UNANIMOUSLY (the minutes of these meetings like capital letters).

If everyone turns up, the public will see 10 executive councillors, most of whom will be entitled to free bus passes, and up to 15 assorted officers, most of whom will remain silent throughout. For reasons Cneifiwr has never understood, quite a high proportion of the male officers favour shaved and polished heads. Perhaps it's a local government fashion.

Unless there is a dramatic departure from tradition, any locals hoping to ask impromptu questions of their leaders will also be disappointed, although under the constitution they may submit written questions at least seven working days beforehand to the Chief Executive, who will decide whether the questions are appropriate. Questions which are similar to any question asked in a council meeting in the previous six months will be rejected, and questioners must state which member of the Executive Board they wish to answer their query.

No questions, then.

If it is anything like County Hall, members of the public will also be asked to provide their names and addresses and sign declarations that they will not film or otherwise record any part of the meeting.

For the avoidance of doubt, as the lawyers like to say, and to avoid disappointment, the council's away-day is entirely separate from the Amman Valley Big Day Out, billed by the South Wales Guardian as a "feast of fun and frolics".

Called in for a chat - Carmarthenshire and press freedom

A few weeks ago the Western Mail got itself into hot water again for a rather inflammatory comment piece on whether the proceedings of the Welsh Assembly should be available in both languages, and for a short while the hashtag #westernfail started trending on Twitter. For those readers not familiar with Twitter what that means is that, for a few hours, one of our Welsh domestic disputes managed to reach such a fever pitch that it could be heard all around the world.

Quite an achievement by all involved, but like any dispute between neighbours over a garden hedge, it was not a pretty sight. An ill-judged piece which led to a row in which the paper refused to back down, and some of those in the other camp were hoping to dance on the paper's grave.

The fragility of our local press is no state secret, and the latest attempt by Carmarthenshire County Council to muzzle one of the newspapers on its patch  - the South Wales Guardian this time -shows that County Hall's bullies have no reservation in exploiting that weakness in their obsessive quest for favourable press coverage. We learned today that the council's top brass took umbrage at a report in the newspaper, and its editor has now been invited over for a chat. For details see Caebrwyn's report here.

If it had not been for the Western Mail, it is unlikely that the story would have been told. And you would certainly not have read about it in the Carmarthen Journal which nowadays makes sure never to run any story which might upset Council bigwigs. Actually, the Journal has sunk even lower than that, as our next example shows.


Also back in the pages of the Western Mail is the story of Delyth Jenkins, the courageous woman who stood up to the bullies in the Council's day care centre in Johnstown. Delyth then ran into the pin-striped bullies of County Hall. At one point the Council even blamed the press for reporting crass and insensitive remarks made by its Chief Executive in a public meeting.

Earlier this year the Delyth Jenkins story was back in the news, with the BBC covering it in an edition of Taro 9. The council not only refused to take part in the programme, but had the police watch the movements of the BBC production team. Not a word of this was breathed in the Journal, which instead ran a long précis of a 6-month old report by the CSSIW (Care and Social Services Inspectorate Wales) praising the council's approach to social services.

Delyth is now calling for the CSSIW to be given powers to inspect day centres, although sad to say, recent reports from CSSIW, the Wales Audit Office and Estyn show that when it comes to standing up to our county council, these agencies don't have a single testicle between them.

Estyn recently produced a damning report on Ysgol Gyfun Emlyn, one of the county's secondary schools. On the same day it published another report which gave the county's education department an overall rating of "good".

Good is probably not the word which is in the minds of most of the parents, children, staff and governors of the school, but needless to say the Journal ran a re-hash of the Council's press release praising its education service and forgot to mention the plight of one of the largest schools in its area.

The Western Mail, whose chief reporter Martin Shipton was once decribed by Carmarthenshire's Chief Executive as being someone "not known for being friendly to or giving the benefit of the doubt to Councils", is a bit of a problem for the Kremlin on the Towy because the paper is not reliant on its advertising, and so cannot be easily threatened.

One way of sorting out the likes of the Western Mail would be to sue them for libel, but annoyingly for Carmarthenshire, councils are not allowed to bring actions for defamation.

The solution to that problem is to sue by proxy, claiming that one of the officers, for example, has been libelled and that these "extraordinary circumstances" are somehow preventing the council from discharging its functions, so that public money may be used to fund the case.

If that doesn't rid the Council of that turbulent Mr Shipton, what will?

Skittle bombs and lapses of memory

Early one morning a couple of winters ago, Cneifiwr awoke and went to the kitchen to make the missus her customary coffee when he noticed a trail of large footprints in the frost coming over the high bank which separates the garden from the lane and across the lawn towards the back door.

Had someone tried to burgle Cneifiwr Castle in the night? And why had the intruder climbed over the bank rather than use the garden gate a few yards further down?

Closer inspection of the crime scene revealed a scatter of coins around the back door which together yielded about 37p.

Burglars do not normally leave money at the houses they visit in the night, and certainly Cardi* burglars don't.

A few local enquiries revealed that one of the neighbours had enjoyed a bit of a sesh down at the Pelican on the night in question, and the likelihood was that his homing device had been impaired as a result. He had veered off course about 300 yards too soon.

Easily done, as Cneifiwr can testify, having downed several more pints of Bass than was good for him on the odd occasion. Once his auto-pilot took him back to a house he had moved out of a couple of months previously.

Perhaps a surfeit of Brains or Buckley's, or possibly in the case of the "youngsters" a night out on Skittle Bombs may be the explanation for the rumours that Inspector Dai Knacker has been called in to investigate several cases of alleged confusion over the residential status of some of our newly elected county councillors.

In order to qualify as a candidate in an election to a county council, the law says you must meet at least one of the following criteria:

• You are a registered local government elector in the local authority area, both on the day you are nominated and on election day. You can check whether you are registered by contacting the Electoral Registration Officer at your local council.
• You have occupied, either as an owner or a tenant, any land or premises in the local authority area during the whole of the 12 months before the day you are nominated and election day.
• Your main or only place of work during the 12 months before the day you are nominated and election day has been in the local authority area.
• You have lived in the local authority area during the whole of the 12 months before the day you are nominated and election day.

Candidates for the election who filed papers with incorrect information about where they live and work could reasonably expect to find themselves disqualified if elected, and even face a criminal prosecution.

Voters too might not be best pleased to find themselves having to turn out for by-elections, which can be expensive businesses.

Let's hope that the rumours are not true, and that none of our councillors had done a "Keith Davies" the night before handing their papers in at County Hall.

* For non-Welsh readers, a Cardi is a term of affection for people from this part of Wales, and they have a reputation for being very careful with their money.

A local man passed away, and his son called the Tivyside Advertiser to place a notice. He read out a few words noting the passing and details of the funeral service. The woman at the other end asked if he wanted to add anything, as he had not used up the full character allowance.

The man thought for a second and replied, "Also scaffolding at reasonable rates".

