Losing the plot

Tweet One of the things that struck me shortly after being first elected to the Vale of Glamorgan council in 1979 was the different approach to items of expenditure.  The larger items, sometimes in the millions, were generally nodded through, whereas the smaller items were the subject of much more debate.  I remember a lengthy debate at one personnel committee about whether an officer should or should not be sent on a course costing a few hundred pounds.  My suggestion that minor decisions of that nature should really be operational ones made by officers wasn’t exactly well-received.

There’s a general point here.  Most of us find it easier to discuss and deal with sums of money which are within our experience.  Hundreds and thousands of pounds are ‘real’ amounts of money; millions are just numbers.  I suspect this is the underlying reason why so much of what passes for politics is concentrating on the smaller sums rather than the larger ones – just think about a number of recent press releases from the Taxpayers’ Alliance or the opposition parties in the Assembly talking about expenses and salaries.  It’s not that salaries and expenses aren’t important; it’s just that they are close to being insignificant in the context of overall public expenditure.

In the same way, a lot of the debate around the proposed reductions in the numbers of local authorities in Wales has been around the number of Chief Executives or Directors of Education, and the cost of employing 22 rather than, say, 8.  But that isn’t where any real savings will come from.

(And, as an aside, it’s by no means certain that these particular savings will actually be realised anyway.  If, for instance, 8 Directors of Education each appoint an assistant to look after each of the former council areas, the result could well be that there is a reduction in the number of Directors from 22 to 8, but the number of people doing their work increases from 22 to 30.  And no doubt the 8 will expect higher salaries than the 22 in respect of their increased responsibilities.  There are an awful lot of devils hiding in the detail here.)

If there are significant savings to be achieved, they won’t come from simple reductions in the numbers of chief officers.  They will come from combining teams and reducing jobs at much lower levels in the organisation; they will come from harmonising systems and procedures; and they will come at a cost of a significant initial investment.

Last week, the Welsh Government produced a headline figure of £650million savings.  Reluctant as I am to agree with the Tories, I can’t help but feel that this is, as they say, a figure plucked out of the air.  I don’t know whether it’s an accurate figure or not, but what we can say with a high degree of certainty is that any savings that are achieved will largely come at the expense of jobs.  Jobs will be cut directly by dictat of the Labour government – and they seem quite proud of it.

But, hold on a minute – is saving money really the driver for local government reorganisation?  The savings seem to have become central to the debate, but wasn’t the original argument more about taking a strategic view and addressing the perceived failures in the services being delivered?  When did that argument turn into a financial one?  I was never convinced that reorganisation was the best way to improve performance in any event; but reorganisation aimed at saving money is almost certainly not.

Generals with maps

Tweet I rather liked the line about the dangers of a general with a map in a combat zone.  I’m not sure that it stands up to scrutiny though – it strikes me that a general without a map might potentially be even more dangerous.

It’s clear by now that the minister is determined to press ahead with a reorganisation of local authorities which will reduce the number of 8 or 9 in total.  It’s also clear that the other three centralist parties represented in the Assembly agree in principle with the push for a reduced number, even if they are quibbling about the detail.

It’s also clear that there are councillors in all the parties who will resist the proposed changes.  Here in Carmarthenshire, in a rare display of unity a few weeks ago, Labour, Plaid, and the Independent Party joined forces to declare that Carmarthenshire should remain a stand-alone authority.  They’re whistling in the wind though – their influence on their leaders in Cardiff is about as close to zero as it can get, and their views will simply be dismissed as self-interest.

It might be true that their protests are based on self-interest, but even if we give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they are genuinely seeking to do what’s best for local democracy in Wales, they’ll still be ignored.  That simply isn’t the question being asked; and having the right answer to the wrong question won’t advance their case greatly.

It seems to me that the question being asked by Cardiff’s centralists has little to do with good or effective local democracy at all – it is, rather, about finding the most efficient way of delivering certain key services, and primarily amongst those, education.  Efficiency and democracy are not at all the same thing.  But seeking to judge the latest proposals against that key criterion of ‘efficiency’ (assuming that the term even has a simple agreed definition) raises more questions that it answers.

