Carmarthenshire Planning Problems 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.

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.

Family Court Judgement

Carmarthenshire Council have been in the news again following the publication of a damning judgement from the Family Court. The case centred around an 8 year old child and whether or not he should be returned to the care of his mother, the council and the appointed guardian were opposing the move. The council lost the case and came under scathing criticism from the judge over the quality of both their written and oral evidence.

The judgement is well worth a read. Evidence from one "so-called expert witness", was simply theoretic and should never have been admissible. A 44-page statement from one social worker was described by the judge as "swathes" of "rhetoric and generalisations" and "inconsequential, trivial and insubstantial".

The judgement can be read in full here

Swansea Bay City Deal
Full council met last Wednesday for their monthly meeting and quietly nodded through the legal framework for the City Deal. Bearing in mind that the council is already £400m in debt, no one questioned the unknown level of borrowing which will required, or if it was affordable, or whether there were contingency plans should the mysterious investors go bust, or pull out; or, well, anything much at all really.

As chief executive Mark James is leading the whole thing, with Emlyn Dole as the mouthpiece, rebellion, or anything more that a polite enquiry was always going to be unlikely and Mr James, along with the finance director, was given extended delegated power not to trouble the pretty heads of councillors with the finer details. To be honest I'd err on the side of caution when it comes to Mr James and documents... Linda Rees Jones, Carmarthenshire's Monitoring Officer and the chief executive's legal protector is also, we learn, the Monitoring Officer for the City Deal. You may recall that Carmarthenshire's internal legal advice was once famously, and accurately described as 'cavalier' and 'incompetent'. It most certainly still is.
What could possibly go wrong?

The Agreement now has to be approved by the other three councils; Swansea, Neath Port Talbot and Pembrokeshire. I hope their councillors take a slightly more 'risk based' approach to what is, essentially, a very expensive PFI scheme. After all, it was only two weeks ago that Emlyn Dole said that "services have now been cut to the bone, and now it is almost impossible to safeguard our frontline services".

Meanwhile, down at the Delta Lakes swamp, the planning application (by Arup, on behalf of the council) for the Mark James 'Wellness Village', part of the City Deal, is not going quite according to plan with NRW threatening to object to the application unless their concerns are addressed. These concerns include "requirements for flood risk, protected species, designated sites, drainage and air quality and conditions on geoscience, landscape and pollution prevention."Which covers just about everything.

The site, which is contaminated, partially on a flood plain and part of Llanelli's creaking sewage system, is directly adjacent to several designated sites; Carmarthen Bay and Estuaries SAC, Burry Inlet Special Protection Area (SPA) and RAMSAR, Burry Inlet and Loughor Estuary Special Site of Scientific Interest (SSSI), Pyllau Machynys SSSI and Pwll Lagoon SSSI.
Nothing is insurmountable of course, if you throw enough taxpayers' money at it, or, as in the case of the council's usual preferred option, deny all and carry on regardless.

Another project, Yr Egin 'cultural hub' in Carmarthen is now complete, it is not known how much has been paid out by the council or if there are any ongoing costs. We do know though that they paid £110,000 per acre for 19 acres of land for the Carmarthen West Road to enable the development, and that S4C, the flagship tenant is having trouble tempting its staff relocate to the wild west.
It's probably only a matter of time before the council starts renting office space...

Digital divide
Three and a half years ago Carmarthenshire councillors voted to go 'paperless' and have the reams of agendas, minutes and documents delivered electronically. iPads and software were duly purchased at considerable outlay and ongoing cost, and provided to all 74 councillors.

A report to the quaintly titled Democratic Committee last Monday, see here, revealed that, after three and a half years, only four councillors had actually gone 'paperless'. The rest, we assume, are either still working out how to turn their tablets on, given them to the grandkids or becoming Candy Crush experts. There had been 'hiccups', apparently.

I don't think there are many outfits, in this day and age, public or private, which continue to use small forests of timber, buckets of ink and eye-watering postage costs to impart information to their organisation. Apart from Carmarthenshire Council.

Carmarthen West Development
As mentioned above the Council have been shelling out a small fortune to progress the Carms West development of 1200 homes and the associated Carms West Link Road. One application, for around 250 homes, originally submitted in 2013, was, despite numerous objections including lack of demand, approved in February 2017 (See my post here which gives further background) but this was conditional on the completion of a S106 agreement. Presumably that has now been agreed as the decision notice has now been released.
The developer, Carmarthen Promotions Ltd is, oddly, based in Norfolk with a Lord, no less, as one of the Directors. The last published accounts indicate a loss of £252,000 in 2016/17. What I find odd is that, according to Companies House, as of the 6th June this year the council now have a legal charge over the company on the land. The company already has a bank loan of £1.6m secured on the land.

The council's legal charge is either connected to the S106 agreement or is security for a loan. If the council have given Carmarthen Promotions Ltd a loan it would be interesting to know why, how much, and on what terms. If it's part of the S106 then any return from the development is likely to take a very long time, if ever. Incidentally, in 2016 the same directors set up another company, Carmarthen Promotions (North) Ltd which is also running at a loss.
Curious.

Public Audit
It's nearly that time of year again when the law allows you to take yourself down to County Hall and inspect the council's accounts and "all books, deeds, contracts, bills, vouchers and receipts relating thereto", well, those that have escaped the Presidential Shredder anyway... The inspection period runs from the 5th July and the 1st August.
Unlike English councils, the requirement to publish monthly spending details over £500 doesn't apply to Wales and this puts the interested public on the back foot. In Carmarthenshire we are left with trying to decipher generalised quarterly budget reports or going through tortuous freedom of information requests. With the growing profusion of arms-length companies and outsourced services even these avenues are becoming blocked.

So, if you have an area of interest, or even suspect there's been some creative accounting or an unlawful payment or two, the details of how to exercise your right to inspect can be found here.

Earlier this year I mentioned the council's pay policy and the eye-watering levels of senior pay contained within. During the budget debate a month earlier, a Labour councillor had raised the subject of the chief executive's pay in the Chamber and its remarkable generosity compared to that of the prime minister. This unholy transgression resulted in a sour and outraged email from the chief executive, clearly irritated that the subject had been brought up, and picked up by the press; it was, he said, "entirely unwholesome and distasteful"...

The council's draft accounts have just been published and show an increase in the chief executive's salary from £170,424 to a whopping £191,699. The difference, around £20,000, is for Returning Officer fees for the Local Elections held in May 2017.
The figures do not include similar fees for the General Election which are paid direct by the government, not the council. Nor do they include other perks such as free use of publicly funded resources, facilities and staff time for his own private and personal use. (Nor does it include, of course, £165 a month from me..).

Extract from Statement of Accounts 2017/18

To put this into some real-world perspective, £20,000 equates to what would be considered a decent annual wage in Carmarthenshire, and in fact the median annual pay for all council employees works out at around £21,000.

Labour have been quiet on the subject but a few years back Plaid Cymru, largely initiated by former AM Rhodri Glyn Thomas, called for the end of these additional election fees, unsuccessfully it turned out, but in January 2015 stated a clear Plaid policy on the subject;

"Plaid Cymru believes there should be no additional fees paid to Council senior officers for undertaking Returning Officer duties at election time. Swansea Council does not pay their chief executive a penny to undertake election duties, and we do not see why others should pocket up to tens of thousands of pounds in addition to their very well paid jobs."

I'm not sure what's happened to this policy in 'Plaid-run' Carmarthenshire, presumably Emlyn Dole hasn't found the courage to broach the subject with Mr James...though given the latter's preoccupation with his own wallet it's fairly clear how he would react to such an impertinent suggestion...

From the accounts we also learn that the Director of Communities and deputy chief executive Jake Morgan comes in at a not-very-close second on £156,000. This figure includes pension contributions of £20,000. Mr James has not been part of the pension scheme since the tax avoiding arrangement was exposed back in 2014. Neither the pension cash, nor the illegal libel indemnity have ever been repaid.

Other figures in the accounts show £2.8m paid out in exit packages which includes £687,738 for just six members of senior staff. Altogether, in the past two years, nearly a million pounds has been paid out in exit packages for eight members of the top brass. There are 21 senior officers in the £90,000 to £191,699 pay scale.
The total pay for the 74 councillors comes to £1.23m, plus expenses, which this year have jumped from £42,702 to £50,554.