Dog mess, buried treasure, fag ends and skeletons

The press office in County Hall have had a very thin time of things recently, with little else to do than run stories about dog fouling, people dropping cigarette ends, cardboard cutouts of Dai Greene and the like. As Caebrwyn has discovered, the office even does its bit for recycling by attributing word-for-word identical quotes to different people at different times.

There must have been real relief, therefore, when Estyn published its report on education in the county and gave the authority an overall rating of "good". If it had not been for a few minor trivial problems with school attendance, performance and financial planning, the county might have been awarded a top rating of "excellent".

Undeterred by such considerations, the council's spin machine trumpets,

"This report confirms that Carmarthenshire’s education service is one of the best in Wales."

Anyone searching the Estyn report to see where the inspectors actually delivered that verdict will search in vain.

Sadly for the press office, this one little ray of sunshine turned out to be a brief respite from the continuing downpour of stories about dog mess, cigarette ends and general litter (three new stories yesterday), but summer is upon us, even as we wait for the next flood alert, and thoughts turn to how to keep the kids entertained during the long school holidays.

The press office is inviting us to head for the County Museum in Abergwili (the one they want to close), to take part in a "dig" for "buried Roman treasure". Perhaps the kiddies may even unearth the Dai Greene cutout.

The county's bloggers, meanwhile, will be heading for the forbidding confines of County Hall, with a much more realistic prospect of unearthing pots of gold, skeletons and mouldering remains as they prepare to comb through the council's accounts.

Why not join us for a really fun day out?

Education in Carmarthenshire: a tale of two reports

A snowstorm of school inspection reports has just been published by Estyn, and two are of particular interest to residents of Carmarthenshire. Copies can be found here.

The first is a general appraisal of education provision across the county, and the second is a report on Ysgol Gyfun Emlyn, one of the authority's 14 secondary schools.

The first thing to say is that it is very hard indeed to reconcile the positive picture painted by the first report with the damning verdict delivered in the second.

Estyn uses a 4-point grading system (excellent-good-adequate-unsatisfactory), and against nearly all of the criteria assessed, the County is rated "good", with an overall rating of "good".

The report finds that performance at all of the key stages has improved in recent years, and that the percentage of school leavers without a qualification is among the lowest in Wales. It claims that support for additional learning and social inclusion is good; the Modernising Education Programme is praised; and County Hall managed to persuade the inspectors that they understand that education is influenced by "the impact of wider regeneration and social care".

Whatever that last point means is not explained, but no doubt County Hall will be very pleased to hear this endorsement of their wider policies of outsourcing and prestige development projects.

Estyn is also a big fan of the council's Modernising Education Programme, which involves the closure of large numbers of village schools to eliminate spare places, and its controversial reorganisation of secondary education, which includes the planned closure of the secondary school in Llandovery.

As we know, huge sums are being pumped into new schools in parts of the county, but the report states enigmatically,

However, the authority has not analysed systematically enough the benefits arising from its investment in terms of improving the condition, suitability and efficiency of its schools.

Again, Estyn does not explain what it means.

In another note of criticism, the report states,

The authority and its schools have, in the past, spent too little on the routine repair and maintenance of school buildings. Current financial planning does not address adequately the need to ensure that new school buildings are well maintained into the future so that they remain in good condition.

And,

Despite this significant investment, the authority’s data shows that just over half of pupils are taught in buildings in need of further investment.

In plain English, the council is spending a great deal of money on school buildings in some places, but then neglecting ongoing maintenance (e.g. in one new primary school Cneifiwr knows, parts of the roof leak in heavy rain and there is inadequate drainage around the school buildings). And anyone familiar with the shabby state of many older buildings will be surprised to hear Estyn's claim that lack of repair and maintenance is a thing of the past.

As for support for additional learning and special educational needs, parents battling to get support for children with literacy problems, dyslexia, speech therapy and language skills will be surprised to hear that provision is "good". They will be even more baffled to read,

The authority has the second highest number of appeals to the Special Educational Needs Tribunal for Wales. It is working to reduce the percentage of pupils with statements of special educational needs, which is currently the third highest in Wales. This work includes piloting innovative work for the Welsh Government in assessing pupils’ additional needs and providing for them without going through statutory assessment.

In the case of one family I know, the "innovative work" which avoids statutory assessment means almost exactly what it says on the can: the parents' efforts to get support for their 9 year-old with serious reading and writing difficulties (very likely dyslexia) have been ignored for two years, and no assessment has been carried out.

As they have already discovered, fighting the system is time-consuming and complicated. As "pushy" parents, they intend to fight on, but it is obvious that for many children from more disadvantaged backgrounds, the dice are loaded against them from the start.


And so the report chunters on. Boxes are ticked, and backs are slapped.


Now let's move on to the second report dealing with Ysgol Gyfun Emlyn.


The school was last inspected in 2006, and the new report makes for very depressing reading. So much so, that you have to wonder what Estyn and the County Council's strategic visionaries and "senior leaders who work in a sophisticated way" have been doing for the last 6 years.


Unlike the council itself, the school is classed as "unsatisfactory" in several categories, and it is given an overall rating of unsatisfactory.


The school has 639 pupils, and the school roll is rising. It has a broad intake of children from a wide range of social backgrounds, and most of the teaching is through the medium of English.

The school budget for the school is currently £4,224 per pupil, compared with an average of £4,938 for the county as a whole. That average masks a huge variation in spend in secondary education, which goes from £7,322 at the top end down to £4,096.

Overall, the school is 10th out of 14 in terms of spending per pupil.

Later in the report, Estyn tells us that the school has been running a deficit for the last two years, and is anticipating a significant deficit for 2012-13. In Estyn's view, "taking into account the unsatisfactory standards, the school provides unsatisfactory value for money". 


A more common sense finding would have been that the school is seriously under-funded. It has in fact been caught in an impossible dilemma of struggling to balance its books, partly by cutting provision and teacher numbers, while trying to meet demands to expand its curriculum. Estyn doesn't go into that sort of detail.


Anyone who knows the school will be aware that the main block is a shabby and depressing place. Estyn notes that the toilets and changing rooms are in a poor (i.e. truly terrible) state. The council will very belatedly get around to doing something about the toilets this summer, it says, after several years of delay and bumbling.


Alongside the main block is a new creative arts centre (partly funded by an external agency, I believe). No sooner had that been built than the council slashed its schools music programme, and pupils taking their Art A Levels last year were left without a teacher when a member of staff suffered an accident. Again, Estyn skims over this clear case of left hand, right hand.


Otherwise, you can search the council's Modernising Education Programme from top to bottom for spending on this school, and you will find that over a period of 20 years investment in the core of the school will be zero.

As for the school budget, the Governors have been arguing the case for some time that the school is under-funded, even according to the council's own funding criteria. They recently invited the council's Director of Education, Rob Sully, along to a meeting to set out their case, and claim that they were assured twice that he would attend.

Sadly it seems that he was far too busy, because after waiting in eager anticipation for the great man to arrive, it slowly dawned on the governors that their invitation had been wasted. No apology or explanation given.