Firstly, why does the area of Glamorgan and Gwent require four regions, when four or at most five is deemed adequate for the whole of the rest of Wales?  Where is the evidence that requires the population of a region to be less than x and no more than y?

Secondly, why is the sanctity of existing boundaries taken as a given?  What’s wrong, for instance, with splitting Conwy and merging half with Gwynedd and the other half with the rest of north Wales?  Yes, I know, of course, that it’s easier to treat existing authorities as whole units, but if the question is how we find the most ‘efficient’ structure, this is an unnecessary constraint.

Thirdly, why do all services have to be delivered to the same pattern?  I can understand – even if I’m not entirely convinced by the evidence – why fewer education authorities might be an improvement, but why do services such as leisure centres have to be managed at the same level?  It simply looks like a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.

Fourthly, given the need for better co-ordination between health and social services, why is the NHS not being included, and aligned to the same boundaries, as Plaid have in fact suggested?

Fifthly, where does this leave the Welsh Government’s drive for city regions?  Whereas the regions have previously included ‘whole’ authorities (for instance, Carmarthenshire in Swansea Bay), the new plan will mean that some authorities (such as Dyfed) are partly in and partly out.

But the biggest question of all, which the minister seems to be completely unwilling even to contemplate, is about the value of democratic elections to these new ‘authorities’.  If the aim is to ensure the most efficient delivery of centrally prescribed services to centrally ordained standards in a consistent fashion, how does electing councillors to regional authorities add any value at all?  How much influence can any elected councillors actually have?

It’s a point that I’ve raised before – if certain services are considered so important that they have to be uniform and consistent in terms of both policy and delivery across the whole of Wales (I’m not at all convinced about that, but it seems that all four Assembly parties are), then why pretend that elected local government has any rôle in delivering them?  Better by far to keep local government local and let it concentrate on those services where there is room for local variation and difference.

Hope vs experience

Tweet Estyn’s ‘excellent’ report on Ceredigion’s education system looks like good news for the county’s children and parents, and the county council is well in order to be celebrating the success.  There may be one or two devils hiding in the detail, and I’m always at least a little dubious about whether comparisons are as meaningful as they’re made out to be, but at least we now have a series of county by county reports produced by the same body on, one assumes, the same basis and criteria.

Whilst the fact that Wales’ 19^th largest authority has done better than the 18 larger ones above it doesn’t disprove the notion that smaller authorities find it harder to deliver consistent high quality services, it very much disproves the notion that size is the sole or even the main determinant of performance.  Yet the wholly subjective argument that Wales’ local authorities are ‘too small’ has been one of the key arguments of those wanting to rush headlong into an arbitrary reorganisation of local government.

Where does it leave the proposed merger of Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire?  Pembrokeshire is the 14^th largest authority – that doesn’t sound too different from 19^th, but by population, Pembrokeshire would represent around 60% of the new county.  Pembrokeshire’s Estyn report was, shall we say, rather less glowing than that received by Ceredigion.

That means that there are some other questions which need to be asked: When two organisations of different size merge, which culture is likely to be dominant – that of the smaller or that of the larger?  And when it comes to amalgamating the staff and management posts, which authority is likely to predominate - the larger, or the smaller?  And where will most of the councillors making the appointments come from – the larger or the smaller?

I know which I think is likeliest to happen – believing that the smaller will prevail would be to elevate hope and optimism over logic and experience.

Unfulfilled expectations

Tweet The more time passes, the more the local government non-reorganisation proposed by the Williams Commission appears to be dead in the water.  The all-party consensus which Carwyn Jones hoped for evaporated before it formed, and the arbitrary “decide by Easter or else” deadline has been shown to be just that, entirely arbitrary.

The First Minister must be wondering how on earth this has happened.  After all, he included representatives of all four parties on the commission and must have expected that their, apparently unanimous, conclusions would be rubber-stamped by their parties.  Was that expectation really so unreasonable?