A Labour motion to marginally reduce £123,000 per year salaries for two new director posts was defeated late last year by Plaid and the Independents, helped along, incidentally, by an entirely unwholesome and distasteful intervention by the chief executive... However, at Cardiff Council, in 2015, a Plaid Cymru motion to slash chief executive pay from £170k to £100k was defeated by Labour.
Meanwhile, Cllr Dole tells us that frontline services are now 'cut to the bone'.

With the current stalemate over excessive senior pay, what about tackling those Returning Officer fees? At £20,000 a throw, it's time to revisit the issue.

A couple of reports, worthy of a mention, are on the agenda for Friday's Audit Committee. First up is an internal audit report identifying 'fundamental weaknesses' in the council's management of its leased property. As usual the report lacks detail, it is not even clear if the reference is to residential or commercial property, or both.

A sample test of leased properties was taken and the report "identified concerns in the management and administration of the Authority’s assets" and found that "agreements were not always up to date", neither were they reviewed or renewed on time" and furthermore "evidence was not always available to demonstrate that best value had been obtained for the authority"

The report concluded that the procedures and controls were not "sufficiently robust" to "demonstrate adequate clarity and accountability over the lease of the Authority’s properties...Adequate monitoring of properties with agreements / leases is not always undertaken. In particular, the finance element of leased properties is not being managed appropriately".
Income isn't being collected promptly (if at all perhaps?) and records are not being properly maintained.

It is remarkable that that the council, with it's apparently shrinking budget; raising council tax, cutting services and shedding jobs, has failed to collect or properly manage and record the valuable income it gets from leased properties. Let's hope the Audit Committee will be given some honest detail for once, and can determine whether there have been and fraudulent or unlawful transactions and/or financial losses to the taxpayer.

As I have mentioned, Carmarthenshire Council and it's chief executive are currently the 'Accountable Body' for the City Deal, administering and managing the finances...they may want to get their own house in order first. Then again, deals enabling corporate entities and business associates to suck the lifeblood out of the taxpayer for years to come are right up Mr James' street...

Obtaining 'best value for the authority' does remind me of a certain deal with Scarlets' Regional Ltd where the chief executive, Mr James, certainly secured 'best value', unfortunately this was for Scarlets' Regional, not the authority...

The second report is from the Wales Audit Office which is also difficult to decipher. It appears to stem from two cases where "failings in people management had led to employee dismissals; losses in revenue or assets; and negative publicity for the Council.". One of the cases might well refer to the fiasco and cover-up at Pembrey Country Park (please search this blog for background, including here) though this is not stated in the report.

To 'review' what had happened, the council raided the Dictionary of Council Jargon and put several random words together, creating a "Corporate People Performance Management Review Working Group". The WAO have helpfully called it the 'review group'. The group met and discussed 'lessons learned' (of course) and, presumably, the management of people performance, whatever that might be.

As an aside it is worth remembering that there are a plethora of working groups, review groups, 'task and finish' groups, strategy and policy boards and other similarly titled bodies within the council who, by their nature, are not required to publish any agendas, minutes or decision notes, the most notorious being CRWG, set up to make the council 'more transparent'. This trend is growing and is a convenient way to subvert transparency and public engagement.

Anyway the WAO seemed pleased with the process of the 'CPPMRWG' review which made no less than ten recommendations. One of the recommendation was to review and update the guidance on declarations of interest, which is something we can all agree on...

However, despite the recommendations being formally proposed seven months ago, none of them had been implemented. The WAO concluded that this delay meant that the failings identified in the two review cases could be repeated.
Oh dear.

You can read the report here

* * *

The latest version of the council's Social Media policy was up for approval at last Monday's Executive Board meeting. The policy is nothing out of the ordinary and is an updated version of those which have been in place for the last ten years or so.

The policy, which is specifically for employees, restates a certain clause which prohibits the use of the internet for personal use during working hours. No one will mind, presumably, if you pop in to check twitter for five minutes in your lunch break, but hours of trawling blogs to acquire 'evidence' for your own private grudge, for instance, is not allowed and could lead to serious disciplinary action.

This is exactly what happened in 2016 when the chief executive trawled, or, more likely, instructed staff to trawl, through this blog for hours to cobble together his failed complaint to the police. I happened to save the hit logs from a couple of these unusually lengthy visits.

There have been many more instances where clearly Mr James has saved himself the tiresome expense of instructing a solicitor to do this lengthy exercise and used council staff and computers instead, but as I had happened to have saved this particular evidence, I raised it with the Wales Audit Office. After while they replied and said that what he had done was acceptable, staff were allowed to do this.

You may think this was unusual, being able to pursue your private interests using publicly funded resources, bloody astonishing really, but more was to come. Further enquiries, via freedom of information revealed that this generous money-saving perk didn't actually extend to any one else other than Mr James.

In fact, in the past few years, no less than eight members of staff had been disciplined for using council computers to pursue their private interests.

Astonishing.

Anyway, from unlawfully pocketing tens of thousands of public money, to breaching an undertaking to his employers, we know that Mr James prefers to spend other people's money, he said so himself....

Click to play

A minor flurry of press releases yesterday announced the identity of private sector partner who will be developing the 'Wellness Village' at the Delta Lake swamp, Llanelli, with the council and Swansea University, all part of the PFI-style Swansea Bay City Deal.

The 'Sterling' photoshoot

The company is called Sterling Health, trading as Sterling Health Security Holdings Ltd. The company was set up in 2015 and has sister companies called Sterling Health Security Property Ltd, Sterling Health Security Operating Ltd and Sterling Health Security International Ltd, set up last year.

There is something oddly familiar with all this.

In 2016, in secret session, the council's Executive Board entered a twelve month'exclusivity agreement' with Kent Neurosciences Ltd to 'develop' the Village.
By May last year the 12 month agreement had not been renewed and had been quietly dropped. The company subsequently dissolved itself in May 2018 with the last set of accounts showing a deficit of £128k. Professor Marc Clement (who is the Swansea University part of the deal, pictured above on the right) was a director until 2015. Other key directors included Mr Franz Dickmann, James Dickmann and Phyllis Holt-Dickmann, clinicians and business people.

Carmarthenshire blog, West Wales News Review took a good look at Kent Neurosciences in 2016 and there were some interesting connections, not least of all to a loss making private hospital in Kent and offshore tax havens in the British Virgin Islands. The hospital opened in 2014 but by 2016 required a £20m refinancing deal due to heavy losses. Most of the original directors had, by that time, moved on.

The 'official' reason why the 12 month Wellness Village deal with Kent Neurosciences Ltd was not renewed was that the project was SO BIG that a wider net had to be cast to incorporate a more diverse developer.
They also had to be able to come up with £127.5m to chip in to the project...

It was somewhat surprising therefore to see that Sterling Health appears to be Kent Neurosciences by another name and includes the same directors, ie the Dickmann clan. The 'Sterling' group of companies have yet to submit any detailed or useful accounts. However, as the council press release states, it "leads a prestigious consortium of global companies", whoever they may be, and searching Companies House certainly takes you down an endless rabbit warren of linked companies and directors, and the Kent connections.

A very recent addition to the list of Directors of both Sterling Holdings, and Sterling Operating is none other than our old friend, former council leader and loyal rubber stamper of the chief executive's unlawful behaviour, Meryl Gravell. Meryl has been loitering in the background ever since as Chair of the 'Arch' health board collaboration thing.

How the same company re-emerged under a different name within a myriad of companies, and the consequential lack of clarity over business track records, will probably remain a mystery, under the helpful shroud of 'commercial confidentiality' and all that. As will the secretive procurement process and the details of the financial deal which has been struck with the council.
Clearly, as has been said before, the emphasis is on private health care, and a luxury health spa, in which the council, under the lead of Mr James, will be investing heavily.
All quite remarkable.

West Wales News Review ends its 2016 piece with another important point; "..could the Wellness Centre be a conduit for public money to flow through networks of companies into far-away entities registered in the British Virgin Islands and other tax havens?"

I would imagine that is entirely possible.