In common with all other schools in the county, Ysgol Gyfun Emlyn has a Schools Improvement Officer, and it has been suggested that like Mr Sully, the trip out into the sticks is often just that bit too far. The author of this blog cannot verify that, although you can draw your own conclusions from the Estyn report.

The report also highlights the school's poor performance in literacy in English and Welsh, and it notes in particular the failure to build on the Welsh language abilities of children coming up from primary schools. 
Despite this, Estyn is pleased to see that all pupils are entered for the full GCSE course in Welsh as a second language.

Somehow, though, it escaped Estyn's attention that a good many of the children taking Welsh as a second language are unable to use the language in any meaningful way, with vocabulary which extends no further than "Diolch" and "Rydw i'n hoffi coffi". Some of the "Welsh" classes consisted, at least until very recently, of watching videos in English or Welsh with English subtitles.

Elsewhere, the inspectors note in passing that sometimes pupils of higher ability are not sufficiently challenged.

On a positive note, it remains true that a good proportion of pupils from the school continue to go on to higher education, including to some of the best universities, although quite a few find that they have a mountain to climb when they get there compared with their contemporaries.


The school can also be proud of the many talented and successful young people it has taught over the years, but what emerges from the report is a system which has let down children who could have emerged from school with better grades and skills.


One of the other casualties of the report is the head, who is a very decent and likable man. He has been made to shoulder much of the blame, and is now leaving the school.


But as the first of Estyn's reports shows, no blame will attach to anyone in County Hall for the years of under-funding and neglect. That's Teflon for you.

Can we have a refund, Kev?

Caebrwyn reports that the July meeting of Carmarthenshire County Council has been cancelled because of a lack of business to transact, and she points out that there will probably not be another meeting until September.

This means that in the 6 months from March councillors will have met just twice - once for the rubber-stamping formality of the AGM, and a second time for an ordinary meeting in June.

Given the lack of activity, it is likely that none of the scrutiny committees will meet until the autumn, and very little is happening at the executive end of the council either.

The Tivyside Advertiser recently reported (here) that councillors' allowances and special responsibility allowances in Ceredigion would cost taxpayers more than £540,000 in the current financial year. Caebrwyn points out below that the equivalent figure for Carmarthenshire in 2011 was just under £1.4 million, and now that Kevin Madge has increased the size of the Executive Board because of erm...pressure of work, the figure for this year will be higher.

Will the Executive Board and chairs of the various comatose committees show the way by handing back half of their special responsibility allowances in recognition of the fact that they have taken 6 months off?

The savings could be used to reverse some of the planned cuts. For example, the council is cutting £50,000 off its support for the Mentrau Iaith (half its total grant) over the next three years, and that will mean that jobs and livelihoods will be lost. And that's just for starters.

Cyfryngau gorleol

O ystyried sefyllfa enbydus cymaint o bapurau lleol yng Nghymru, dyma brosiect diddorol o Gaernarfon sy'n cael ei gefnogi gan NESTA a'r Llywodraeth.

County Hall flies the flag

But not this one. Two Union Jacks were reported to be fluttering in the breeze outside the council's headquarters today, but no Red Dragon.

Says it all, somehow.

British democracy - could do better

In this year of Union Jack waving celebration, it is worth asking how others see Britain.

What sparked my interest was a short article in the weekly German current affairs magazine Der Spiegel which reported on the latest findings of Bertelsmann's Transformations Index and an associated Democracy Barometer, which is produced by Swiss and German academics. The report stated that once again Sweden, Finland and Denmark had received the best ratings, while France was placed 28th out of 30. There was no mention of Britain, so I decided to take a closer look.

You can find the Democracy Barometer here, and as you can see from the map, the vast majority of the countries covered are in Western Europe and North America. To retrieve reports on individual countries, simply point and click with your mouse. The individual country reports are in English, although translated with a fairly heavy German accent.

Britain comes in 27th place, just ahead of France and just behind Poland, and what emerges is that on an overall  measure of quality of democracy Britian has consistently under-performed against its peers since the study began in 1990. The index of overall freedom, which looks at issues such as civil liberties and the rule of law (independence and impartiality of the judiciary) is in long-term decline.

A striking deficiency is in what the study terms "public sphere". This reflects the fact that Britian does not have a written constitution which guarantees freedom of speech, freedom of the press or freedom of assembly and association. We are also blessed, the report notes, with a press in which ownership is concentrated in a very few hands and which is overhwelmingly to the right of centre.

There is also decline in the quality of rule of law, largely because of restrictions related to anti-terrorist legislation. The report does not factor in the Government's latest plans to conduct many more court cases in secret.

Another measure looks at what the study terms "control". Here again Britain scores poorly because of the lack of checks and balances in the political system (inadequate powers of judicial review and lack of federal structures). The first-past-the-post voting system results in a lack of pluralism and often manifestly unfair electoral results.

Looked at over the long-term, Britain has improved transparency in public life, thanks to the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act, although once again the study does not factor in the latest attempts to undermine FOI and the growing tendency of many public authorities, particularly in local government, to flout the rules and principles underpinning FOI.

The study also notes the worrying decrease in public participation in politics and voting from 2001 onwards (another of Blair's legacies). Rather better is the slow improvement in the representation of women in politics.

France scores only slightly worse than Britain, mainly because of its lop-sided constitution which grants almost monarchical powers to the president.

Moving away from Britain, it is remarkable how far countries such as Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Poland have come since the end of Communism, all of which outperform the UK ("Mother of Parliaments" and Home of the Free, we are always reminded).

Although small countries generally perform well, it is striking that three with a strong British colonial legacy (Cyprus, Malta and Ireland) are relatively poor performers. To take Malta as an example, the report notes,

These [deficiencies] are, most notably, the full or partial absence of unrestricted constitutional provisions regarding the freedom of assembly, association, speech and the press as well as a weak civil society with regard to the organisation of professional, environmental or human rights interests.

Note how closely that mirrors the findings on the UK.

Sobering, isn't it?

Dog bites man

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that it has been a little quieter than usual. One reason for that is that there appears to be very little news about.

The County Council went into election purdah in March of this year and has still not really emerged on the other side. Only one meeting of the full county council has taken place in the last four months, apart from the mutual back-slapping and fancy dress competition which was the AGM.

To date not one of the 5 scrutiny committees has met or even got around to publishing an agenda for their first meeting, whenever that might be.

Of the 9 executive board member decision meetings, only two have got round to holding a meeting to decide anything (dishing out grants for holiday cottages and appointing school governors).

The Executive Board, which holds brief public rubber-stamping meetings to approve (always unanimously) decisions which are taken at closed meetings, has so far met twice to discuss nothing much at all.

The County Hall press office, which can usually be relied on to throw out political propaganda and spin, has been reduced to pumping out an endless stream of headlines such as "Woman fined for dog fouling" or "Man fined for dropping cigarette end", or even "Five fined for dropping cigarette ends".