It seems to me that there are two factors which come into play here.  The first is the extent to which the party representatives were chosen by their parties rather than selected by the First Minister, and the second is the extent to which they kept in touch with their respective parties during the commission’s deliberations.

On the first it was never entirely clear.  It’s part of the way of doing things in the UK – and another of those habits which the Assembly seems only too keen to ape – that appointment processes for such commissions are anything but transparent.  Whether the individuals were nominated “through the usual channels” by their party leaders, or arbitrarily selected by the First Minister is obscure to say the least.  But even if we assume the worst case, that he alone made the decision without consultation, he must surely have expected that in choosing an ex-leader of one-party, an ex-special adviser to the leader of another when in government, and an ex-director of policy for the third, he was choosing people who would, at the very least, have a good “feel” for the likely response of their parties.  That strikes me as a not entirely unreasonable starting point.

On the second, it is hard to believe that the party representatives would have come out so unanimously for their proposals if they had any inkling of the likely reaction from their parties.  One can only conclude that communication has been minimal.  I suppose that the Lib Dems can, almost, be forgiven – it seems that “their” man left the party during the process.  But I’m not sure what excuse the other two can offer.  The whole “all-party” exercise ends up looking like a charade.

For whatever reason, the First Minister’s reasonable expectation has not been realised.  He must surely be left wondering what was the point of the exercise, and where he went so wrong.

Another missed opportunity

Tweet A cynical description of a management consultant of the sort so popular with businesses and government organisations is “a person who borrows your watch to tell you the time”.  It encapsulates the view that the ‘independent’ ‘experts’ have been hired, first and foremost, to confirm what those hiring them already ‘know’ – but with the extra credibility that comes from being external.

Crucial to this approach is hiring the ‘right’ consultants – they need to be sufficiently compliant – and giving them the ‘right’ brief.  It’s a definition which somehow sprang to mind when I read this sentence in the foreword to the report of the Williams Commission yesterday:

“In establishing us, the First Minister made clear that the status quo was not an option.  We have found extensive and compelling evidence that that is indeed the case.”

The consultants that I’m used to don’t often make their role quite as crystal clear as that; it’s usually a bit more nuanced!  But there can be little doubt that the Commission has told the Welsh Government what it wanted to hear.  Quelle surprise.

Sadly, their brief was written entirely around “governance and delivery”, thereby absolving them of any duty to consider what local government should actually do, and concentrate instead on how they do it.  I wouldn’t argue that there aren’t problems with the how at present, but to adapt a piece of management speak, “doing the wrong things well is probably worse than doing the right things badly”.  It seems, however, that doing things well is deemed more important by the Welsh Government than doing the right things. 

Local Government in Wales is a complete mish-mash of three types of activities, with vague and imprecise boundaries between them:

·         Services where the councils really are free to decide on policy and delivery as they wish.  They can choose to spend more and deliver a better service, or to spend less and cut the council tax.  Different parties and candidates really can promise different approaches which they can then implement when elected.  This category includes things like parks, leisure centres, and libraries.  It’s worth noting that this one area where they have complete freedom is the one area where they currently seem, perversely, to be trying to divest themselves of all responsibility.

·         Secondly, we have some services where the councils have absolutely no scope to set any policy and are totally constrained by the law as to what they can do.  The limit of their scope for being different is perhaps using different and incompatible IT systems to achieve the same ends – things like electoral registration, for instance; or births, deaths and marriages.  I find it hard to see what, if any, value is added in these areas by having locally elected councillors responsible for them.  They are administrative tasks which could just as easily – and probably more efficiently – be managed nationally.

·         Then we have the services in the middle where the local councils like to believe that they have some freedom to set policy and do things differently, but in reality are hide-bound by central directives and standards.  These are things like Social Services and Education – and it’s worth noting that these are precisely the service areas in which local authorities are perceived to be failing.  The two facts might not be unconnected…

I’m not sure whether the services referred to in the third category should actually be delivered by Local Councils at all; I’m open to be convinced either way.  My starting point is that if local councillors with their own democratic mandate are to run services, they should have the freedom to set policy – and the freedom to deliver a poor service as well if they so choose, and if the local electorate choose a bunch of incompetents to run the council.  It’s called democracy.  But if a service is deemed to be too important to be left to local decision-making, then we should stop pretending that local authorities add any value and run the service nationally. 

