A welcome U-turn

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I’m not sure that I’ve entirely understood what Leighton Andrews was saying yesterday about reducing the range of A level subjects, but it certainly sounded like a total U-turn.  The insistence, to date, of the Welsh Government that schools had to offer a minimum of 30 subjects in years 12 and 13 seemed to me from the outset to be pulling an arbitrary number out of the air.

If the Minister is now proposing to scrap that requirement, and adopt a more flexible stance, then it would be a victory for common sense.  It may not be quite that straightforward though – as I recall, the Government actually took a Measure through the Assembly making the number of 30 a statutory requirement.

There is another little issue arising as well.  Just where does that leave county councils such as Carmarthenshire which have developed and pushed through unpopular and unnecessary school reorganisation schemes justified entirely or largely on the basis that they had to close any schools which were ‘too small’ to offer the full 30 subjects?  Will the Minister at last call a halt to them?

Update:  I see that Len Gibbs (aka VoteNoDay) has tweeted a link to this post with the message "WAG passes a law, causes a load of damage now wants to undo it.".   The implicit message is, presumably, that that justifies abolition.  On that basis, we should have abolished the Westminster Parliament after the poll tax debacle.  (Mind you, perhaps that suggestion is not entirely without its merits...)

Moving money around

Tweet The latest edition of Carmarthenshire County Council's propaganda sheet arrived this week. It's a 40-page (20 in English, 20 in Welsh) 'newspaper' which is full of the council's 'good news' stories trumpeting the council's successes, and featuring a good sprinkling of photographs of members of the council's ruling group.

According to the council, it's not a cost to the taxpayer because it's funded by advertising revenue. So, naturally enough, I looked to see how many adverts there are. The answer is that there are quite a few. There is a big but to that, however. All but two of the adverts are placed by the county council itself, advertising one or other of its own services or facilities. And, of the two which are from outside the council, one of those is by the builder of a new school - and appears alongside a story about the opening of that school.

Effectively, this means that the cost of producing the newspaper has been moved out of the budget of the PR department and redistributed across the departments placing the advertisements - which is not at all the same thing as saying that it is no longer a cost to the taxpayer. It also blurs somewhat the distinction between editorial and advertising copy. If the same people are responsible for both, isn't the whole 'newspaper' just one giant advertisement in effect?

The council would no doubt argue that this is a cost-efficient form of advertising. I'd like to see the evidence of effectiveness rather than just reach (as well as being certain that it is replacing rather than supplementing other advertising). In principle, if the figures add up, it's not a wholly unreasonable argument to put forward to justify the expenditure, although it doesn't convince me.

But it isn't the same thing as saying that there is no expenditure. That's just playing with the way the accounts are presented.

Who's being reckless?

Tweet According to a report in the Western Mail today, the Plaid group on Carmarthenshire was being 'reckless' in challenging the location of a new school proposed for the Dinefwr area. It would be easy to simply point out that the comment came from Labour Group leader Kevin Madge, who does have something of a propensity for hyperbole when he gets a bit worked up (which generally happens at least once in each council meeting).

The basic problem is that the council has, from the outset, been trying to bulldoze its plans through with minimal discussion, consultation, or consideration of the alternatives. At every discussion prior to the one at Wednesday's meeting of the council, councillors were told that no final decision was being made about the siting, and that there would be an opportunity to discuss that later.

By this week, the position had suddenly become that it's too late to change the location now, the business plan has been prepared on the basis of the selected site. The blame, of course, is placed at the door of the external consultants engaged by the council to evaluate a range of alternative sites. Their recommended site was announced to councillors at a (non decision-making) seminar a couple of months ago, and has somehow become the de facto choice since then.

Many of the councillors from the ruling parties seem to think that the consultants have taken the decision for them. That's a nonsense of course. The consultants gave them a list of pros and cons for each site, and drew attention to the fact that one site matched the brief they were given by the council better than the others - but that never meant that the council had no alternative.

In any event, as an ex-consultant, I've always believed that the definition of a consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time. The real decision is taken by those who prepare the brief.

It's an echo of yesterday's post in many ways. Just as when preparing a business plan the real decision is which business plan you choose to write, so when employing consultants the real decision is not what you do with their report but the brief that you write for them in the first place.

And in a further echo of yesterday's post, having come to a conclusion on the site, the council has prepared an outline business plan for submission to the Assembly Government. It 'proves' that the council's proposals are viable, of course. But then it was never going to do otherwise. It is, in essence, a device to unlock funding for a decision which was taken three years ago, not a basis for taking that decision.