This blog is not suggesting, not for one moment, that there is anything wrong with the arrangement, merely suggesting that it might benefit from some democratic scrutiny... Unsurprisingly there has been none at all so far, and, as ever, Carmarthenshire's taxpayers deserve better.

For previous posts on the Wellness Village and Swansea Bay City Deal please use the search box on the right hand side of this blog

This week's Carmarthenshire Herald features another observant and entertaining opinion piece from columnist 'Cadno', it's self-explanatory, particularly to followers of this blog, so here it is;

Cadno and the nightmare on Emlyn's Street

Mark James CeeBeeBies ™ is a man on a mission. Having blown public money at the Princess Royal Stadium and Parc Y Scarlets, he has now decided that his next wheeze will involve mugs from the private sector soaking up the pain of failure at Delta Lakes.

Although, and let's face it, given Marky-Mark's way with investing gargantuan sums of public dosh in pale pachyderms it would take a small miracle for the public not to end up paying out if the great swamp proves a money pit.

But let's all try to be positive.

Maryl Gravell has returned like a boomerang kebab on a Friday night in Llanelli town centre to lend the imprimatur of her own spotless reputation on doling out public money to the Llanelli Wellness Thingummy.

With Meryl the Peril back on board we cannot help but wait for the excitement to start. There will be exciting announcements of exciting news and exciting sums of money being spent on exciting things, some of which could turn out to be excitingly real, for a change.

You can imagine, readers, there was Emlyn, fast asleep one morning at Capel Ifan's own Rancho Grande when the phone rings. A half-awake council leader stumbles out of bed and wanders to the kitchen - stops to pour himself a cup of ambition - and answers the ringing phone.

It's Mark James.

Quickly Emlyn stands to attention and salutes, dinging himself with the receiver in the process.

"It's good news Leader"
For the sake of clarity, Cadno points out Mark James is the speaker of the last sentence.

A visibly relieved Emlyn genuflects.

"It's Meryl Gravell."

Emlyn puts on his sombre face and begins the touching eulogy he has prepared for such an occasssion.

"No Emlyn, Meryl's back. And this time it's Wellness."

An ashen Cllr Dole stares unbelievingly at the handset mouthing like a stranded trout. He feels one of his headaches starting; one of the ones that end with him sitting in the corner of the kitchen with a cup of cocoa, armed with a sand wedge to repel boarders and keep the voices at bay.

"Meryl!?" He eventually croaks into the handset. Through the earpiece, he can hear Mark James whistling 'Happy Talk' from South Pacific.

"Yes, Emlyn. Meryl. Please try to keep up. She's a director of the company we're entering into a partnership with to build the Wellness Centre, Life Sciences Centre, Wellness Village, Wellness Resort Hotel, Wellness Golf Course, and Wellness Sheltered Housing complex for discrete and well-off gentlefolk who don't want to end up living in a cardboard box on Station Road in their declining years."

Attempting vainly to recover his equilibrium, the Council Leader murmurs the words 'Leisure Centre'.

The narked voice at the other end of the line snaps back, "Well if we must, Emlyn. But we're talking about big money here. Hundreds of millions pumped into Delta Lakes. I'm sure we can manage to squeeze in a ping pong table and paddling pool to keep the locals on side. After all, they'll need something to do in their lunchbreaks after a hard morning on minimum wage with a dustpan and brush or serving coffees in the Wellness Coffee Shop attached to the Wellness Conference Centre."

"But Meryl?!" A faint plaintive note enters Cllr Dole's voice.

"Look she was at a loose end having had the Shitty Deal gig go south when Cardiff Bay decided that she and the other mugs who fronted the deal were disposable. But look on the bright side, with Meryl on board everyone will be excited. I'm excited, Meryl's excited, it'll stop you having to bear the burden of the blame if it all goes tits up, too"

Emlyn cannot help himself; "Blame? Tits?"

"Listen Emlyn, this is my last big chance to enter the annals of public finance and local government as the man who delivered three whopping disasters without getting sacked.

I've been dreaming of completing the hat-trick in order to cement my position as the man to whom the Welsh Government will be able to turn to head the Assembly Commission when the time is right. I can't risk a success. It'll go against the best traditions of local government in Wales and could ruin my legacy. It's notoriety that counts, not competence. A word in the right ear was all it took and Fanny's your aunt, Meryl is back."

"I don't understand. Are we planning to fail?" A desperate Emlyn clutches to the prospect of disaster like it was a life preserver.

"This is Carmarthenshire, Emlyn!"

The exasperated tone with which the Council Leader is familiar is in CeeBeeBies' voice; "For goodness' sake, if we succeed every other county council will think it can succeed. We can't let down Cardiff Bay by allowing that. Remember what the City Deal is for; it's to ensure that when ill-costed, poorly thought out projects fail, the Welsh Government can pass the buck. They pass the buck to us, we pass the buck to Meryl. It's a win for us no matter what happens."

"Winning?" A faint note of hope enters Emlyn dole's voice and he sits down on a kitchen stool by the breakfast bar to steady himself.

"Yes, winning Emlyn. Everyone's a winner. Well, apart from Llanelli of course. They'll be left with a rotting building site around a leisure centre slowly sinking into the water."

Emlyn brightens up; "You mean Llanelli loses?"

A hollow chuckle comes down the other end of the line; "Oh yes Emlyn. That'll teach the ungrateful bastards."

There's a click and a whirr, the audience is over. Emlyn's world begins to spin with the possibilities. He begins to feel dizzy. Everything goes black.

He wakes up to the sound of ringing. I's the phone in the kitchen.
A half-awake council leader stumbles out of bed and answers it.

It's Mark James.

"It's Meryl Gravell, Leader."

Emlyn puts on his sombre face and begins the touching eulogy he has prepared for such an occasion.

"No, Emlyn. Meryl's back. Back again."

Emlyn swallows and feels rising dread.
It all seems so familiar...is there no end to this nightmare?
He looks around for his sand wedge. The voices are coming again....

(From The Carmarthenshire Herald, 21st July 2018, reproduced with permission as currently in print ony)

Please search this blog for background, including here, here, and previous post here.

Please read this earlier post for background; Those unlawful libel clauses - a call to arms

I understand that a meeting of the council's Constitutional Review Working Group (CRWG) was held earlier today. On the agenda was an Item on those infamous and unlawful libel indemnity clauses in the council's constitution.

The matter had been raised, I understand, by the leader of the Labour group Rob James who was pushing for some sort of decision as to what the administration intended to do, it was his express intention for them to be removed completely, rather than remain as 'suspended' for yet another four years.

It seems that the Plaid and Independent majority on the group, including Emlyn Dole, out-manoeuvred the three Labour members and resolved to write to the Wales Audit Office to ask if they could, legally, reinstate the clauses, on the basis that they consider them to be lawful.

If this is indeed the case, and I have asked Plaid politicians Jonathan Edwards MP and Adam Price AM to confirm Plaid's stance, then it is astonishing.

In 2014 the same Plaid councillors voted to accept the Wales Audit Office libel indemnity report which declared that it was unlawful for officers to be publicly funded to bring defamation claims, and, in fact, legislation expressly prohibited it anyway. At that time it was the Labour and Independents who voted just to 'note' the report and suspend the clauses.
All to save the skin of Mark James and Legal Linda who have refused to accept the findings.
They have claimed that the provision is lawful under case law and the vague powers under the Local Government Act of 1972.
Neither the case law, which in fact does not support such action, nor the LGA 1972 override the express prohibition in section 6(3) of the Indemnities Order 2006.

The about-turn of Plaid 'in-power', particularly Emlyn Dole is shocking and prior to today he has informed me that he now considers the clauses to be lawful. Anyone would think he owed his position to the, erm, generosity of Mark James...

I have written many times about these clauses and the sinister, chilling effect that the provision has on critics and the press alike. I will not repeat it all again here. A senior officer can still sue of course, like anyone else, but must use their own money, apart from in Carmarthenshire.

I find it remarkable that Plaid Cymru are apparently considering such an illiberal, unlawful and anti-democratic step.

If they are seriously going to try and do this then of course there is a lengthy process to follow. The response from the Wales Audit Office will eventually turn up on the agenda of a CRWG meeting, a recommendation will then be made which will, in turn, go to full council. It will run and run.

CRWG could have voted today to remove them completely and recommended this to the next meeting of full council.
It seems they did the exact opposite.