It all depends on your viewpoint on the extent of any local democratic mandate; I tend to the view that we should maximise local control, and I accept that one inevitable result of that is that service levels and quality will vary; but if the majority believe that consistent service levels are more important, then they should advocate proper central control, as the only way of meeting that objective.

The latest report doesn’t address that sort of question at all – and the Commission is recommending a series of local government mergers on the basis of an assumption that we should simply continue as we are.  The merger process will be costly in the short term, even if we believe that there will be savings in the longer term.  Eyes will inevitably be taken off balls in the process; such problems as we currently have will continue until the process is complete.  It’s a serious missed opportunity.

Agreeing with the opposition 1

Tweet There were two stories in yesterday’s Western Mail which found me agreeing with the basic points being made by two politicians with whom I’d normally disagree on most things.

The first story was the one about the ‘leaked’ letter (experience tells me that for journalists, ‘leak’ can, and frequently does, cover a multitude of sins) from Cllr Hedley McCarthy to ‘party colleagues across Wales’ (a phrase which suggests that the letter finding its way into the public eye can hardly have come as a surprise to the author, given the singularly unfraternal relationships which exist between members of the Labour Party).

There seems to be a lot of general whingeing in the letter – typical internal Labour Party stuff – and the Western Mail seized on it as a sign of a ‘split’.  There seems to be little that the paper likes more than a ‘split’, and the more personal the better.  No surprise that some political opponents leapt onto the ‘split’ bandwagon; it’s a lot less taxing to debate at that level than to engage with the nub of the argument.

None of that was the bit that led me to find myself in agreement with the councillor.  It was rather the nugget at the heart of his argument - almost lost in the coverage of the froth - that the idea that small councils cannot deliver services “…is theoretical and not backed up by any serious evidence”.  This is a very significant point, which I have no doubt that the four centralist parties in the Assembly will completely ignore.  They have already decided that size, or rather lack of size, is the problem.

It is true, of course, that the councils suffering the biggest problems at present are smaller ones; but that’s correlation, not proof of causation.  It could just be that the councillors and officers in those councils happen to be less competent (although I suspect that Cllr McCarthy and I might disagree on that!).  It might even be, as Cllr McCarthy himself seems to half suggest, that the basis used by the Minister for determining ‘failure’ was itself rigged to favour the result that he wanted.

But here’s the real point which those rushing to centralise and consolidate councils are missing: if there’s no hard evidence that the small size of some councils is the problem, there is equally no hard evidence that amalgamating them into larger councils is the solution.  That it is the solution to some problem or other is not in doubt of course – but the problems which it solves are more to do with a populist attempt to cull the number of politicians, and a rather less open and honest attempt to strengthen the control of the centre.

I’m not opposed to reform or re-organisation of local government; on the contrary, I think we need a root and branch review of what powers local government should have, and form and size should flow from that.  To be worthwhile, local government needs to have clearly defined powers and be left to exercise them.  That isn’t what we are getting though – we are getting a process which simply implements the already formed prejudices of centralising politicians who are accreting power into their own hands.

The surprise is not that one Labour councillor from Gwent is expressing his opposition; it’s the fact that he seems so isolated.

How to win friends and influence people

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There’s no single right way to achieve that, but there are plenty of wrong ways.  Telling people that they’re complacent, bureaucratic, and under-performing is a pretty good example.  Yet that’s the message which the Welsh Government delivered yesterday to the assembled bosses of the WLGA, and Local Government Minister Carl Sergeant was the enthusiastic messenger.

My guess is that it’s unlikely to lead to the sort of joined-up collaborative thinking that is needed to implement the sort of scheme which I referred to yesterday.  But I’d also guess that that isn’t what the Welsh Government is looking for anyway.