School meals

Tweet The news this week about the extent to which school meals are still failing our children should surprise no one. I expect the situation to get worse in coming years as councils attempt to tighten their belts.

Carmarthenshire haas already decided to increase the charge for providing school meals by 5p above inflation for each of the next two years, whilst cutting the cost of providing those meals by 1p per meal. (Need I say that these are all misleadingly described as 'efficiency savings'?) I'm sure that they won't be the only authority looking to do something similar.

The response of some, according to the Western Mail story, has been to call for more regulation to standardise school food across Wales. I'm sure that could be done - if we really want yet more centralisation of decision-taking.

But, as I've pointed out several times recently, let's not pretend that continued standardisation and increasing central control has anything to do with local democracy.

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.

Care homes campaign

Tweet There has been a campaign group in Llanelli for some time now, organising the campaign against the possible closure of council-run care homes. Last night, there was a very well-attended meeting in Carmarthen to establish a similar group in the town.

The council's position is that the 'task and finish' group set up after their previous proposals were soundly thrown out by scrutiny committees is still working on the issue, and that we should all wait for that to complete its work before getting too excited. But then, they do generally prefer that we all wait until after they've taken the decision before commenting - at which point, it's usually too late. Somehow, I don't think that the relatives, staff and others are going to sit back and wait until the council has decided to close them before they start making their voice heard - and they're absolutely right not to wait.

I find it difficult to believe that the council's leaders will really try and come back with the same proposal again, but from the responses that I've heard from the leader and others in council meetings, I simply wouldn't put it past them. They're certainly still using the same arguments.

One of those arguments is that demand will drop as more and more people opt to try and continue living in their own home. But there's a huge gulf between the number who would like to go on being independent and the number who are capable of remaining independent. And the council's projections are open to great question anyway - they openly admit that every year for the past three or four years they have underestimated the demand for adult care, and consequently overspent the budget for that department.

They'll need to demonstrate a much greater capacity for accurate forecasting before anyone will believe their projections.

"Consulting"

Tweet The principle of consulting with people before adopting a particular proposal or course of action sounds like one of those 'good' things to do. So good that it's become a statutory requirement in all sorts of circumstances, and a requirement, at that, which causes delay and cost before implementing any proposal.

Now, if the consultation is genuine, then there's a reasonable argument that allowing time for comment and input before making a final decision makes it a reasonable cost to pay in a democracy. Far too often, however, 'consultation' has become a meaningless process during which documents are published and people respond before the consulting body carries on and does exactly what it was planning to do in the first place - usually claiming an increased validity as a result of the 'consultation'.

It can also help to disguise where and how decisions are being taken.

I've mentioned previously that two scrutiny committees in Carmarthenshire rejected a proposal to close four care homes. The council's response was to argue that the committees did no such thing; they merely rejected a proposal to go out to 'consultation' on the plans. Technically, of course, they're right. But had they proposed going out to consultation on a range of possible options, then I'm pretty certain that they would not have lost the vote in the way that they did.

It was one of those examples where there was only one option on the table, and after the consultation, the council's Executive Board would have simply rubber-stamped and then implemented its decision. It's a sad state of affairs when the only stage at which councillors could put a stop to a bad proposal was when they were asked to approve it going out for consultation. It underlines the powerlessness of the average councillor under the Executive Board system.

It's not uncommon though. Most of the 'consultations' launched by county councils and the Assembly Government seem to be of the same nature - a process which has to be gone through but which will not make any difference to the outcome. I'm not sure that I'd want to argue that the 'consultation' phase should be abandoned; but unless it is meaningful, it really does look as though it adds cost for no real benefit in most cases.

Prestidigitation

Tweet Passing the buck is not unique to the public sector. I can remember working for one company where I was expected to waste hours of my time arguing whether costs should really be in my cost centre or someone else's, when I felt it would actually be more productive for me to spend that same time trying to improve the overall bottom line.

But, when bonuses and targets are set on the basis of departmental targets, the result is to encourage behaviour which works against the overall greater interest. Something similar happens in local government...

Another of Carmarthenshire's wizard money-saving wheezes is to stop maintaining public conveniences and pass the responsibility to town and community councils. The move will apparently 'save' £100,000 each year, and is one of a number of plans the county council has to 'allow' town and community councils to take over services currently provided by the county council.