The only light relief has been County Hall's desperate attempts to associate itself with Olympic hurdler Dai Greene. Currently the Council is encouraging us to "Spot Dai Greene - join the fun and help find him!" This is about a cardboard cutout of the athlete which council officers have taken to trying to hide in a shopping centre. Yes, really.

Anyone hoping that the local press might tell us what is going on in searing exposes, serious investigative pieces or robust editorials will be disappointed if they turn to the pages of the venerable Carmarthen Journal.

Here is a selection of recent headlines:

"Cigarette Butts Warning - 5 fined for dropping cigarette ends" (funny, that rings a bell, doesn't it?)
"Council Leader and Garnant Councillor Kevin Madge will hold a surgery"
"Age no barrier" - a puff for 23 year-old Labour councillor Calum Higgins
"Leader's praise for Shane's MBE" - Kevin Madge tries to muscle in on Shane Williams' MBE.
"Meet Councillor" - a chance to meet Labour councillor Colin Evans

And that's about as exciting as it gets. For some strange reason, only Labour councillors seem to hold surgeries in the pages of the Journal.

Shane Williams' MBE had been reported previously, and a follow-up would only have been newsworthy if Kevin Madge had (let's use some journalese here) snubbed or slammed the award.

The only story with potential for anything more interesting was the Calum Higgins piece. The full headline gives you a pretty good idea of the drool that follows:

"Age is no barrier as young gun proves his worth on the council"

Calum Higgins was elected as Labour councillor for Tycroes in May, and he is the youngest councillor at 23.

In addition to being a county councillor, he works for AM Keith Davies, who as we know has been in the news quite a lot recently. Perhaps Calum could have been asked to spill the beans on just how the old boy managed to party all through the night and much of the morning with a raucous lady friend in tow. Was it all down to Sanatogen?

According to disgraced Labour candidate Shahid Hussein, the Labour young guns would occasionally go clubbing and freestyling in Cardiff. Did Keith join them? And for the benefit of older Tycroes residents, just what is freestyle?

And in addition to being a county councillor and part-time employee of Keith Davies AM, Calum is also a full-time law student in Cardiff. How does he do it?

Sadly, we do not know the answers to these and other interesting questions. As what the Journal's style book probably calls a "youngster", it would have been interesting to hear his views on the social media. Calum uses Twitter, for example, but one of his bosses, Kevin Madge, believes that it is the work of the devil. What does Calum think about filming council meetings?

The Journal's editor, Cathryn Ings, resigned suddenly and left the paper at very short notice in mid-May to "pursue other opportunities". Since then the poor old paper has been wallowing about as the search for a new captain goes on.

Like most local papers, the Journal is under huge pressure from its owners to cut costs and corners, and the recent loss of its (shared) politics reporter is making it look like a one-man-and-a-dog operation. Rumour has it that the dog is hoping to be re-housed soon too.

Circulation has been falling for some time. In 2009 it was around 19,000. In the second half of 2011 it fell by 11% to just under 16,500.

Unlike most local papers, the Journal also has to cope with a local authority which has come as close as a council in a western democracy can to using the sort of tactics more usually seen in third world dictatorships. True, Cathryn Ings did not end up floating face-first down the Towy, but by the end of her tenure, the threats and the bullying meant that real editorial control had passed up the road to County Hall which is known to have told the paper what it should and should not print on several recent occasions.

Anyone interested in taking the job on will need to be willing to turn their hands to everything from reporting to office cleaning and come without old-fashioned hang-ups about editorial integrity. There may be a few NoW hacks who fit the bill.

And to think that the Silly Season hasn't even started.

Auditors, ombudsmen and councillors

Over the last few years quite a few residents of Carmarthenshire have decided to take their concerns about Carmarthenshire County Council to the Wales Audit Office, and all have found that their hopes of persuading the authority to take action have ended in disappointment.

Several years ago the Carmarthen Journal told readers that an investigation of the council's planning department by the Audit Office was about to be undertaken, and the office received quite a few letters from citizens outlining their grievances as a result.

The auditor replied to Cneifiwr's complaints about the handling of a major planning application with a brief letter written on what looked like recycled lavatory paper (top marks for economy). The letter said in a tone which mixed surprise with exasperation that the Audit Office had received a significant number of unsolicited letters complaining about aspects of the council's planning function, apparently in the belief that an investigation was about to be undertaken.

This was not the case, it added. The auditor was merely contemplating whether an investigation was warranted, and needless to say the conclusion was that despite the unsolicited letters from various victims and aggrieved citizens,  no action needed to be taken.

Interestingly, as Caebrwyn has discovered, the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales has taken a rather different view.

More recently, a couple of people felt moved to write to the WAO to question the council's decision to pump almost £1.5 million into the Towy Community Church's 10 pin bowling alley at a time when it was making cuts to all sorts of other services, including libraries, school music schemes, support for the Welsh language, museums, road maintenance, etc.

The responses came, it turned out, from the appointed auditor for Carmarthenshire rather than the WAO itself, and carried with them the unmistakable whiff of County Hall where a ghost writer appeared to have been at work.

The auditor told the residents that the Council has "the power to do anything which it considers is likely to achieve the promotion or the economic well-being, the social well-being and the environmental well-being of its area", wording taken from the Local Government Act 2000.

Further, all decisions had been correctly made at the appropriate level, and the grants awarded by the council "will have met" the prescribed requirements for each scheme, they were told.

The "will have met" bit is interesting because it suggests that the auditor was either assuming that this was the case or had been told by the council's officers that that was so.

In other words, the auditor took the council's word that everything was OK and above board.

What about the council's duty to ensure that public funds were not being wasted? Well, the disposal of an asset which had been "independently valued" at £750,000 (although the book value was £835,000) fell within the threshold of the General Disposal Consent of £2 million which meant that the Council was able to avoid the legal requirement that it disposes of any land at best consideration. So it was OK to use £835,000 of public money to give to a small church (strictly speaking it is a 99-year lease at a peppercorn rent, but the council treated it as a disposal) because in the council's view it is likely to achieve the promotion or the economic, etc. well-being of its area.

Ironically at about the time the councillors voted to approve the latest funding package for the church, the council was also finalising its budget proposals and a huge swathe of cuts to all sorts of services.

Whenever the council is challenged about hikes in charges in leisure centres, the closure of libraries, public lavatories, cuts in funding for Mentrau Iaith, etc., it always responds by telling us that it has no statutory duty to provide any of these services.

Of course it has no statutory duty to ensure that Carmarthen has a 10 pin bowling alley either.

Next up was Caebrwyn who had previously been assured that the auditor would be monitoring the costs of the libel case between her and the Chief Executive.

You can read about the response she received here, but it was made clear to her that the appointed auditor was not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, and that any information he divulged would be at his discretion.

The whole point of having external auditors of local government is surely (a) that they are independent, and (b) that they perform their duties in a transparent and open way in order to assure local people that their councils are both acting within the law and using public money efficiently and effectively.