The comments seem to be based on a preconception that the current structure of local government is not fit for purpose.  Nothing new there – it’s a pretty generally-held view.  There’s a lot less consensus, however, about what the ‘purpose’ is, and even less about what structure would be ‘fit’ for that purpose.  “Wales doesn’t need 22 Directors of Education (or whatever)” is the easy part; deciding how many we do need is a great deal harder.

He also talked about combined units having greater buying power – presumably he’d like them to emulate his Government and use their buying power to drive the cost of laptops up down to £700 each.  It’s also a well-proven way of ensuring that contracts get awarded to larger and larger companies from ever further away.

Forcing the merger of individual services on an opportunistic case-by-case basis may (although I’d need convincing about that – the devil is in the detail) reduce some costs.  But it will also have the effect of further reducing the power and influence of local elected members – probably an intended consequence of a centralising government.

I don’t have a firm view about how many councils we need in Wales or their precise functions and responsibilities.  I do have a view, though, on the sort of factors which should influence those decisions, such as:

·                Clarity over lines of responsibility and accountability

·                Meaningful ability to influence the nature of the services for which they are responsible rather than simply implementing central government policy

·                Boundaries reflecting natural human and geographical affinities

·                Joined-up delivery between complementary and overlapping services.

An approach for which the main drivers appear to be cost-cutting and being seen to be tough doesn’t seem to be designed to achieve any of those, other than perhaps by accident.

It is, once again, skirting around the issue that no-one wants to face up to, namely a proper and thorough review of the governance of Wales in the context of a devolved parliament.

More bad news on education

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Yet another report on education this week draws attention to the ways in which our education services are failing our children.  Yet another wake-up call according to the Minister.  I wonder, though, about some of the reaction to the stream of reports highlighting the issues. 

It may well be that a reorganisation of the way education is managed will give more strategic leadership to the sector, as well as generating some savings on overheads.  But management reorganisations have a habit of diverting attention from the front line whilst they are in progress, as people manoeuvre for new jobs, and the history of reorganisations in the public sector does not exactly paint a clear picture of effective cost reduction.

There also seems to be some misunderstanding of the so-called ‘funding gap’ between English and Welsh schools, and the impact any reorganisation might have on that.  Clearly, a reduction in ‘overhead costs’, if it really could be achieved, would potentially free up more cash to go direct to schools; but it would not necessarily have any impact on the funding gap.

As the Welsh Government report which identified the size of the gap pointed out, “Education spend per pupil … is not a measure of 'schools' expenditure per pupil as the only way of making a consistent comparison over time with England is to include adult and youth education expenditure and use overall education spend. The reason for calculating education spend per pupil is therefore solely for the purpose of making a comparison with England.”, and “The figures include expenditure on schools services, LA central costs, mandatory student awards, inter-authority education recoupment, nursery schools and adult and youth education”.

So the costs of 22 education departments are already factored into the comparison, and a re-allocation of funds within the education spend will have no impact on the comparison with England.  To reduce the gap means that the total education budget would need to be increased – anyone proposing that in current circumstances needs to spell out which other spending would then be cut to compensate, because there’s certainly not going to be a large pot of extra money available.

I’m still unconvinced about the relationship between ‘spend’ and ‘outcomes’, in any event.  Whilst there ought, intuitively, to be a relationship of some sort, it is not a straight line relationship, as pointed out in comments on a previous post.  The lowest spend per pupil in Wales is in the Vale of Glamorgan, which achieves some of the best results, and the second highest spend is in Blaenau Gwent, which achieves some of the worst results.  That suggests to me that social factors – and particularly relative wealth – are at least as important as determinants as the amount of money being spent.  That in turn suggests that whilst reorganising the management and increasing the spend might look like decisive action, the real action needed is much more about tackling the underlying inequalities - and thus has little to do with the education portfolio at all.

How many councils?