It's not really a saving at all of course – it is merely a transfer of cost from one public body to another. But I suspect that we can look forward next year to hearing the council leader praising her own council for its good management in reducing costs, whilst attacking town and community councils for the likely increases in their own council tax levels to pay for the transferred services.

This is no saving at all – it's not even a particularly clever conjuring trick.

Daylight Robbery

Tweet Reports submitted to councillors for meetings are often long and complicated; and it takes a lot of work by staff to prepare them, often under pressure. Sometimes, some unfortunate wordings end up appearing in reports, where the author knows exactly what he or she means, but…

Take Carmarthenshire's budget report, in which Appendix C lists all the proposed savings under the various headings, and explains how they are to be achieved. Under Fair Trading, they are planning to save £15,000 next year. How? Well, "Proceeds of crime used to offset costs" is the method quoted.

It doesn't mean quite what it seems to say at first sight – the council is not proposing (as far as I'm aware) to set up a team to go out and commit robberies to finance its activities. (Although I'm sure that there are many who would argue that the Council Tax is a form of daylight robbery anyway, which would mean that a large proportion of the council's funds are already the 'proceeds of crime'.)

But what happens if Dyfed Powys Police were to succeed in eliminating crime? I don't think I'd like to be the senior officer who had to explain that the particular budget heading was overspent due to 'an inadequate level of crime' in the county.

Achieving their ends by stealth

Tweet I mentioned yesterday the fact that some councils are looking to distinguish between statutory and non-statutory services, with a view to cutting out the latter. Until Carmarthenshire started considering withdrawing transport for pupils aged 16 to 19, I hadn't realised that providing school transport for pupils aged over 16 came into the second category.

It's not offically a firm proposal as yet, since a task and finish group is still looking at it – but the cost saving has already been deducted from the council's indicative budgets from 2011 onwards. And there are still two options for implementation – simply removing the service entirely, or charging an economic cost for its provision.

One astounding argument advanced at yesterday's budget-setting meeting was that most of the young people concerned receive EMA to encourage them to stay on in school, and that they could pay their own transport costs out of that allowance. What the government giveth, the council taketh away, as it were. (And presumably, if the result were to be that fewer children decided to return to education after GCSEs as a result of reducing the financial incentive, that would give the authority another chance for some 'savings'?)

But there is another aspect to this which concerns me. FE colleges are now independent of local authority control, so any decision to remove transport for 16+ pupils would not affect those who opt for FE colleges. I have long suspected that the unstated agenda of officials at both county council level and Assembly Government level is the abolition of sixth forms, and their replacement by tertiary colleges created by the expansion of FE.

When they try to achieve that aim directly, they hit massive parental opposition. But what if they could achieve the same result by stealth? By, for instance, making FE financially more attractive than the 6th forms?

Kicking and Screaming

Tweet It has been an ongoing bone of contention in Carmarthenshire that the ruling Labour and Independent parties have systematically excluded the Plaid Cymru councillors from any position of influence in the authority. This is despite clear guidance from the Welsh government that committee chairs should be allocated on the basis of political balance; something which the ruling parties have made it quite clear that they are not prepared to countenance.

Partly because of the recalcitrance of councils such as Carmarthenshire, which wish to concentrate as much power as possible in the hands of the council's leader, the Assembly government is pushing through a new Measure which will compel councils to take account of political balance.

At last week's meeting of the council, the Plaid group in Carmarthenshire invited the ruling parties to implement the change now rather than wait for the legislation. The final question was direct and to the point, "or do you really want to wait until you have to be dragged kicking and screaming into making the change?"

The answer, from the leaders of both ruling parties, was that they will consider any changes in the rules after the Assembly makes a decision, and not before. I'll take that as a 'yes' then.

Stop digging

Tweet The first law of holes is that when you're in one, you should stop digging. It's a law which Carmarthenshire county council seems not to fully understand.

I've mentioned before the curious way in which the council takes some of its decisions. The strange case of Christmas car parking raised its head again at last week's council meeting, when one of Plaid's team drew attention to an apparent inaccuracy in the minutes of the previous meeting. At the time, on 9th December, she had asked whether parking would again be free, and was clearly told that it would be. That is not, however, what found its way into the council's minutes, which read:

"In response to a question as to whether free parking would be introduced in the Authority’s car parks over the Christmas period, the Director of Technical Services stated that a recommendation would be made to the Executive Board at its meeting on the 14th December to approve the introduction of free car parking after 10.00 a.m. in all towns in the two weeks leading up to Christmas 2009."