The locally appointed auditor system certainly fails the second of those two tests, and there is reason to wonder in the case of some locally appointed auditors just how independent they really are from the local authorities they are supposed to be monitoring.

Just as the Towy Church project rests on that catch-all clause from the Local Government Act 2000 (promoting the economic well-being, etc.), so the Caebrwyn libel case appears to rest on an equivalent clause from the Local Government Act 1972 which says that,

a local authority shall have power to do any thing (whether or not involving the expenditure, borrowing or lending of money or the acquisition or disposal of any property or rights) which is calculated to facilitate, or is conducive or incidental to, the discharge of any of their functions.

The implication here is that Caebrwyn's blog is somehow preventing the council from discharging its functions, although as the decision by the Executive Board was subject to a public interest exemption, we can only speculate as to how her blogposts are jamming up the wheels of local government.

The libel case itself has been grinding slowly along for over 6 months now, and it will be almost another 6 months before the case goes to court. Obviously, the lawyers' meters are ticking away, and costs at this early stage are already known to be in excess of £60,000 before anything much has happened. By the time the case has been heard and any damages awarded, the sums involved could well be astronomical.

A timely illustration of what this could mean comes from a recent libel trial involving a student who sued two national newspapers for making false claims about his participation in demonstrations against education spending cuts. The trial ran for just 5 days, and the judge issued an order for the two newspapers to make an interim payment of £450,000 to meet the claimant's baseline legal costs. The final figure is likely to be higher and excludes damages awarded to the claimant, Luke Cooper. A summary can be found here.

The council will be insured in the case of its defence of Caebrwyn's claim, but it is almost certainly not covered for the costs incurred in its counter-claim. If the council loses, those costs will come directly from public funds, and an interesting question in this regard will be how the council's costs are apportioned, especially since the same counsel is conducting both the defence and the counter-claim. We can be sure that the council's insurers will be keeping an eagle eye on their exposure.

The question is whether the external auditor is paying as much attention to the taxpayers' exposure as the insurers are to their likely share, and what if anything he might do to protect us.

Nothing that the auditor has done in recent years can give us much comfort on either score, and as Caebrwyn has discovered, the auditor does not have to tell us anything because he is beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.

The case law on which the County Council is basing its counter-claim relates to a libel case involving Bedford Borough Council and a Conservative Party election agent. There the district auditor decided to intervene after the libel case had been settled to object to the use of public funds in pursuit of a libel claim, and that extremely belated response by the auditor played a significant part in the judge's decision to dismiss the auditor's claims.

Will Carmarthenshire's appointed auditor learn from the Bedford case and intervene while time is on his side? Will he warn the Council against pursuing its counterclaim and the risk of a huge financial hit? Will he seek to impose any limits on the Council?

Well, we can but live in hope.

There is a draft Audit Office (Wales) Bill waiting to go before the Welsh Assembly which might just tackle this mess by making the WAO directly responsible for local government, but by the time that hits the statute books, the dust will have settled on the libel case.

Perhaps the biggest lesson is that all of these desperate appeals to ombudsmen and auditors would not be necessary if our elected councillors found the courage to say no a little more often and remembered that every pound given to the Llanelli Scarlets, Towy Community Church, the chief executive's libel fund and all of the other worthy causes means a pound less for our existing museums, leisure centres, school music programmes, support for the Welsh language in the community, etc.

Forza Italia

One of the journalists on the South Wales Evening Post has decided to go to the trouble of telling us why he will be supporting England in tonight's match against Italy.

Here is a good reason to support Italy.

A few days before the competition kicked off, the Italian team, which like its English rivals is based in Krakow, paid a visit to the former extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, just a short drive away. Like all other visitors, they were given a tour and paid their respects.

A couple of days later it was England's turn. Unlike the Italians, England could only spare its coach and six of its players. And unlike the Italians, it was decided that the English team could not possibly just turn up as ordinary visitors and mingle with the public, so the camp was closed and they were given a private tour.

Quite possibly this was done for the usual British "security reasons", although in truth most of the other major European teams have rather more star quality and famous names. And anyway, who was going to attack or otherwise pester a small group of relatively obscure, overpaid and overrated footballers on a visit to Auschwitz?

The incident tells us something about John Bull in this year of the Jubilympics, and it explains why we shall be eating pasta tonight in Casa Cneifiwr.

Pob lwc i'r Eidal!

Services to the Community

Whatever your views about David Lloyd George, no other Welshman in history had more impact on the world stage, and his impact on our daily lives (the old age pension and National Insurance, for example) and the British political scene can still be felt today.

In 1909 he introduced his "People's Budget" and took on the entrenched power and privilege of the hereditary House of Lords, by some margin the biggest constitutional crisis in Britain in the last 100 years.

Of course, the boy from Llanystumdwy went slightly off the rails in the later stages of his career, and there are some uncanny parallels with the British political scene today, including his relationship with the press barons and a shabby coalition with the Tories.

Having faced down the hereditary peers, Lloyd George went on to subvert the honours system by selling peerages, knighthoods and just about every other bauble in the cupboard on an industrial scale. Tony Blair, whose own career is a pale imitation of Lloyd George's in many other respects, was of course cleared of selling peerages rather more recently.

A century on from Lloyd George we still have hereditary peers, and he would have no difficulty recognising the rest of the honours system. One small concession to modern sensibilities is that ordinary members of the public may now nominate people for honours, but the bulk of those receiving awards are the same old mix of superannuated politicians, civil servants and other establishment hangers-on.

Cneifiwr was scrutinising the Queen's Birthday Honours list the other day to see if either he or Caebrwyn had been recognised for services to blogging when up popped a familiar name under the OBEs: David Gilbert, Director of Regeneration, Carmarthenshire County Council, for services in the fields of Regeneration and Skills.

This brings the council's tally of officers, members and commanders of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire to at least four. Meryl herself is a rather humble MBE, the lowest of the rungs in the pecking order, as is Labour's Terry Davies. Mr Gilbert, who can regularly be seen glaring fiercely at councillors and the public from his seat on the officers' podium in County Hall, can now look down on Meryl and Terry with his OBE, while looking down on us all as a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is Chief Executive Mark James.

Lloyd George's battle in 1909 and his subsequent flogging of honours may have tarnished and discredited the system in many people's eyes, but clearly the self-perpetuating cliques which run our local government are still in love with this Ruritanian nonsense.

So congratulations to Mr Gilbert, who takes home £147,637 a year. Sadly, after all his years of regeneration, Carmarthenshire remains one of the poorest parts of Europe, and many of his regeneration projects will be a drain on hard-pressed council taxpayers for decades to come.

While it is unlikely that there was a flood of nominations from the public, various developers, consultants and rugby bosses were no doubt on hand to endorse the award with rather more enthusiasm and gratitude.

As the council gears up for more school closures, preposterous and unsustainable developments and privatisation of services, it is good to know that services to the community are recognised by the Establishment. Just a pity that it's the Range Rover driving community.