Carmarthenshire Council remains the only council in the UK to have this notorious provision in its constitution, it should be an embarrassment to them all. The failure to remove the clauses, and now, apparently, to seek reinstatement, shows the length they will go to protect the illegal actions of the chief executive and Monitoring Officer.

After eighteen long months, the Ombudsman, Nick Bennett, has concluded his investigation into a series of complaints made by chief executive Mark James against former county councillor Sian Caiach. In short, the Ombudsman has decided that no further action is required and the file is now closed.

Nick Bennett, Public Service Ombudsman for Wales

Mr James' complaints against Cllr Caiach run to sixty-one paragraphs, with numerous repetetive sub-paragraphs and a file of evidence weighing the equivalent of a large turkey. He complained that Cllr Caiach breached various parts of the council's Code of Conduct through blog posts, emails, the 'pound of flesh' protest and a letter published by the Western Mail.

In essence, it all related to the support Cllr Caiach has shown to me over the past couple of years, particularly when Mr James was trying to force sale of my home. You may recall a similar reaction to others who tried to intervene and of course his complaints to the police.

The Ombudsman concluded that Cllr Caiach was entitled to do, and say, what she did, it was political comment from an opposition councillor concerning the actions of the council and its chief executive. There was no breach found, and none of it was considered by the Ombudsman to be serious. There was one minor issue that the Ombudsman thought Cllr Caiach should reflect on, but, again, no further action was required.

The Ombudsman applied Article 10 of the Human Rights Act, and the Calver judgement in respect of the extra protection afforded to political expression and concluded that in Cllr Caiach's case freedom of expression included the right of political expression through public protest, she was also perfectly entitled to criticise council policy and show support for a cause or individual.

He added that he expected a chief executive to have a 'thicker-skin' when under general criticism.

Cllr Sian Caiach, currently Chair of Llanelli Rural Council

My personal view

There are a few points arising from this investigation which are worth making.

Mark James became personally embittered and outraged when Cllr Caiach acted as a witness for me, against him and the council, at the libel trial in 2013. It later transpired that he had tracked her emails.

Cllr Caiach, as followers of this blog will know, continued to question the legality of the libel indemnity and to criticise the council's pursuit of costs and Mr James' pursuit of damages.
However, she did not challenge the legal outcome of the trial, just the moral compass of Carmarthenshire Council.

Whether or not Mr James has a personal vendetta against Cllr Caiach is not known, but, as with me,
the volume of 'evidence' and the detailed complaints also give rise to another concern. It appears that Mr James has either spent an awful lot of time tracking quotes and comments from blogs, including this blog, and Cneifiwr's, scrutinizing emails, memorising chunks from Tugenhat's judgement, and god knows what else, or he instructed other council staff to do this laborious and repeated task.
Not once did he discuss his complaints with Cllr Caiach before going to the Ombudsman.

Incidentally, my police custody record from the 2011 #daftarrest incident was included in the 'evidence', I can't think of any reason why this was sent to the Ombudsman, its inclusion was completely irrelevant.

It seems to me that, yet again, Mr James' personal mission has not only cost the council an arm and a leg in staff time and resources but clearly an eighteen month Ombudsman investigation, including the taking of statements, interviewing witnesses, etc doesn't come cheap. This money would have better spent addressing concerns of dissatisfied hospital patients rather than the inflated ego of Mr James.

Mr James is the Head of Paid Service and his remit does not include assembling dossiers, by whatever means, on backbench councillors. Or bloggers or members of the public for that matter. It begs the question as to whether he has a similar obsession with the musings, and the data, of any other councillors....

Interestingly, this is not the first Ombudsman to suggest that Mr James grows a thicker skin. He has previous. Back in 2012 he made another set of complaints against Cllr Caiach to the former Ombudsman, Peter Tyndall, and he, Mr Tyndall, threw them all out.
Maybe Mr James should be registered somewhere as a vexatious complainant.

Come to think of it, Mr James hasn't had much success elsewhere either, his complaints to the police against me were thrown out by the CPS, and the judge who has dealt with the various civil enforcement proceedings was, shall we say, surprised at some of Mr James' actions, he was also as fair to me as he could be under the constraints of the circumstances.

As for the Code of Conduct, there's another one for Officers. As I have mentioned before, Mr James has taken payments which were deemed unlawful, he has used council resources and staff for his own purposes and breached an undertaking to his employers to pay the damages to the council. And more.

I think that this time, the Ombudsman got it pretty much right, although personally I wonder if he's been investigating entirely the wrong person.

Mr James doorstepped by reporters during the pension and libel indemnity scandals, 2014

For part one, please see earlier post; Plaid Cymru seek to reinstate unlawful libel indemnity clauses...really?!

Following the CRWG meeting held at the end of July I asked Jonathan Edwards MP and Adam Price AM to clarify Plaid's stance on the subject. Their reply, which I received on Monday is reproduced below, in full;

EDWARDS, Jonathan <jonathan.edwards.mp@parliament.uk>
To: kthompson855@btinternet.com
6 Aug 9:53AM

Dear Mrs Thompson,

Many thanks for your e-mails.

I’ve taken a bit of time to try and establish what has happened these past few days. I respond to you today on both my and my constituency colleague, Adam Price’s behalf.

I’m afraid the information I have is based on informal discussions, rather than anything which has been published.

As I understand it:

· There was a suggestion by the Labour group leader at a recent meeting of the council’s CRWG meeting to remove the particular clause from the constitution.

· The response from a Plaid Councillor was that there remains a grey area as to whether the council is or isn’t allowed to provide an indemnity following recent proceedings relating to Caerphilly Council.

· The Plaid Councillor proposed writing to the Wales Audit Office for clarity on the matter.

· This proposal was supported by the Labour group leader.

You’ll appreciate that my understanding is somewhat different to the noises which have been made in the press since the meeting!

As far as Adam and I are concerned, this is not a matter which has been discussed within the party and we would not personally support the re-introduction of the clause. Furthermore, we don’t think there is any appetite whatsoever in the Plaid Council Group to re-introduce such a clause.

We maintain the position that it is right and proper for a public authority to indemnify officials for proceedings brought against them in the course of their duties, but not the ability to initiate proceedings or for counter-claims.

If I get any more information I’ll be sure to get in touch, but as far as I’m concerned there are no attempts to re-instate the clause.

I hope that’s useful for now.

Cofion,

Jonathan

This week's Carmarthen Journal also features an article on the subject which does not yet seem to be online, so here it is;

First of all I'd like to say that I believe Mr Edwards and Mr Price are sincere when they say they would not personally support the reintroduction of the clause. Having read their remarks over the past few years, including in correspondence I can't imagine they would think this was a good idea, to say the least.

Unfortunately, they do not run the council, and neither, for that matter, does Emlyn Dole, or his Independent colleagues.

We know who does.

I would imagine that when the Motion to remove the clauses landed on the chief executive's desk for inclusion on the CRWG agenda there was a rapid flurry of activity.

As we know, a report was written to 'advise' CRWG. That report has not been published and, according to the Journal article the whole Item was 'exempt' and confidential. There is no reason for this at all.

I am fully aware of the historic, and flawed arguments put forward by Mr James that the clauses are, in his opinion, lawful, but there also appears to have been some scratching around to include unspecified proceedings relating to Caerphilly Council. I am not currently aware of such proceedings directly related to this issue.

However, instead of simply agreeing to remove the offending and unlawful clauses, a counter-motion to reinstate was, it seems, put forward. Eventually, a vote was taken whether or not to write to the Wales Audit Office, presumably for legal clarity. I understand that the Labour leader abstained another Labour councillor voted against.
I have asked Linda Rees Jones for a copy of that letter.

As the quote from the Wales Audit Office states, their position remains unchanged.

Mr James, has, for the past four years railed against the findings of the then Appointed Auditor Anthony Barrett and I imagine his correspondence with the auditor was as arrogant and as irritatingly righteous as his correspondence with me. In 2016 he used Mr Dole to question the Wales Audit Office as to whether Mr Barrett was suitably qualified to make his findings. Mr James was sent off with a flea in his ear.
Even in his complaint to the Ombudsman concerning Sian Caiach he challenged, at considerable rambling length, the findings of Mr Barrett.

