Wednesday 30 May 2018

Swansea Bay City Deal 'Agreement'...and Carmarthenshire's in charge


After fifteen months of deliberation, arguments, and unknown, but no doubt astronomical legal costs, the final draft of the Joint Working Agreement for the Swansea Bay City Deal will be doing the rounds of the four participant councils over the next few weeks. If they all agree, the Joint Committee will be formally set up. The draft Agreement can be read here.

Carmarthenshire Council Executive Board will be rubber stamping the Agreement on Monday (update Monday; duly rubber stamped). It will then go to full council for the final nod of approval.

From what I can fathom out, here are a few points;

The Joint Committee will consist of the four council leaders and several co-opted representatives from the health boards and the universities. Only the four council leaders will have a vote. However, this is against a backdrop and input of the programme board, economic strategy board of business interests, finance and legal board, and other vested interests. As lip service to scrutiny, a councillor joint scrutiny board will be set up which will be run Carmarthenshire-style, ie surgically sanitised officer reports, engineered to avoid challenge and dissent.

Carmarthenshire Council will be the official 'Accountable Body', essentially then it's Mark James, aided and abetted by Linda Rees Jones and the section 151 finance officer. No, it's not April 1st. Mr James, as we know, is the lead chief executive for the whole Deal, the principal advisor to the Joint Committee, and will be known as the 'Accountable Officer'. What a joke. The other councils should be aware that the 'Accountable Officer' thinks nothing of breaching promises and was happy to renege on an undertaking to hand money over to the council, and pocketed it himself. Speaking from experience, I wouldn't believe a word he says. We wouldn't want the City Deal money ending up in the gutter would we?
I refer readers, and interested parties, to my previous post City Deal - a scandal in the making, and the wrong man for the job?

The private investment, the funding arrangements, and borrowing requirement for the four councils are still not clear but essentially, the 'Accountable Body' will be in control of the purse strings...what could possibly go wrong? A recent letter from the Welsh Minister shows that even the Welsh Government is confused as to Mr James' role in local government;



In Carmarthenshire the main project is the Wellness private-health-care hot-tub extravaganza, a Mark James vision he clearly plans to bequeath to the County when he finally moves on. If nothing else, it will be something to keep the auditors in gainful employment in years to come. The Yr Egin 'cultural hub' has already cost £16m of public money, how much of that has come from the council is not entirely clear.

The reality of the City Deal governance will be somewhat different than the tick-box legalese of the official agreement. One of the 'Principles' is for councils to be 'open and trusting in their dealings with each other'. We don't have to look very far back to see just how open and trusting Carmarthenshire was with Pembrokeshire over the speculative property grants, see 'Councils at war' leading to Pembs councillors concluding that Carmarthenshire was indeed a Sicilian cartel. These grants were administered by Carmarthenshire, like the City Deal, and the audits were shrouded in mystery, and mismanagement covered up.

The ambiguity identified by Neath Port Talbot over the past few months is still there with uncertainty around the use of capital receipts (as I read it, a council could sell any asset and use the money for a city deal project) and the divving up of funds, controlled by Carmarthenshire, is likely to set one council off against another before a once-in-a-generation brick has been laid. That's only when the government funding does start to trickle in, up until then each council, all making cuts to frontline services, will have to fund the projects themselves.

The running costs for the Deal will be met by the four councils to to the tune of £1m over five years, plus an additional 1.5% top-slice of the governments' contribution. This again will be controlled, and audited by Carmarthenshire...

As for Freedom of Information requests, once again it is County Hall in overall control, a council far more concerned with reputation than truth. My own request for an earlier draft of the JWA was flatly refused under legal privilege, which is a fine start. The Agreement mentions the requirement for a 'robust system' for declarations of conflicts of interest, yet the 'Accountable Officer' is an officer who chose not to declare his own property and business empire to his employers.

The complex governance structure for the City Deal resembles a bloated quango, filled with conflicting interests and cosy arrangements (I bet the council hospitality boxes have been busy), set up to oversee a public/private scheme likely to benefit a few short term investors, and the egos, and wallets, of council chief executives, at massive public cost.

I will be watching.

Friday 11 May 2018

News round up - AGMs, and more


Following a very close vote at their AGM last week, the Labour group on the council elected 30 year old Cllr Rob James as their new leader, replacing Cllr Jeff Edmunds who had held the position since early 2015 after he had ousted Kevin Madge.

Early in 2015 the council was 'run' by Labour and Independents. However, former councillor Meryl Gravell (for 'Meryl' read Mark James) refused to work with Cllr Edmunds. His card was marked by Mr James when he helped spill the beans over the latter's bung to Scarlets Regional Ltd midway through 2014. This 'disloyalty', therefore, made him unacceptable as leader of the council and so 'Meryl' dumped Labour and formed a coalition with Plaid in June 2015.
Seen as the lesser of two evils, Emlyn Dole has turned out to be a remarkably loyal follower of the regime.

One of the problems faced by Labour in opposition has been an inability to challenge Plaid as many of the policies were started by Labour (and whilst Cllr Edmunds was the Executive Board Member for Resources), and merely continued by Plaid. This led to Cllr Edmunds starting every opposition statement with general agreement with whatever Plaid were doing.
As Rob James, previously a Neath councillor was only elected last May he, at least on a personal level, doesn't carry the same baggage. So, we'll see.