Kremlin on the Towy gives itself new powers - Updated

Update: Cneifiwr was unable to go to the meeting where the changes to constitution were discussed, but thanks to Caebrwyn for reporting on it here. In the end the proposal to abolish the right for school transport appeals to be heard by councillors was rejected. Despite the best efforts of the excellent Cllr David Jenkins and Cllr Siân Caiach, the rest of the changes were bulldozed through.


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Carmarthenshire County Council met yesterday to approve yet another raft of changes to its constitution. This blog has pointed out on several previous occasions how over the years the council has hacked away at the rules which govern its conduct to remove transparency, reduce democratic accountability to vanishing point and abolish rights of ordinary citizens to a fair hearing.

Some of the changes made in recent years have verged on paranoia. For example, it was found necessary to change the constitution a couple of years ago because one individual had exercised his right to ask the council a question (about food sourcing). The problem was that he lived in a neighbouring county. Clearly that outrageous abuse had to be stopped, and so it was.

The latest set of proposals is long and complex, but here are just a few tasters:

• Parents who wish to appeal decisions relating to school transport will lose the right for their appeal to be heard by elected councillors. Appeals will in future be heard by officers of the council only (i.e. the people responsible for making the decision which is being appealed).
• Rulings made by the chair of the council on the application of the Constitution or the proceedings of council meetings may not be challenged. No matter how daft or wrong.
• More powers to appoint representatives to external bodies will be delegated by councillors to the Executive Board.
• Members of Scrutiny Committees may request that members of the ruling Executive Board attend their meetings and "assist them". The requirement for members of the Executive to answer questions at such meetings has been dropped.
• The right of scrutiny committees to call extraordinary meetings either by a decision of the chair or by means of a majority vote is abolished; henceforth, the Chief Executive will have to approve such meetings.
• Meetings of the full council, committees and the Executive Board will be open to the public and press, subject to the usual restrictions (exempt information). Executive Board Decision Meetings (i.e. not the public rubber-stamping sessions) will however be closed to public and press.
• The rights of scrutiny committees to propose amendments to the Executive Board and provide advice to the Executive Board on major issues before final decisions are made are also curtailed. In future they may only "contribute" to policy development, etc.

Some other sections of this document have undergone extensive re-drafting, in particular the sections dealing with calling in (i.e. challenging) decisions made by the Executive Board, but the end result is the same. The effect is reminiscent of the sort of fake questionnaire you find on the internet, where no matter what answer you give to a question, the outcome is always the same. Here's how call-ins by scrutiny committees of Executive decisions work:

Scrutiny committees will retain the right to call-in decisions made by the ruling executive if a majority of members votes to call a decision in. The call-in request then has to leap through a number of hoops before it will be considered, and may be vetoed by the Monitoring Officer. If the request somehow manages to survive that process, the committee will be given cooling-off time to reconsider its call-in. They may, possibly under pressure from the whips, realise the error of their ways and drop their call-in. But if all else fails, they may refer the request for a decision to be reconsidered back to the Executive Board. The Executive Board may (racing certainty: will) decide that its decision was correct and reject the call-in. No further call-in is then allowed.

Kafka would love that.

There are myriads of other proposed changes, some of which are required because of changes in government legislation. Others are home-made in Carmarthen, and it may well be that buried away deep in the verbiage there are more nasty land-mines.

The overall drift of the changes is to reduce the powers of elected councillors still further, to reduce the need for the Executive and officers to consult with elected councillors and to curtail both the number and the powers of the scrutiny committees.

All of this vast patchwork quilt of changes was "considered" and approved in rather less time than it would take anyone to read them.

It's what Vladimir Putin calls "managed democracy".

Demon bloggers - when Evangelicals attack (1)

Back in December 2011, Carmarthenshire County Council voted to approve a loan of £270,000 at 3% to Towy Community Church for its bowling alley project, bringing the total value of the council's package of grants, loans, peppercorn leases, etc. to more than £1.4 million so far.

In the run-up to the meeting, Cneifiwr and Caebrwyn raised a lot of questions about this use of public money, the ability of this very small evangelical church to manage a project on this scale and the many and glaring inconsistencies in statements put out by the church and the council. They also pointed out that the church's website was advertising a partnership with a highly controversial American organisation called Mercy Ministries (links since removed).


Needless to say, this really rattled the Evangelical Alliance which took a first swipe against the bloggers and press here at the end of 2011.

The author of the piece, Jim Stewart, makes three main points. First he comes to the rescue of Mercy Ministries and tries to justify the church's link to that organisation.

As you can see, he gets himself into a bit of a tangle here. True, Towy Community Church had talked about a partnership with Mercy Ministries, he says, and one of the Carmarthen flock had taken a gap year with Mercy Ministries. True, there had been an unfortunate financial scandal in Australia where Mercy Ministries had had to close its local branch (actually the scandal was rather more than just financial; it included allegations of false imprisonment, exorcism and abuse of young women, but Mr Stewart clearly felt that that sort of lurid detail was unnecessary).

He goes on to mention the American founder of Mercy Ministries and her YouTube talks about "deliverance" which he defines as an act of setting free or rescue. From what? Jim Stewart does not elaborate, but we are talking about deliverance from demons and demonic possession.

The problem with these terms is that we are in a world of pseudo-science, and they are very elastic. What is clear is that quite a few of the troubled young women who have experienced the "deliverance" he is talking about emerge from it even more traumatised and troubled. You can read a very well written account about Mercy Ministries' UK operations here. Interestingly, the piece mentions a group called the Abundant Life Church which was also attended by Towy Community Church's gap year student.

Mr Stewart also argues that religious groups seeking funding from the Lottery, councils, etc. should be judged solely on whether they have complied with the terms and conditions of the loans and grants they have received, rather than on religious (and we might add), ethical and political grounds.

That would be very good news for all sorts of extremist religious groups, such as the virulently homophobic Christian Voice. The Klu Klux Klan, which sees itself as Christian, might want to consider opening up a youth training camp in Carmarthenshire on that basis.

Finally, Mr Stewart claims that it was only because of the activity of the bloggers that Carmarthenshire County Council had to meet in full session to debate the loan. It would be flattering to think that was true, but the reality was that the decision had to go back to the full council, partly because of the size of the loan, and partly because the funding package agreed by the councillors in closed session a few months previously turned out to be based on rather wishful thinking.


This being Carmarthenshire, a lot of spin was deployed to persuade councillors to sign on the dotted line. They were told, for example, that giving the Johnstown creamery site to the church for 99 years would save the council money because it would no longer have to pay business rates. They were also told that the church no longer needed to borrow as much from the banks.

The truth was that the church's bankers had got slightly cold feet, and were no longer willing to lend as much, and unverified claims were made about a massive increase in the church's own contribution. The bottom line was that bank borrowings were being reduced because the council had agreed to stump up a heavily subsidised loan.

Jim Stewart's musings were rather mild compared with our next piece.

"Faith-ignorant smear campaign won't undermine us"  yells a woman called Jenny Taylor in a rant on a site called Lapidomedia (here) in April of this year.