If the council were run by councillors I have little doubt that these clauses would have been quietly removed. But, as I said back in 2015, our dynamic duo, Mark and Linda, are in something of a dilemma, if they remove the clause completely, then Mrs Thompson would have won a small but significant victory - they would be conceding that it should never have been there in the first place. They would also be agreeing with the Wales Audit Office. Their positions would be untenable.

Hence the continuing prevarication, and undue, and unlawful, influence on councillors.

If they leave it in the book, in its 'withdrawn' state, never to be used, then it looks ridiculous and serves no purpose within the constitution; a permanent reminder of professional incompetence, arrogance and unlawful behaviour.

As I have said, regardless of political nuance or pointing the finger of blame, the clauses remain unique to Carmarthenshire, a memorial to local government idiocy, and in particular, the self-centred idiocy and unbelievable arrogance of Mark James.
Perhaps he's considering raiding the council coffers again, and suing someone...

Please search this blog for further background, of which there is an abundant supply.

Wellness

With the Swansea Bay City Deal Joint Committee meeting for the first time today (Friday) the Llanelli Herald has marked the occasion, perhaps, with a steely look at the state of play of the Wellness Shed planned for the Delta Lakes swamp. More precisely it looks at the company appointed by the council as their 'private partners', Sterling Health.

Much of the information was covered on this blog (with several interesting comments) last month - see Wellness Village 'private partners' - something oddly familiar? - but, given that our Mr James is due to be made King of the City Deal (lead CEO, Principle Adviser, Chair of the Project Board and yes, really, the 'Accountable Officer') it's worth taking another look.

Following a sprinkling of council press statements during the week the Herald reports that no less than two management consultancies have been appointed by the council, Faithful & Gould and Medparc Ltd.

F & G are clearly a massive multinational company with a track record of success, (apart from a no-blame hiccup over the abandoned InterCity West Coast franchise competition), in project management.

Medparc, as I mentioned in my last post, has no such track record, has minor assets and was dormant until 2016. The connection however is the director of Medparc, James Dickmann. Mr Dickmann, along with Franz and Phyllis Dickmann, and bizarrely Meryl Gravell form Sterling Health Security Holdings Ltd, the council's 'private partners', recording, as I said, a £137K deficit last year and zero income.

Another Dickmann enterprise is the 'Little Learners' Academy' which, according to Sterling's website, are planning to provide 'Wellness' creche facilities. As this company was only formed in August 2017 there are no accounts nor track record.

Sterling, and it's directors, grew out of Kent Neurosciences (KNS), the council's original development partners, when it dissolved earlier this year with a deficit of £128k. KNS had developed a private hospital in Maidstone, Kent until insolvency beckoned and a bail out was required.

The Herald continues;
"That hospital, built in Maidstone, is the Kent Institute of Medicine and Surgery and ultimate control of the entities concerned in it is based in the British Virgin Islands – no doubt ‘the city connections’ the Council is so proud to trumpet. And those ‘city connections’ all link to a string of other companies similarly vested in overseas tax havens.
No allegation is made regarding the tax status or practices of those companies.
Although it is something which, no doubt, the Council’s crack legal and compliance team took into consideration when choosing its partners."

Presumably the council's 'due diligence' process will have noted the track record of the Kent hospital and the involvement of the Dickmann clan who left before the bailout by investors began. It is on public record that as at April 2017 the three year old hospital's net liabilities were £33.5m. Projected success had not materialised and the crisis was a result of an 'overly optimistic' business plan in the first place.

The Herald concludes; "With two key partners’ heady track record of delivery and links to shady offshore tax havens, there is little doubt that the Wellness Village – when built - will be everything people expect it to be and more."

All this should be comfortably familiar to Mr James and perhaps why the "robust procurement exercise", Carmarthenshire style, always leaves more questions than answers. In his previous incarnation as chief executive, Mr James had been the originator of the Princess Royal stadium in Boston and by the time the auditors had been called in to figure out why the projected financial success story was nowhere to be found, he had moved on to build another taxpayer draining stadium in Carmarthenshire.

So, let's hope that the new term at County Hall sees our councillors asking some very pertinent questions, such as, for example, just what exactly is the criteria required for a company to become 'development partners', is a track record of financial success actually necessary? And how many millions will the council have to borrow, and just who exactly is going to benefit from the Wellness Village? Who knows, with Mr James' private property investment partners and his management empire in Cardiff, it might just be him...
More to the point, some searching questions right now would be better than an external forensic audit investigation further down the line, when everyone involved at the outset has long since buggered off.

As for the Council, the Herald's cutting columnist Cadno makes a few observations and suggests a few questions in this week's paper, well worth a read;

Here's an extract of a previous Cadno piece (apparently Boris the Brexit Fox stood in for Cadno this time) which dealt with the various impending political leadership elections here in Wales. It suggests, in fact, that Mr James already has all the fine accoutrements we would expect from an all-powerful Welsh Leader...;

"So we must rally to the flag of strong and decisive leadership and intolerance of rebellious voices so as to mould the Welsh nation anew.
The flag of Mark James.
Nobody in their right mind could claim that sinking millions of pounds on easy terms into a succession of failed projects was not adequate preparation for taking over the whole country.
Equally, nobody could say – at least not twice, unless it’s the Ombudsman – that the glorious leader is a vindictive petty bureaucrat who ought to grow a thicker skin if he’s going to interfere in the political process and eavesdrop on councillor’s emails.
Who else but Mark James could fulfil the onerous role of being involved in a property management company, chief executive of a County Council, lead chief executive for the City Deal, and all-seeing eye at the centre of Mordor?
One more finger in another pie and the set would be complete.
It is for that reason, not to mention Mark James’ ability to perform in the traditions of Welsh local government (mot ‘si scalpere dorsum, et digitis tuis’) that marks him out as a man apart. The sort of man who should be leading Wales instead of the current band of lollygagging ne’er do wells who populate Cardiff Bay.
Imagine for a moment, my friends, the sort of country we would have under the benign and ever-watchful Great Flaming Eye that is Mark James.
There would a bowling alley on every corner, a Wellness Centre in every village, and a bloody big stadium to host the Olympic Games – possibly at Cross Hands East.
It’s a compelling vision, isn’t it my friends. The sort of firm leadership for which Wales is crying out. And seated at his right hand will be Meryl Gravell and her representative on earth Emlyn Dole.
To those of you voting in various leadership elections this summer, the choice is clear. Write in Mark Vincent James’ name on your ballot papers.

Let him do for Wales what he has done for Carmarthenshire.
And then pull the chain."

* * *

Early Resolutions

Carmarthenshire Council makes no less than three appearances in the latest Ombudsman's quarterly casebook with all the findings dealt with under the 'Early Resolution' scheme.
This scheme avoids the need for a protracted investigation and is used where the Ombudsman and the council can agree to a quick turnaround for things to be put right. In an ideal world, a satisfactory and quick result is of course preferable for the complainant, cheaper for the Ombudsman and less in the way of 'reputational damage' for the council.

With these three findings against the council unlikely to appear any time soon on the corporate website it's worth noting that, aside from the specific failings, the theme across all three is the council's reluctance and inability to deal properly with complaints, or even recognise and log them as such. It presents a snapshot of a wider problem; as many of us who have tried to bring the council to account will know;

Carmarthenshire County Council – Children in care/ taken into care/ ‘at risk’ register/ child abuse/ custody of children
Case Number: 201706555 – Report issued in April 2018
Ms A complained about the Social Services Team at Carmarthenshire County Council (“the Council”) and, in particular, a lack of care towards her daughter’s safety when using social media. Ms A also raised concerns over a lack of communication and the fact that she had not received a formal response to her concerns.
The Ombudsman found that although Ms A has not been through the Council’s complaint procedure, the Council should have noted her dissatisfaction from her correspondence and dealt with Ms A’s concerns as a formal complaint.
The Council agreed to undertake the following actions, in settlement of the complaint:
a) Within 28 days from the date of the Ombudsman’s decision, arrange a meeting between Ms A, her daughter and the Social Services Team.
b) Within one month from the date of the meeting, issue a Stage 1 written response to the complaint.