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I’m in danger of agreeing with both Peter Black and the CBI, which must be a first of some sort.  Up to a point, anyway.  Both of them have called for a commitment to legislation to change the number of Welsh Local Authorities. 

That is a far more honest and open approach to tackling an issue which most people recognise needs to be addressed than the backdoor route currently being pursued by the Welsh Government.  Instructing authorities to share services and resources, and seeking for itself the power to merge councils as and when it sees fit is a centralising, reactive, and ad hoc way of dealing with a serious issue, and is likely to lead to a patchwork quilt of inconsistency across Wales.

But agreeing with the principle of reforming the local authorities in an open and honest fashion is not the same as agreeing with the detail of their proposals.  The CBI propose 7 councils, and Peter Black proposes 8 or 10.  Both of them seem to be picking figures out of the air, and proposing different ideas about what responsibilities councils should have – they look like subjective rather than objective conclusions.

I’ll admit to some subjective views myself – I’m not convinced that 22 councils is the ‘right’ number, and that probably puts me in a majority – for once.  But subjective views about what is or is not the ‘right’ number are hardly a sound basis for a major and costly reorganisation.  The local government set-up is as it is today after two rounds of reorganisation in the past, both driven by what one particular party’s politicians thought was the ‘right’ thing to do.  What we need is a more objective and thought-through approach.

How about resurrecting the idea put forward by Plaid in 2007 of a commission to review the whole issue of powers, financing, numbers and boundaries of all the different bodies governing Wales with a view to putting a structure in place which is fit for the 21^st century?  That has to be better than either tinkering when things go wrong (as seems likely to happen in the case of Ynys Môn), or of choosing a number between 7 and 10 because someone thinks it’s ‘right’.

Formal briefs and cosy chats

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When Carmarthenshire County Council was faced with a difficult decision about the siting of a new secondary school, the Assembly Government agreed to pay for the council to hire some consultants to consider the options.  The fact that the Assembly Government was paying was enough for some of the councillors to claim that it was the Government, not the county council, which had employed the consultants, so the county council was only accepting the site selected for them by the Government.  Politically convenient, if utterly disingenuous.

Interestingly, one local blogger issued a FoI request to the county council to see a copy of the brief given to the consultants.  Clearly, they had to have some sort of ToR for a study of this sort, costing the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds, didn’t they?

Well, er, apparently not.  The council’s reply is that there was no formal brief at all, and no written ToR; they simply had a few little (unrecorded and unminuted) chats with the consultants and then left them to get on with it.  Apart from giving the county council what Richard Nixon used to refer to as ‘credible deniability’, it means that no-one (except those party to the little chats) is in any position to assess whether the report did or did not fulfil the brief, or whether it represented value for money.

It’s just one more flaw in an already very badly flawed process aimed at closing schools.  It’s neither transparent nor democratic.  Will the Welsh Government raise any issues over the way in which the money they gave the county council has been spent?  I suspect not – after all, the Welsh Government has been complicit from the outset in the flawed process.  In closing schools and denying the right to Welsh-medium secondary education in the Tywi Valley, the county is merely implementing the will of the government.

22 of everything

Tweet The subject of local government reform is raising its head again, as financial tightening starts to hit local government. The Local Government Minister is quoted as saying that he can't see why we need 22 of everything, and I agree with him in principle. (Although in the case of one of his examples, I'm not sure that reducing 22 fleets of vehicles to a smaller number of larger fleets necessarily results in fewer vehicles overall. And even if it did lead to fewer vehicles, if they had to travel a significant extra distance to cover larger areas, the cost saving may turn out to somewhat illusory.)

What concerns me however, is the suggestion that we rush straight from 22 into some other number, and do so in a higgledy-piggledy manner with arbitrary cross-border service mergers based on joint filling of senior vacancies, and without giving any real thought to what the 'right' number is.

For political reasons which I can understand (to say nothing of the potential cost implications in the short term), the Welsh Government has fought shy of taking a thorough look at local government boundaries and functions. I think they're as wrong to avoid taking that big picture look as they are to try and rush into opportunistic changes. We're also not looking at what can and should be democratically accountable at a local level and which services might be better delivered nationally.