An interesting example of the democratic constipation arose a few weeks ago when Rob James questioned the executive decision to set up yet another arms-length company, 'wholly owned by the council'. The trend was started under Labour and, at the time, was challenged by Plaid; "The obsession of the Labour council with effectively outsourcing services and removing democratic oversight inevitably reduces the operational control the council has over our public services."
However, the tables have now turned and Cllr James' use of words such as outsourcing and privatisation were sneered at by Plaid, rubbished by the chief executive and even some of the Labour group shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Jobs and terms and conditions were all safe, they said, well, erm, for the first day of transfer anyway...oh.

Safe as houses eh? In the London Borough of Barnet, care workers were TUPE transferred to an arms-length company, 'Your Choice Barnet', 100% wholly owned by Barnet Council. Within a year, a third of the workforce had been made redundant and the care workers given a 9.5% pay cut. Hopefully this won't happen in Carmarthenshire...

Coincidentally, next Monday, the Executive Board will meet to approve the business plan for the latest arms-length company, Lleisant Delta Wellbeing Ltd...but, despite it being 'wholly owned' by the council, the decision will be held in secret, behind closed doors. How very transparent...

One advantage for Labour in electing a new leader to the hot seat was that he wasn't part of the ruling Labour/Ind group during the unlawful payments scandals, even though the collective responsibility of allowing the chief executive to get away with daylight robbery, remains. Jeff Edmunds, whilst not on the original Exec Board which bankrolled the chief executive, was elected just after, in May 2012 and was in charge of resources throughout the Wales Audit Office reports etc etc. Plaid were vocal in opposition, at the time, but that all changed in June 2015, (apart from this notable effort from Plaid backbenchers).
Labour's Kevin Madge is the final remnant of the executive board who wielded the fatal rubber stamp, and has now been nominated as vice chair of the council, and will be automatically elevated to Chair the year after. Only in Carmarthenshire eh?

As an aside, it is understood that the chief executive responded to any enquiries as to whether he was going to repay the unlawful monies by threatening councillors to keep their mouths shut or he'd make that earlier Exec Board pay it back out of their own pockets, in so many words. No wonder they all kept quiet... A pity really that they didn't stand up to him, the fact that he misled and manipulated the Exec Board into giving him a blank cheque would have given them an instant defence.

I am not aligned to any party, and will leave all the political intrigue to others, but as I see it we still have a largely benign set of councillors, fearful of the chief executive who continues to bully, threaten, flout the law and rip off the taxpayer.

The power lies with senior officers, and, as we have seen, the chief executive, aided by his cabal of disciples, holds the reins of whatever 'administration' is currently in the hot seat, so a strong opposition is essential in Carmarthenshire. With the City Deal, for example, looming on the horizon, even more decision making will be taken out of the hands of councillors. I have heard that the council have already borrowed unknown millions, and are paying interest on it, without any guarantees for the taxpayer, cross-council agreement, let alone a whisper of scrutiny.

Have all councillors taken a vow of silence over the 'Wellness Village' white elephant? Or the Swansea Bay City Deal itself? Pembrokeshire, like Neath Port Talbot, remains cautious and at a Pembs full council meeting yesterday one councillor wondered whether the 'Swansea City Bay Deal' (must be a footie fan) would bankrupt the council, the webcast starts here.
In Carmarthenshire, questioning the integrity of the chief executive's vanity projects can be problematic, you are likely to be labelled a troublemaker, an obstacle to job creation and the forthcoming abundance of shared wealth, you could even be sued. He has his own agenda, and it should be challenged...jobs and abundant wealth for who exactly?
Has anyone, apart from me, flagged up whether his own business and property investment interests may conflict with the City Deal cash bonanza? Let alone the council's interests?
As I said in my previous post, the wisdom of allowing the chief executive anywhere near a piggy bank, let alone £1.3bn must be questioned.

Scrutiny is vital and, at times, far more effective on a public platform, at full council meetings, in the glare of the webcam, than at poorly minuted unrecorded spoon-fed scrutiny meetings. The farcical reaction to the Motion to introduce Epetitions a few weeks ago was a case in point. The Plaid leader demanded that the motion be withdrawn because the the decision to introduce them had already been made...despite the fact that this was FOUR years ago. The Motion should have been welcomed by the administration as a matter of democratic principle, not treated as a source of irritation from the opposition and voted down.

Next Wednesday is the council's AGM, a largely ceremonial affair but followed, after lunch by the Leader's Annual report, offering the usual opportunity for some b******t bingo, if nothing else. Following the appointment of Committee members and Chairs - none of which seem to be contested - we come to the annual tweak of the Constitution, with a minor amendment to ensure that councillors can claim extra expenses for additional 'approved duties'.
Yet again there is something missing from the annual Constitutional amendments and it's those shocking 'suspended' libel clauses which remain the elephants in the room. Unbelievable. Maybe next year eh?

Meanwhile, whether it's Labour, Plaid or the Independents 'running' the circus, it seems that some things never change. Back in March, whilst fans were shelling out for tickets and struggling to park, three Executive Board Members, Linda Evans, Hazel Evans, (both Plaid) and Mair Stephens (Ind) enjoyed a night out at Parc Y Scarlets for the Scarlets v La Rochelle match in the council's hospitality box, with designated parking. And who was paying for it all? Us of course, including you lot queuing outside. Mind you, Exec Board Member Jane Tremlett (Ind) went one better, whilst we were all shivering in February, she wangled a couple of days in Barcelona courtesy of a private telecare company...

Of greater significance however are the gifts, hospitality and fringe benefits enjoyed by the most senior officers, but, as I have discovered, you'll have to embark on lengthy battles through the Freedom of Information Act to get to the bottom of that.

County Hall, Carmarthen.