Carmarthenshire County Council – Special Educational Needs (SEN)
Case Number: 201706608 – Report issued in April 2018
Ms X complained that Carmarthenshire County Council (“the Council”) had continuously failed to provide a Physics tutor for her 15-year-old daughter. Her concerns were as a result of her daughter’s school mishandling her education which led to a breakdown and several suicide attempts. Ms X’s daughter has been diagnosed as having Atypical Autism.
Although the Council had taken steps to resolve this complaint, since the Ombudsman’s involvement, it had failed to formally acknowledge and deal with the complaint under its complaints procedure despite Ms X clearly indicating that she was raising a formal complaint. The Council agreed to write to Ms X with its apologies.

Carmarthenshire County Council – Social care assessment
Case number: 201700171 – Report issued in June 2018
Mr A’s complained about Carmarthenshire County Council’s (“the Council”) response to his Stage 2 complaint investigation. This included the Council not detailing the measures it had put in place to address the identified failings around assessments, statutory and non-statutory services and eligibility.
The Council acknowledged shortcomings in its complaint handling and agreed to take the following actions:
a) apologise to Mr A for the failings identified and pay him the sum of £250 for the time and trouble caused to him in pursing his complaint.
b) revise its Complaint Process flowchart so it meets the requirement of the Welsh Government’s guidance on complaint handling and representations by local authority social services (2014).
c) provide evidence of the training programme it has drawn up in relation to complaint handling.
d) provide an explanation of the Eligibility Criteria for the Transition Team and update the details displayed on its website accordingly.
e) provide the Ombudsman with copies of the revised policies, accompanied by an action plan, which should include appropriate timescales for ensuring implementation and monitoring of compliance.

An added bonus for County Hall is their possibly erroneous assumption that the shorter Early Resolution scheme must leave the Ombudsman with plenty of cash and time on his hands with which to spend sifting through the self-obsessed, deranged ramblings of our chief executive for 18 months. But as we already know, Mr James clearly considers himself a far more important and deserving recipient of scarce public resources than vulnerable children, worried mothers and their irritating complaints...

And finally...

Tax avoidance and the CBE

Interesting news out today that the Honours system takes a dim view of nominees involved in tax avoidance schemes and takes advice from HMRC.

You may recall that around the same time as chief executive Mark James was given a CBE he was also involved in a tax avoidance scheme.

For two years he took a secret pay rise (totalling nearly £30k) in lieu of his pension contribution for the purpose of avoiding tax, a matter deemed unlawful by the Wales Audit Office in their 2014 Public Interest Report (there were two reports, the other being the unlawful libel indemnity).

Mr James' honour from Private Eye was richly deserved, and his own concept of honour, dignity and integrity has been called into question before.
As for the CBE, the Honours committee states; "poor tax behaviour is not consistent with the award of an honour".
Oh dear.

Some interesting stats about Freedom of Information requests were released earlier this week after the Welsh Conservatives, via FOI of course, collected figures for Welsh government, councils and health boards. The full dataset can be found under the article 'Culture of Secrecy' on their website here, naturally there's a bit of a Tory slant, but never mind.

As I am a regular user of the Freedom of Information Act, Carmarthenshire-style, their stats were interesting. Out of 1235 requests made from January to December 2017 only 50%, were answered in full, ie full disclosure of the information requested. A grim statistic. Out of the remaining 50%, 317 were refused and 193 partly refused.
In 2016 the full disclosure figure was 58% so there's been a decline of 8%.

This puts Carmarthenshire towards the bottom of the public body barrel. The Welsh Government were worse with only 46% full disclosures. At the top of the tree was Gwynedd council with 95% full disclosures out of 1002, a comparable number of requests as were made to Carmarthenshire.

According to to the stats, Carmarthenshire has improved it's response rate to reply within the 20 day limit from 84% in 2016 to 97% in 2017. My personal experience of delayed responses would put this figure at around 10%, but perhaps that's just because it's me...

I acknowledge that the variables in the world of FOI can be endless, but the range of figures for full disclosure suggests that the legal criteria for disclosure or refusal are not being applied with much consistency across Wales.

One surprisingly quick Carmarthenshire response was to a request (not one of mine) for expenditure details for the month of June 2018. Over recent years I've suggested that Welsh councils should follow the legal requirement, now statutory in England, to publish monthly expenditure, but Carmarthenshire have consistently refused to do so.
This particular request, which was responded to in full in just three days, showed that publishing these details every month might not be such a problem after all...

The latest Caebrwyn FOI farce concerns my request for the officer's report to the Constitutional Review Working Group meeting held on the 27th July. The report related to the agenda item on the unlawful and notorious libel clause, recent posts, here and here explain the details, and the possibility that reinstatement of the clause is being sought.

I originally asked Monitoring Officer Linda Rees Jones for a copy of the report. She eventually replied to say that she had passed on my request to FOI as I was asking her to "divulge information about what might or might not have been discussed at a private meeting of councillors".
It is interesting that CRWG has now been classified as a 'private meeting of councillors'... I understand that calls are being made for CRWG, which is overseen by Mark James and Ms Rees Jones to become a properly constituted committee.

The predictable FOI response arrived on Monday stating that my request had been refused under the legal privilege exemption. There are two parts to this exemption; litigation privilege and advice privilege, the request was refused under the latter as no actual litigation was (or is) being contemplated. Which is something I suppose.

The basic principle that correspondence between lawyer and client is protected from disclosure is, of course, well established in law. Where it becomes something of a grey area is when the exemption is applied to reports written by council legal officers for councillors, committees or, in this case, a 'working group'.
The danger in a democratic society is that as a matter of convenience, the net can be arbitrarily widened to include anything written by a solicitor, including a council solicitor, about anything that elected members are discussing or deciding upon.

The exemption is also subject to a public interest test and in this case the council FOI officer, no doubt under the direct instruction of Mark James and Ms Rees Jones, decided that the public interest for transparency did not outweigh the need for secrecy.
Legal privilege is also a difficult one to appeal as there is such a long-standing presumption against disclosure. As the council well know.

Carms Council FOI Exemptions Department.

However, I have asked for an internal review of the refusal and will take this to the Information Commissioner if necessary. (Both the refusal and my request for an internal review are posted in full at the end of this post). So, we'll see.

In this case I believe that the document is being wrongfully withheld as a means to avoid public discussion on what is essentially a matter of significant public interest. The status of the clauses, ie the reinstatement, removal or the status quo (remain 'suspended') of the provision to use public money to fund officers' defamation claims has significant implications for the public and the press, financially and ethically, not just here in Carmarthenshire but across the UK.

The fact that this is sensitive and embarrassing subject matter for the chief executive and the monitoring officer, whose illegal actions sparked this long running scandal in the first place, should have nothing to do with a FOI response; but this is Carmarthenshire, with it's toxic culture of secrecy.

As I mention in my request for a review below, advice relating to the same issue was published in 2014, but this was when their backs were against the wall, so to speak. It does raise the question though of whether they have already waived their claim to legal privilege, or whether, as I have also mentioned in my email, it is engaged at all...
All in all I fail to understand why the report hasn't just simply been released. It is farcical.

The letter to the WAO, which I also requested, is 'not held by the council' which, in plain speaking, means it probably hasn't been written yet. Maybe they're getting legal advice...

On a wider point, it's about time that FOI legislation was widened to include commercial entities who carry out public services, from council owned 'arms-length companies, to housing associations and even City Deal partners, for example. If they're spending public money then they should be open to a degree of scrutiny.

Anyway, I am digressing, here's the refusal notice (3rd September), with my request for a review (5th September) below;

Dear Mrs Thompson,

I refer to your request for information, which was received on 3rd August, 2018 and has been dealt with under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

The specific information you requested was as follows:

“1. I understand that at the CRWG meeting held last Friday (27th July) it was resolved to write to the Wales Audit Office concerning the unlawful libel indemnity clauses. I would be grateful for a copy of this letter or confirmation of its intended purpose if has not yet been composed.”

“2. … the officer's report which accompanied the item on the unlawful libel indemnity clauses which might or might not have been discussed at the 'private' CRWG meeting.”

In response to the first part of your request, the Council does not hold this information.

With regard to the second part of your request, this information is held by the Council.

However, it is evident that the report in question is comprised of advice provided by a legal professional to the CRWG on this particular matter.