In the 2007 Assembly elections, I (and every other Plaid candidate) fought on the basis of a manifesto which called for a thorough review of the whole way in which Wales is governed – local government, health, etc. It's one of our promises which didn't get into the One Wales coalition agreement, more's the pity. Instead of a thorough review, we've had a piecemeal approach which delivers neither radical change nor stability.

Sooner or later, we need to face up to the question rather than continue to avoid it.

Let's see the follow-through

Tweet One very good point coming out of the transport plan was the recognition that transport planning needs to be integral to the planning for other services.

Intervention 5 sets out very clearly that the government will "ensure that transport planning is a part of the development of 21st Century Schools plans and the transformation of post-16 education, and that transport planning decisions support these plans".

If the government are really serious about this – and if it isn't just a vague statement of intent - than the Government will be obliged to reject Carmarthenshire's proposals for secondary school reorganisation in the Dinefwr and Gwendraeth areas, which have taken little or no account of transport issues.

My colleagues on the county council have already called for the county to rethink its proposals in the light of the Transport Plan, but based on history, I have zero expectation that the Labour/Independent coalition will waver for one micro-second. Hopefully, the Assembly Government will be more resolute in sticking to its stated policies.

It's an acid test of course – there's no point making such statements unless they are followed through into hard action.

Rationalisation and centralisation

Tweet The collapse of plans for a number of local councils to pool certain functions has inevitably led for calls from some to force local councils into co-operating. The Western Mail editorial leads the way with a suggestion that if councils won't share functions voluntarily, then the number of councils should be reduced.

There is a question here about whether the proposed rationalisation should ever have been restricted to local government anyway. If we want a single centralised payroll system for ten councils, why not for 22? And why not include the NHS? Why not, indeed, a single payroll system for the whole of the public sector in Wales? What makes one particular combination 'right' and others 'wrong'?

As I blogged recently, I don't necessarily disagree with the notion that Wales has too many councils, and should re-organise them, but I think we need to start by asking what they are for. The problem with most of the calls for a reduction in the number of councils is that they seem to start from a pretty subjective statement such as "Wales doesn't need 22 Directors of Education", rather than from the question "What's the best way of delivering education services in Wales?".

And it isn't just about education, of course. Local government provides a whole range of services - on what basis do we start with the assumption (which is where most seem to start) that the best way of delivering one service is the best way of delivering all services? Does the structure for delivering education need to be the same as that for delivering leisure services, for instance?

We have an Assembly government with highly centralising tendencies, which is regularly reducing or constraining the scope for local government to add value and make a difference. It sometimes seems to me that differences between Wales and England are considered by some to be perfectly acceptable, but differences between Cardiff and Newport are not.

I find it fascinating to see some arguing for allowing the Assembly Government to do things differently, and then arguing that that same government should enforce a standard approach across Wales' local authorities. This is a particular challenge for those like myself in parties which have traditionally called for more decentralisation. Real decentralisation has to be about more than passing money from the centre to the local authorities and then telling them exactly how to spend it.

I'm not against a reconsideration of local government structures - far from it, I think it's overdue. But we need a proper review, not a knee-jerk reaction. And I think that, as Plaid said in our 2007 manifesto, we really need to look at the governance of Wales as a whole.

That's better

Tweet The proposed reconfiguration of the management of the NHS announced yesterday by Edwina Hart goes a lot further than her original proposals. The merger of LHBs and Trusts is a much more radical move than the previous suggestion, and marks a more decisive break with the 'internal market' philosophy introduced by the Tories. No wonder that the Tories' leader is unhappy as one of the most ideological and unnecessary changes ever made to our NHS is swept away in Wales, following the examples of Scotland and Northern Ireland. Only in England will this crazy system remain in place. And it's no coincidence that only in England do Labour rule alone.

Nick Bourne is right, of course, in saying that it is "a total reversal" of the previous stance of the Labour Party and the Labour Government in Wales; but I for one think that is to be welcomed, not condemned. Since when has recognising past mistakes and correcting them been something for which people should be criticised?