When asked how the decision was therefore implemented on 10th December, and publicised in the council's propaganda sheet on 25th November, the Executive Board member responsible for this area rose to his feet to declare that he had signed off the decision, but thought that he was in order to do so after the Executive Board had agreed the matter on 14th December – completely missing the point of the question.

His answer may also have caused some concern to the council's Monitoring Officer who quickly intervened to confirm that no councillors had taken the decision at all; it was an operational matter delegated to the Director of Technical Services. Fairly clearly, both explanations cannot be correct, but the Monitoring Officer's version is the one which keeps the council legal.

One has to ask why the Director of Technical Services would tell full council that he would take a recommendation on the matter to the Executive Board if, as the Monitoring Office claims, the said Director had already taken the decision himself at least two weeks earlier.

I can only speculate. Unfortunately, the potential for falling foul of the law of libel rather restricts me from doing so.

More on jargon

Tweet Not long back after sitting in the public gallery through a rather epic meeting of Carmarthenshire County Council. I've mentioned before the way in which official reports tend to over-use certain words, and we had another example today when the council discussed its "Supporting People Operational Plan".

The title was ominous enough to start with. Plaid's Cllr Emlyn Dole asked if someone could define the phrase 'floating support', which he said was used at least 76 times in the document. (I haven't checked his count, but on a quick flick through, it looks like an entirely plausible statistic). This support, whatever it is, comes in a variety of guises, including something called 'low level floating support', which, as Emlyn pointed out, sounds like it might no longer be afloat at all, even if not yet entirely sunk.

The Director of Social Care, Health, and Housing was first up with an attempt at an explanation. He assured the meeting that the term was one which was well-used and understood in the 'supporting people community'. I concluded that he was probably trying for his first mention in Private Eye, but that he hadn't exactly spread a great deal of light.

The Chief Executive followed, telling the meeting that the primary audience for the report was not the ordinary reader, but the civil servants in the Assembly Government. This is the sort of terminology they use, and if the council didn't use the same terms, the Government might not understand the report, and might withhold funding. He went on to say - and I paraphrase only slightly - that if the council wrote reports in plain language, they'd only have to explain the terms they used in jargon before submitting them to the Government.

Is it me?

PS - the explanation eventually forthcoming was that 'floating support' is support which is not 'fixed'. So now we all know.

An interesting explanation

Tweet Yesterday, I referred to the way in which Carmarthenshire Council had apparently implemented the decision to allow people to park for free in the two weeks leading up to Christmas before the decision was taken. In reality, it was obvious that the decision had in fact been taken by someone outside the formal decision-making process, and that the Executive Board had merely rubber-stamped the decision.

I have now been told about the council's 'explanation' for this curious state of affairs. They claim that the Executive Board didn't actually take the decision at all. It may - and probably will - come as a surprise to most members of the council to discover that all decisions on whether to charge, or how much to charge, for car parking are considered to be 'operational' matters and thus delegated to the council's relevant officer. There was, from a legal perspective, no need for the Executive Board to even discuss the proposal, let alone approve it.

That might clarify the legal position, but as with so many of the council's 'explanations', it raises at least as many questions as it answers.

For starters, if the officers had already taken the decision, why did they then submit a three page report to the Executive Board, setting out the implications of the proposal and stating that the key decision required was "That Executive Board approves the introduction of free car parking after 10.00 hours in all towns in the two weeks leading up to Christmas 2009"?

Or why spend time discussing the matter in the Executive Board (with the relevant members of course claiming credit for their generous and wise decision), before formally minuting the decision as "UNANIMOUSLY RESOLVED that the introduction of free car parking after 10.00 hours in all towns in the two weeks leading up to Christmas 2009 be approved."?

This is an authority which claims to be desperately cash-strapped and facing severe cuts in front line services, but they apparently have enough member and officer time available to go through a complete charade of producing reports with recommendations in them, debating what to do, and then solemnly minuting a decision, when the whole process was completely and utterly unnecessary.

Jumping the gun

Tweet I mentioned last week that Carmarthenshire Council had got themselves into a bit of a tangle over how and where a decision was taken. Another example has been highlighted this week by one of the Plaid members on the council.

The council announced in its propaganda sheet, published on 25th November, that it would again be providing free parking for a fortnight before Christmas, as it has done in previous years. A praiseworthy decision, and one supported by councillors of all parties. The decision was duly implemented on 10th December, with notices placed in all the car parks advising motorists that there was no need to pay.