It is therefore a form of communication between a legal professional and a client.
As we have advised you previously, a decision by the Information Tribunal, in Bellamy v the Information Commissioner and the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry (EA/2005/0023, 4th April, 2006), provided a clear definition of legal professional privilege:

“a set of rules or principles which are designed to protect the confidentiality of legal or legally related communications and exchanges between the client and his, her or its lawyers, as well as exchanges which contain or refer to legal advice which might be imparted to the client, and even exchanges between the clients and [third] parties if such communications or exchanges come into being for the purposes of preparing for litigation.”

The Bellamy decision also defined two types of privilege, namely litigation and advice privilege. I believe in this case that the report is subject to advice privilege, which applies where no litigation is in progress or being contemplated. This would include confidential communications between the legal professional and the client, for the main purpose of seeking or giving legal advice. A report which in which a lawyer provides advice is by definition, legal advice.

Under Section 42 of the Act, a public authority may refuse to provide information where a claim to legal professional privilege could be maintained. In view of the above, I believe this exemption is therefore engaged.

However, the Section 42 exemption is qualified and subject to a public interest test. In doing so, I must make a distinction between what is genuinely in the public interest and what may merely be of interest to a member of members of the public.

I accept that there are public interest factors which favour disclosure in this case, namely transparency and furthering public knowledge in relation to a matter which has been subject to some publicity in the past.

However, there is an inherent public interest in maintaining this exemption, which will always be strong due to the importance of the principle behind legal professional privilege, which is to protect the privacy of communications between client and lawyer to ensure access to full and frank legal advice, which in turn is fundamental to the administration of justice.

I am not persuaded on this occasion that this is outweighed by the factors favouring disclosure set out above. Accordingly, I believe the exemption should be maintained and the information withheld from disclosure.

As I am refusing to provide the requested information, please therefore consider this email to be a formal notice of refusal under Section 17 of the Act.

Yours sincerely
John Tillman

And here's my request for a review;

Dear Mr Edgecombe

I am requesting a review of the refusal of FOIA/11379, I have copied the response below for ease of reference.

My request for a review relates to the second part of my request, namely the officer's report relating to the unlawful libel clauses to the CRWG meeting held on 27th July 2018.

I believe that the public interest favours disclosure and the use of legal advice privilege is incorrect, if engaged at all. The report should be disclosed for the following reasons;

The council waived its right to legal privilege on February 27th 2014 when the legal advice, directly relating to this same issue, was published on the council's website.

There has been a historic lack of transparency over this issue and the misrepresentation of previous legal advice, as documented in the Wales Audit Office Public Interest Reports 2014. This in itself is a compelling reason for disclosure.

The Monitoring Officer, who I believe is the author of the report, must ensure councillors are not misled and act unlawfully. Despite the overwhelming findings by the WAO, both she, and the chief executive, continue to misrepresent the legal position as 'lawful'.

The response minimises the importance of the issue which is significant enough for a councillor to place on the agenda for a group which reviews the Constitution.

There is also significant public interest in that the removal, resinstatement or status quo of the libel cost clauses has financial, legal and moral implications for public bodies, members of the public and journalists across the UK, not just in Carmarthenshire. This has been reflected in the widespread interest and publicity over several years.

CRWG is by definition a 'Working group' and is not properly constituted as a committee. Reports cannot be classed as 'exempt' without the publication of an agenda, the application of the public interest test and a formal vote on the exemption sought. Even if CRWG is classed as a 'client', as you maintain, then it is they who own that advice and for them to vote on whether it should be released or not.

Legal advice privilege is not engaged at all if the communications between solicitor and client are to further criminal purpose. This also extends to civil fraud or other conduct which is a breach of the duty of good faith, contrary to public policy or in the interests of justice. In this case the matter was subject to a finding of unlawfulness by external independent Appointed Auditor. Further to this, the provision in the constitution is contrary to legislation and the subsequent policy was adopted by the council themselves in 2006.

CRWG was established following the WLGA Governance report which found serious failing in the way in which the council was run, including the lack of transparency. The WLGA governance review itself was a direct result of the findings of the Wales Audit Office in January 2014. It is ironic that a document relating to the very issue which was the subject of one of those public interest reports is now being withheld.

I believe that the refusal to release the report is based solely on a reluctance for this controversial issue to be subject to public engagement and wider discussion. My own request to Cllr Dole for the matter to be placed on a CRWG agenda last year was refused as he didn't want to 'resurrect' the issue. However, the matter remains unresolved, transparency over the process remains imperative and the report should be disclosed forthwith.

I would be grateful for an acknowledgement of this email.

Yours sincerely

Jacqui Thompson

* * *

The libel cost clauses, aka slush fund. Potential reinstatement on the cards.

Cllr Rob James, leader of the Labour opposition group on Carmarthenshire Council gives his views recent developments over the unlawful libel indemnity clause. Refreshingly clear and straight to the point, it's worth a watch.

* * *

I have made my views on the matter crystal clear and my efforts to obtain documents from the recent 'working group' meeting can be read here. There's plenty of background on this blog, including the CRWG meeting here.
(Just to be clear, the opinions expressed below, and on this blog are mine alone, not views expressed by Cllr Rob James)

I don't need to elaborate, I've done so many times but I will say, yet again that this clause is unlawful, or, in the real world, illegal. Despite the endless denials and desperate attempts to discredit the Auditor, and anyone else, Mark James knows it too. Since the Auditor's findings in 2014 he, and head of law Ms Rees-Jones have deliberately and continually misrepresented the legal position and misled councillors, and used precious public resources to do so.
What is worse, perhaps, is that our pious church-going chief executive 'persuaded' Plaid council leader Rev Dole to betray his own conscience, u-turn, and sing from the same, profoundly un-Christian-like hymn sheet.

It is very much in Mark James' interest, and it is his intention, to try and reinstate the clause or at least overturn the label 'unlawful'. Who knows, perhaps he's hoping for a knighthood... He has never repaid the unlawful cash and, without a pang of conscience, breached the undertaking to hand over the damages back to the council.

Whatever happens this issue will not go away, despite the administration's best attempts to muddy the waters, kick it into the long grass, or any similar metaphor.
Whatever your views on the libel case itself, it is extremely important that the clause is completely removed.
As for accountability, it is my honestly held opinion that Mr James and Ms Rees-Jones should both have been sacked over this fiasco four years ago. There's still time.

The row over the unlawful indemnity clause, and the 'leak' from the Constitutional Review Working Group (CRWG) meeting held at the end of July continues, with further coverage in this week's Carmarthenshire Herald.
Cllr Rob James, Labour opposition leader who is pushing for the removal of the clause, claims that his group are now barred from all sensitive information related to decisions made by the Plaid/Indie coalition, scrutiny of spending will be limited. I have heard similar claims and, furthermore, council leader Emlyn Dole confirms it in a statement to the Herald saying that it was now questionable whether confidential information could be trusted to the Labour leader.

This restriction came about following my blog post here which revealed the fact that the libel indemnity clause had been discussed at the CRWG meeting. No graphic details were published, there were no personal or commercially sensitive material, nor did anyone imagine that the whole business was top secret.
CRWG, you may recall, was set up to improve governance and make the council more transparent, not, as it now appears, as a secret conduit for the chief executive to challenge the qualifications of the Auditor. Something he has tried before.

Clearly the auditor's findings are still keeping Mr James awake at night. Only last year, in his complaint to the Ombudsman against Sian Caiach he rambled on at length about his unlawful indemnity, not that it was unlawful of course. He attacked, yet again, the then Appointed Auditor, Anthony Barrett claiming, in so many words, that his findings were based on little more than shifting sands and a passing whim.
As we know, the WAO have not changed their view and their finding has never been overturned in court.

Cllr Dole's previous enthusiasm to fully accept the Auditors findings and remove the clause in 2014, and his 'pledge' to promote 'a new mindset as we seek to ensure full openness and transparency' in May 2015, all mysteriously evaporated when he was given the key to the Presidential Toilet. It must all be a bit embarrassing, poor man...
He probably hopes that the whole sordid business will find the long grass, or those lumpy carpets in Mark James' Presidential Suite, and as yet, no letter has been written to the WAO, as resolved at the CRWG meeting.