The new proposal also deals directly with one of the three concerns that I expressed in my previous post. The split between primary and secondary care providers didn't make sense to me – or to many of those working in the NHS - and I'm glad that the Minister has now come to the same conclusion. I think it is also one of the few occasions on which a government consultation exercise has actually been meaningful, with the proposals being changed in response to comments received, another welcome departure from past practice.

I remain unconvinced that the final number and boundaries of the proposed bodies is based on a careful consideration of what is needed, rather than on what is easily achievable from the starting point. Obviously, I would have preferred to see Plaid's election manifesto proposal implemented, and a commission established to study the whole question. I suspect though that what is now proposed is considerably closer to what the outcome of such a commission would have been.

The Minister is also allowing more time for consultation following the publication of the revised proposals. I very much hope that adequate time will be allowed as well for implementing the proposals, and that lessons will have been learned from previous rushed changes.

The main thing which I and other people locally do still want to see, however, is clarity over what services are to be provided where. Campaigners supporting Withybush Hospital, in particular, remain unclear on the long term plans for services to be delivered from that hospital, and in the absence of such a statement, concerns will remain.

Not healthy enough

Tweet I’ve been spending some time reading the Assembly Government's consultation paper on the proposed Health Service reorganisation in Wales, mostly to try and understand what impact it will have locally. The One Wales agreement included a commitment to ending the internal market in the health service, and the proposed changes seek to implement that commitment. In that respect, at least, I welcome the proposed changes. It’s also good to see a government consultation document which has been written in a style which makes it digestible and comprehensible, with some of the detail available in backing papers rather than incorporated into the text.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are the right changes, however. During the Assembly election last year, I argued three things as a candidate, and I inevitably find myself comparing the proposals with what I, and Plaid, said at the time. Apart from anything else, I gave people a very explicit commitment that I would not say one thing before the election and another afterwards, unless I had very good reasons that I was able to explain.

I said then:

• That agreement on the configuration of services locally was a more important priority for action that re-arranging the management deck chairs.
• That there were too many bodies running the health service in Wales, and that a thorough review was needed to determine the right number, but that that was not my first priority. Plaid proposed a commission to study the whole question in detail rather than urgent piecemeal action.
• That it was important to take an integrated view of services – one of the problems with the proposed reconfiguration of secondary care at the time was that it was predicated on the increased provision of primary care for which there was simply no viable plan.
  

Looked at through this prism, I find the proposals at this stage to be more than a little disappointing.

On the first point, we still do not have the clarity that I would like to see on what services will be provided where. Whilst in the short term, the proposed reconfiguration was halted, there are still legitimate concerns about the long term future of Withybush hospital and the services to be provided there; embarking on a reorganisation is likely to divert attention from the questions on which people locally want real, hard answers to the questions which SWAT and others have raised.

We have direct experience of ‘diverting attention’ locally, where five former bosses at Ceredigion Health Trust have claimed thet the merger which created the new Hywel Dda Trust was "rushed and chaotic". They allege that there have been delays, a lack of consultation, and failure to appoint key staff. The experience does not bode well for what looks like another round of piecemeal change.

On the second point, this proposed reorganisation will certainly reduce the numbers of health bodies, but the final number proposed looks to have been arrived at by accident rather than by design.

And on the third, whilst the proposed changes remove the unnecessary division between 'commissioners' and 'providers', they seem to be strengthening the split between secondary and primary care providers, which appears to me to be a potential new source of conflict. The original rationale for having 22 LHB’s was that they would be co-terminous with the county councils in order to ensure effective co-working. Removing that co-terminosity leaves another potential question over the way in which the county councils' social services departments relate to the health providers. (Unless this also presages a re-organisation of local government...).

Overall, therefore, I am unable to support the proposed changes, and have submitted comments accordingly in response to the consultation. Whether people agree with my view or not, I would urge people throughout the area to submit their own views to the Minister.