It was only when the minutes of the Executive Board meeting on 14th December appeared that it became clear that the decision wasn't actually taken (in the sense of being formally taken at a properly convened meeting under the terms of the Local Government Act, 1972) until 14th December - four days after it was implemented, and nine days after it had been publicly announced in the newsletter.

So, what actually happened? Clearly, the real decision must have been taken at an earlier date, although apparently not at any formal meeting convened under the terms of the Act. So, when, and by whom was the real decision taken? Whilst the council's formal decisions are officially taken in meetings open to the public and properly minuted, it is increasingly clear that much of the real decision-making happens in secret – the open meetings are just a rubber-stamping exercise for decisions which have already been made.

That was not exactly the intention of the relevant legislation. The process would be more convincing if they got the rubber stamp out before implementing decisions.

Old news

Tweet And while I'm on the subject of Carmarthenshire County Council, I have today received my copy of their latest edition of Community News. There is comment elsewhere on the blatantly political attack which passes for an editorial, including a direct threat against local newspapers who dare to be unsycophantic in their approach.

However, it's the council's take on the idea of 'news' that struck me. Delivered today, the front page contains a story about events which people are encouraged to attend - on November 27th, December 4th, and December 12th. Really useful stuff. An inside page tells me about the consultation on closing care homes - which was scuppered two weeks ago.

Just because they use recycled paper, it doesn't mean that they need to recycle the content as well.

Do try and keep up

Tweet Interesting that Nick Bourne states today that he has written to Carmarthenshire county council opposing the proposals to close four care homes.

It seems that the proposals he is opposing are the same ones which were thrown out on the motion of Plaid's councillors a fortnight ago.

Maybe he's just been on a stable-door bolting course.

Float like a bee

Tweet Myth has always been a powerful element of human culture, and that's fine in its place; but it should surely not displace science when it comes to matters of public policy. Mathematics is something that not everyone finds easy; some of us are very comfortable with numbers, others less so. But when it comes to taking decisions, it's surely important that numbers are properly interpreted, rather than completely misinterpreted.

It is in that context that I return again to the magic magnets which Carmarthenshire County Council has decided to fit to its fleet of vehicles "where appropriate". The subject came up again at the full council meeting last week, where one of Plaid's team challenged the decision, given the complete lack of scientific evidence for their efficacy.

The response he got was, basically, that it doesn't matter a jot whether anyone understands how they work; the only important thing is that they do. One councillor suggested that sometimes things happen and we only understand why much later; another memorably trotted out the hoary old urban myth that scientists have 'proved' that bumble bees can't fly, so what do they know about anything. (That particular myth has been well and truly debunked on a number of occasions – here's an example – but still seems to have an amazing degree of traction in the public mind).

In principle, "as long as it works" is a good response – but it does rather assume that the magic has been proved to work. And that's where we move from the unscientific to the unmathematical.

The council actually tried the devices on 22 vehicles, and after analysing the results, came to the conclusion that the devices worked on "some" of them, without having the foggiest notion why that should be.

What their figures actually showed was that 5 of the 22 results had to be disregarded because they were 'outliers' - i.e. so far removed from the sorts of results being achieved on the majority as to be not credible. As for the rest, they showed that in 9 there was a 'negligible' effect, 1 actually showed an increase in fuel consumption, and the remaining 7 showed an apparent improvement of between 3% and 9%.

They also noted that "some results have been skewed by the effect of operating conditions". This was intended to explain why some of the results were so low (after all, they 'know' that the devices work, and were only trying to measure how well). They don't seem to have realised that it could equally be the explanation for all of the apparent improvements. A more corrrect interpretation of the words would be "we haven't been able to exclude an effect from other factors so can't really be certain that any of these figures prove anything".

And in fact, on the basis of their own trial, they have proved precisely nothing. They haven't a clue how the devices might work, or why they might appear to work on some vehicles and not on others. But they have concluded that urban myth and scientific bunkum carries more weight than objective analysis and research.

On that flimsy basis, they are going to fit more of the devices – at taxpayers' expense – on other vehicles in their fleet, presumably based on sheer guesswork as to where they will 'work', since they have no objective basis on which to make such a decision.