Taylor goes to town in a piece which has a shameful disregard for the truth and the facts:

• The Council has provided £550,000 of funding towards the project, she says. The true figure is in excess of £1.4 million.
• Wales on Sunday had linked the Carmarthen church to a non-existent Australian charity, she screams. The reason why the Australian charity was non-existent was because it had been closed down in the wake of revelations in the Sydney Morning Herald.
• Despite having told us that the Australian charity was non-existent, she then goes on to argue that, apart from the unfortunate coincidence of the name, Aussie Mercy Ministries and Mercy Ministries UK had nothing in common. Just as Microsoft Australia and Microsoft UK are not linked in any way, presumably.

Apart from the evil bloggers, Taylor is very, very cross with other satanic spawn, including MP Jonathan Edwards, Cllr Siân Caiach, the BBC, the Western Mail and Unison, the union which represents many council employees.

They are all out to get the Christians, she rages, and they are all faith-ignorant, before adding that the Prime Minister, Call-Me-Dave Cameron, thinks that Mercy Ministries is wonderful because of what it is doing for the Big Society.

And this is where the politicians come in, as we shall see in the next installment.

Demon Bloggers - When Evangelicals Attack (2)

Attacks from the Evangelical Alliance and Lapido Media were to be expected, but a rather more shocking onslaught came from the House of Commons, where an official all-party group calling itself Christians in Parliament produced a preliminary report in February entitled "Clearing the Ground" on the freedom of Christians in the UK.

The committee is made up of 3 Tory MPs, 2 Tory peers, one Lib-Dem peer and 2 Labour MPs, and  it set itself the task of deciding whether Christians are being marginalised in UK society. Given the membership of the committee, this was akin to asking a group of vegetarians to write a report to decide whether eating meat is good or bad.

Various people were called to give evidence, and the report directs those wishing to see the evidence to the official website of the Evangelical Alliance. Impartial and objective are not the first words to spring to mind, then.

Members of the committee include Gary Streeter MP (Con), Fiona Bruce MP (Con), David Burrows MP (Con), Gary Shuker MP (Lab) and Jim Dobbin MP (Lab). We need not spend much time on this assortment, except for a few snippets to give readers a flavour.

• Gary Streeter has campaigned to have an Advertising Standards Authority ban on faith healing advertising lifted. He has demanded that the authority produce proof that healing through prayer does not work. Like his fellow MP David Burrowes, he uses CARE (Christian Action Research Education) interns.
• Fiona Bruce says she is opposed to same-sex marriage "as a mother". Well, Fiona, the author of this blog thinks that allowing people of the same sex to marry is a good thing, "as a father".
• David Burrowes has close links with CARE, and has an intern paid for by that organisation which campaigns and lobbies on a range of issues, including teaching creationism in schools and opposition to gay marriage and abortion.
• Gary Shuker also thinks that adverts which claim prayer can heal should be allowed.
• Jim Dobbin is opposed to gay marriage.

The committee's report includes the following piece about the Towy Community Church story:

Towy Community Church in Wales is working with the local council to develop a community
centre with a bowling alley and is due to receive a loan from the council to help fund this
development. Due to malicious stories on a blog, public pressure was placed on the council to
block the loan. It emerged that the church had made small donations to an American Christian
organisation that offers support for women with life-controlling issues – which include sexuality
issues. The publicity necessitated a full meeting of Carmarthen Council, who after investigation
re-stated their commitment to the church and the project. However, despite the outcome, the affair
reflects a widespread ignorance of what a Christian church is and does.

Eight lines, and in every line a serious error or evasion:

• Notice that only a loan for an unspecified amount is mentioned.
• Notice how Mercy Ministries is not mentioned by name, and the issue is spun to make it sound as though critics of the organisation are opposed to helping women.
• The local authority involved was of course Carmarthenshire County Council, not Carmarthen Council.
• The meeting was held to approve the loan because the council's previous funding package turned out to be inadequate. It had nothing to do with the bloggers or negative publicity.
• The meeting did not investigate anything - there was no mention at all of the Mercy Ministries scandal.

Sad also to see that legitimate questioning and debate is described as "malicious".

What is shocking is that this is a parliamentary report which will be used to support changes in legislation and government policy. If the quality of evidence in other cases mentioned in the report is as unreliable as this, we all have cause to be concerned.


I wonder what Mrs Morgan, my old Sunday school teacher, would think. She always said that telling the truth was a Christian virtue.

Empty gestures - Carmarthenshire's new council starts as it means to go on

Carwyn Jones came in for a lot of criticism for his very leisurely approach to forming a new administration after the Assembly elections in May last year; it was not until towards the end of September that he got around to announcing a programme for his government, and the programme itself was devoid of specific targets.

The new Labour-Independent administration in Carmarthenshire seems to have decided to follow Carwyn's lethargic lead, and has so far managed only to appoint an Executive Board and the various committees and vote on a couple of discretionary allowances.

The decision on allowances has not got the new council off to a good start, as it manages to combine empty gesture politics with a new policy that undermines the new leadership's claims to want to help rural areas of the county.

Travel allowances for duties carried out by councillors in their wards have been abolished, as has the right to claim for postage and telephone costs relating to councillors' duties.

If you are a councillor in an urban area, this will make little difference, but for those who represent rural areas with countless scattered farms and houses, often without access to the Internet, you will now be expected to pay out of your own pocket all thanks to a proposal made by Councillor Pam Palmer, who has been given the job of looking after rural communities on the governing Executive Board.

Ironic, isn't it?

If your councillor is both rich and public spirited enough to fork out of their own funds, this will not matter, but it raises new barriers to deter people who are not independently wealthy from becoming councillors. If you are unlucky enough to have a rich but mean councillor, lower your expectations now.

Needless to say, this point escaped our new leader, Kevin Madge, who went on to praise a new statutory carers' allowance for councillors.

The new allowance is designed to help councillors meet the cost of providing care for children and other dependents while they carry out their duties. Kev said,

“If we want people from all walks of life to become councillors, then we have got to help them to be here and to carry out their duties.”

Looking round the chamber it is unlikely that many (or any) will be making claims for childcare, although perhaps some of the elderly male members may now reveal that they have fathered flocks of love-children with nubile women young enough to be their great-granddaughters.

Rather more likely, we will find that these new allowances go towards caring for the elderly spouses of councillors who have so far managed perfectly well without them.

Plus ca change.

The Queen and the County Council Elections - oh, and the Torch

Just over a week ago the National Assembly held a special 'debate' to congratulate the Queen on her Diamond Jubilee. The only slight frisson of excitement about this otherwise dull event was speculation about how the Plaid leader, Leanne Wood, would handle it.

Leanne has never made any secret of her views, and would like to see the monarchy in Wales replaced one day by an elected head of state.

In the event, she gave a carefully balanced speech, as you can see from this Western Mail piece here.