And the council's endorsement of the product, showing a saving of 14% (which bears no relation whatsoever to any figures which they have published), remains on the company's website, where it will help to encourage more people to buy into the magic. The particular result on which this wild claim is based actually shows that the vehicle in question achieved fewer mpg with the magnets fitted than did other trucks of the same type without the magnets - a point which no-one seems to have questioned.

I understand that the salesman for invisible clothing is eagerly anticipating his visit to the council.

Planning and the language

Tweet I've referred previously to the Carmarthenshire Draft LDP. Another aspect of this which deserves more attention is its objectives in relation to, and potential impact on, the Welsh language.

Carmarthenshire still has a majority of Welsh speakers – just. Notwithstanding the apparent determination of the county council, aided and abetted by the Welsh Assembly Government, to reduce the commitment to the language in the field of education, there is no obvious reason why the language should not be able to hold its own, or even recover, in the county.

Planning is one of a number of factors in this, but in this respect, the proposed LDP is weak in three aspects.

Firstly, it refers to "language sensitive areas" where "Linguistic Impact Assessments" will be required. It does not, however, spell out which areas are to be regarded as "language sensitive", nor even what the criteria for defining them might be. And in a county which is on the tipping point for Welsh ceasing to be a majority language, it is not immediately obvious to me why any part of the county would be other than "language sensitive".

Secondly, the council's favoured option for development is to concentrate new developments in the major towns. Real support for the language must include enabling our young people to stay in their own communities where they wish to do so, and that involves a degree of development – both residential and industrial – being dispersed rather than concentrated, since the language tends to be in a stronger position in more rural areas. In short, the favoured option does not seem to me to be the one most likely to help retain and promote Welsh as a community language.

Finally, their proposed indicator for assessing the success of their policy in relation to the language is "the number of planning applications determined where a Language Impact Assessment has been required". For me, this misses the point entirely. I don't really care how many assessments are carried out which is what they are proposing to count. I'm far more interested in what those assessments say and what is actually done in response to them.

In the field of planning, as in the field of education, Carmarthenshire County Council is displaying a complete lack of any real commitment to the future of the language. In an area like Carmarthenshire, that is not just a lost opportunity – it is little short of a tragedy.

Cracks in the coalition

Tweet No, not that coalition!

Carmarthenshire County Council is looking to save money, and came up with the wheeze of closing a number of the council's residential homes. To no-one's great surprise (except, apparently, the administration at County Hall), this proposal did not exactly receive a universal welcome from the residents of the homes, or their families or carers. The local papers this week make for interesting reading on the subject, especially the Llanelli Star.

On one of the centre pages, a smiling council leader, Meryl Gravell, explains why the homes are no longer necessary, supported by a statement from the also-smiling Director. The two Executive Board members directly responsible, Labour Councillors Pat Jones and Hugh Evans (also both smiling) set out their reasons for supporting the proposals which they have signed off and put forward for public consultation. The facing page contains a picture of a rather angry looking Nia Griffith, Labour MP for Llanelli, alongside a statement making her opposition to her own party's proposals very clear.

On Wednesday this week, the proposals were put to a joint meeting of the county council's Housing and Health and Social Care Scrutiny Committees, with a recommendation that the document be approved for publication for a public consultation exercise.

One after another, the Plaid scrutiny members savaged the proposals with a series of arguments which the proponents of the scheme found difficult to rebut. When the matter was put to the vote, all four of Labour's voting members supported the Plaid proposal that the document be not accepted as a basis for consultation, realising that their party's Executive Board members had got it totally wrong. The two Labour Executive Board members, who were present but unable to vote, could only watch in anguish as their proposals were comprehensively torn apart before being rejected by a clear majority of the councillors present.

It's the first time that I'm aware of that the ruling Independent Party / Labour Party coalition have lost a vote - or been so obviously split along party lines. I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall at the next Labour group meeting at County Hall.

Politics aside, however, it's instructional to consider how such an ill-advised policy proposal could have got so far without being challenged. It exposes one of the weaknesses of the current cabinet / scrutiny system in local government, where the Executive members alone are aware of policy discussions such as this. There is a culture of secrecy, and back-benchers, even in the ruling groups, are largely kept in the dark about potential policy changes. A more open discussion, involving all the councillors, would have alerted the council to the likely reaction to these proposals well in advance.

It remains to be seen what will happen next. The current administration at County Hall are not renowned for changing direction - I wouldn't be at all surprised to see these proposals being resurrected in some form. The 30-strong Plaid Group can be expected to continue to oppose them.