Rather odder is a claim buried deep in the article that "some in Plaid" believed that Leanne's non-attendance at a Jubilee service held in Llandaff Cathedral had cost Plaid Cymru seats in the Carmarthenshire county council elections.

The unexpected reference to Carmarthenshire in the middle of the report becomes more bizarre the more you think about it.

In the county council elections Plaid performed extremely well in Carmarthen, held its ground in the Amman Valley and took a drubbing only in the notoriously Royalist stronghold of Llanelli (well, it still has a Prince Philip Hospital, doesn't it?).

Local press coverage of the elections could be described as patchy at best, but nowhere was there any mention of the future of the monarchy being a question which had voters challenging candidates. No letters appeared in the Llanelli Star, Carmarthen Journal or any other title accusing Peter Hughes Griffiths of wanting to send the Windsors packing. Nowhere on Twitter or Facebook was there any debate about the monarchy in the context of the council elections.

Since the National Assembly debate, the concerned monarchist citizens of Carmarthenshire have had every opportunity to put up bunting and portraits of the Windsors and hold street parties. The BBC did its best over four days to whip Wales into a frenzy, and Tesco and other big corporates joined in by decking out their stores to make them look like BNP conventions.

As the tumbleweed blew down the empty streets of the towns and villages of Carmarthenshire, the Western Mail's monarchists kept a very low profile. There was no dancing in the streets, and bunting salesmen had a very lean time of it.

In Cneifiwr's neck of the woods only a couple of villages over the border in Ceredigion showed any signs of making any effort. Llechryd had a Union Jack draped under the village sign, and the village hall was decked out in red, white and blue bunting (not a single Red Dragon). In Rhydlewis the county's "What's On" guide listed no fewer than 5 Jubilee events. Perhaps that is part of the lingering legacy of Caradoc Evans.

Otherwise a visiting Martian would have not spotted any difference from any other wet weekend.

The Western Mail snippet remains a mystery, and no doubt it will be tripping up PhD students 100 years from now as they take their cue from it and research the Great Carmarthenshire Republican Row of 2012.

While we are on the subject of mysteries, a few words on the Olympic Torch Relay which recently passed through Cardigan.

Cneifiwr's youngest wanted to go and watch, and not wanting to deprive him for the sake of political principle, Dad duly obliged, albeit with gritted teeth.

The relay started near the Livestock Market, crossed the river, went up the High Street and ended at what is known as the 'Tesco Junction'. Cneifiwr and Junior opted for the Tesco end, and had no problems parking or finding a roadside place. In fact only a short stretch down around the Catholic Church and Rugby Club appeared to have attracted crowds.

Lots of police vans turned up, and after a short while a squadron of police motorcycles came past. Half of the riders were wearing Metropolitan Police jackets.

The Dyfed Powys boys were very friendly, and a couple of the riders stopped to chat with some of the onlookers. A few feet down from Cneifiwr was a very ancient Mam-gu waving her Draig Goch at the cops. The Welsh boys waved back, and she started calling out 'Helo, Shwmae - Shwd ŷch chi?'

The boys from the Met stared back, assessing the terrorist threat.

Eventually a convoy of shiny buses and cars drove past, including a Coca Cola lorry and a Lloyds Bank bus.
The Olympic bus had a huge screen built into the side, showing what seemed to be a cartoon, and a Cockney voice on a loud haler tried to incite the sparse crowd to cheer.

More police outriders and men in grey shorts and shirts surrounded the 'runner', an elderly and rather large lady who staggered and tottered up the gentle hill.

"Stand back! Stand back!" we were ordered, and the whole thing came to a halt.

By this time a small crowd had gathered, and the security men took up position, hands over their genitals like footballers defending a penalty, as the flame was transferred to a small lantern to go back on the bus.

This strange ceremony took about 5 minutes, and one of the security types was holding a spare torch that nobody was allowed to touch.

With that, the lantern disappeared onto the bus, followed by the officials. The door closed and the convoy roared off.

The whole event had lasted about 20 minutes.

Perhaps there is a sad sub-species of trainspotter specialising in police vehicles, in which case, they would have been thrilled. As for the rest of us, Cneifiwr Junior summed it up as he asked, "Was that it?"

Botanic Garden "not financially sustainable"

Back in January of this year Cneifiwr took a look at the tortured financial history of the National Botanical Gardens at Llanarthne (here). What emerged was the story of a venture sold to the public as a viable commercial operation in 2000, but where hardly a year has passed since 2004 without a fresh bailout or rescue. And every time there is a bailout, we are told that the future is looking bright; new plans have been put in place, and more visitors will show up.

In March the Carmarthen Journal went to town with a massive splurge on the gardens, spread across three separate articles, including this one. Along with the daffs and the spring bulbs, optimism had returned:

Staff at the National Botanic Garden of Wales are looking to have a better second decade.

The garden needed rescuing within a few years of its opening, but bosses now feel those days are behind them and that more realistic expectations can give them a base from which to develop the garden over the next 10 years.

Visitor numbers were again set to rise (here), and everything in the garden was looking lovely.

Roll on a couple of months, and the same journalist now tells us that Pricewaterhouse Coopers has concluded in a report that, "The National Botanic Garden of Wales ....is not financially sustainable without external funding. This position will not change in the foreseeable future".

Whereas the experts once confidently told us that the gardens would be self-sustaining, the preferred argument over the last few years has been that other major botanic gardens also need subsidies to survive, and they point to Kew and Edinburgh as examples. Kew Gardens date back to the middle of the 18th century, while Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Gardens can trace their history to 1670.

The difference is, of course, that neither Kew nor Edinburgh were sold to us as great investments, and both are in major population centres.

The other argument which is always trotted out is that the gardens are "estimated" to bring millions of pounds into the county, although nobody has been rash enough to put a figure on that. The truth is, of course, that most visitors will visit the gardens for a few hours and then head off out of the county. Anyone desperate to empty their wallets and purses locally will be hard put to find anywhere to spend their cash, bearing in mind that the gardens are miles from the nearest towns.

Typically, the PwC report had to be obtained through a Freedom of Information request. Although it has been obvious for years that the garden could never become a self-sustaining commercial operation, the Great and the Good who run it persist in treating the public like idiots with claims that a corner has been turned, and that next year, or perhaps the year after, everything will come right.

The politicians, including of course the leaders of our county council, are no better as they peddle patently daft claims about how much the gardens contribute to the county's economy.

What the gardens at Llanarthne have in common with Parc y Scarlets, Garnant Golf Club and other Carmarthenshire regeneration projects (including the evangelical bowling alley) is that they are set to be a burden on the county for years to come, swallowing resources which could be spent on schools, social care and other bread and butter services.

All of these projects were launched on the back of completely unrealistic business plans, and all of the key decisions have been taken behind closed doors, with the public being fed fairy tales. Nobody has ever been held to account for the failures, and given the supine attitude of the Wales Audit Office, there is no likelihood of any serious investigation into any of these costly and disastrous decisions.

Time for the council to call a halt to the bowling alley project before that becomes another permanent drain on our limited resources.