And as for the CRWG item on libel indemnities being 'confidential', it's completely ridiculous and entirely without basis - legal advice, information, reports, judgements and numerous press reports have all been in the public domain for five years. And as I have explained before, there is an inherent and significant public interest for transparency over this issue.
And who do you think is so annoyed with the 'leak' that councillors' access to information has been restricted?
The same control freak who restricted Sian Caiach access a few years back for 'asking too many questions' and who threatened councillors with court action, to give just two examples.
This secretive, controlling nonsense lies squarely at the door of Mark James and his personally appointed legal umbrella, Linda Rees Jones. Our Leader, Cllr Dole is just grateful for his £48k a year, and does exactly what he's told. Just like every other council leader since the chief executive arrived from Boston all those years ago.

* * *

Ombudsman investigation costs

Previous post; Mark James' complaints against Sian Caiach - the Ombudsman's conclusion

A few weeks ago I made Freedom of Information requests to the council, and the Ombudsman's office, for the cost of the investigation. With Mark James CBE having wasted 18 months of everyone's time, I wondered what it had also cost the taxpayers' of Carmarthenshire and indeed Wales.

The council's response

Remarkably, for the 18 months investigation, the only thing that the council had actually written down was an hour and a half of officer time amounting to £92.40.

This response was bizarre on so many levels. They could, for all we know, have spent £100,000 but if they only 'recorded' one little bit, ie £92.40, then that's all they have to disclose under FOI.

Mr James' complaint ran to 32 pages, assisted by free use of the council legal department rather than instructing his own solicitor; there was 'evidence gathering' in the form of statements from several council officers, there were documents obtained from the police, letters from council solicitors; the trawling of several blogs and assorted tweets, computer and printing costs, and whatever else occurred during the 18 months.
£92.40 probably just about covered the cost of printing out, yet again, Mr James' favourite bedtime reading, Tugenhat's lengthy judgement.

Mr James has form of course in using public resources, including hard cash, to pursue his personal vendettas and has habitually treated publicly funded resources as a mean to his own ends, or a means to failure, particularly in respect of his complaints to the police about me or his complaint against Sian Caiach.

What this deliberate omission to log expenditure means is that not only are the press and taxpaying public kept in the dark, but, more importantly perhaps, so are the auditors, and without a paper trail Mr James could have, and indeed did, spend and utilise whatever wanted. The true cost of this little exercise is probably the equivalent of at least couple of years pay for a junior council worker.

The FOI request and response can be seen here.

The Ombudsman's response

The Ombudsman's office would 'neither confirm or deny' that they held the information. This kind of response enables a public body to refuse to confirm that an investigation took place to protect sensitive information from disclosure and is usually reserved for FOI requests concerning police investigations or matters of national security.

The refusal by the Ombudsman to 'confirm or deny' in this case was somewhat unexpected, with their response bringing up issues of 'confidential investigations' and 'data protection'. I asked for the costs of course, not any documents or personal information about anyone. As for the investigation being confidential, the outcome was reported in the press.

I have now asked for an internal review which, along with the response etc, can be seen here.

Last week I received the outcome of the internal review following the refusal, by the council, to disclose the officer's report to 'CRWG' on the subject of unlawful libel indemnities.

The unsurprising upshot of the 'review' being that the council are still, (despite all this arising from the WAO public interest report), refusing to release the CRWG report under Legal Advice Privilege. One of the reasons given against the disclosure of the report was, incredibly and hilariously, 'The significant public interest in the observance of law and the administration of justice'
My previous post concerning details of the request is here.

I have now appealed to the Information Commissioner.

Interestingly Mr Edgecombe (council solicitor who responds to FOI reviews) confirmed in his response, that Head of Law/Monitoring Officer, Linda Rees Jones was the author of the report to CRWG.

One can only wonder whether she declared any sort of interest given that she was a witness in the libel proceedings. It would, of course, be highly improper to declare such an interest several weeks after the meeting (and as we know with historic allegations against Mr James, tampering with documents is not allowed...)

It is a safe bet that both she and Mr James closely monitored the freedom of information request and, as I have said, it is they who are reluctant to disclose the report. Not only does Ms Rees Jones provide a legal rubber stamp for the chief executive's nefarious activities but owes her position as Monitoring Officer directly to his, erm, warm generosity, rather than the inconvenient formalities of Appointment Committee 'B'.

Ms Rees Jones was not just a witness for the council in the 2013 libel trial but also for Mark James and his unlawfully funded counterclaim. Her Witness Statement, which I still have a copy of, was concerned, incidentally, with an attempt to defend the thorny issue of libel indemnities and the constitution...

Ms Rees Jones has appeared to have forgotten this small matter of her being a witness over recent years, and whilst she has been keen to mention, as recently as last year to the Ombudsman in Mr James' failed complaint, that Sian Caiach, and Cneifiwr were witnesses for myself, her role in the proceedings is conveniently brushed over.

She will, no doubt, have an absurd and implausible get out of jail free card which, for reasons best known to her and Mr James, exempt her from having to make such a declaration. It was Ms Rees Jones who found absolutely nothing untoward with Mr James remaining in the Exec Board meeting, and not declaring any interest, when he was personally and unlawfully bankrolled for the counterclaim. The Appointed Auditor thought differently... Neither did she see anything wrong in 'informally' co-writing the report with Mr James, prior to the meeting, recommending his own indemnity.

You can guarantee that the report to CRWG was 'informally' co-written with Mr James in exactly the same way. Mr James was, I understand, not present at the CRWG meeting in July, well, not in body anyway. He didn't have to be, he was there in the dutiful spirit of Ms Rees Jones, and of course the now equally dutiful Cllr Dole.

The Members of CRWG should be made aware of Ms Rees Jones' interest, surely they are already aware of Mr James' direct involvement. If she has not declared an interest then CRWG should make a formal complaint.
Declaration or not, she shouldn't be advising on this matter full stop. It is quite remarkable.

In fact the ability of Mark James and Ms Rees Jones to advise council on anything related to the issue of libel indemnities is completely compromised, and biased, by their own direct involvement.

Whilst the issue remains live it is in their personal and professional interests to ensure that no one challenges their unique view that they have done nothing wrong. From defrauding the public purse to manipulating councillors with misleading advice, from failing to declare interests to downright dishonesty, Mark James is the culprit but Ms Rees Jones is his taxpayer funded personal defence lawyer.

It was eminent lawyer and former lay member of the council's Audit Committee, Sir David Lewis, who described the council's internal legal advice in 2014 as 'cavalier' and incompetent', and not without good reason. This whole farce is a testament to that, and I, personally, would add the words 'deceitful' and 'unscrupulous' to the list.

After noticing a pointless question about tourism figures from a Plaid Cymru backbencher to the Plaid administration at last month's full council meeting, I see there are two more highly suspect, planted questions on the agenda for Wednesday's meeting. One question concerns the affordable housing 'journey' and the other relates to school performance. This is a worrying trend.

Spontaneity and topical debate was stopped a couple of years ago when the chief executive removed Any Other Business, and relegated all the committee minutes to the tail end of the agenda, just for 'noting'. Much of each meeting is now taken up with death-by-power point presentations, leaving little time for any serious debate. It is largely a sanitised, polite and dull affair.

There are usually a handful of tightly controlled 'Councillor Questions' and Motions covering issues which are often unrelated directly to the Council, and, as the administration has seven days to come up with an answer to any questions, not exactly cutting edge stuff. Public questions have dwindled to zero. The agenda is, of course, controlled by the chief executive, as is the council itself.
Full council meetings have become little more than a platform for propaganda, a showpiece of spin and half truths.

This latest trend, where a Plaid councillor asks a Plaid Executive Board Member to 'explain' the 'wonderful success' of something-or-other, is such a blatant piece of propaganda as to be laughable.
Wikipedia informs me, reliably I'm sure, that in Australian politics, such questions are know as 'Dorothy Dixers'

Opposition questions can be equally staged of course, although last month a Labour councillor came up with an interesting supplementary. His question, on homelessness and affordable housing prompted a lengthy response from Emlyn Dole's sister-in-law, Exec Board Member Linda Evans who waxed lyrical over their achievements and commitment to accommodate those less fortunate than themselves. (perhaps Emlyn's got a couple of spare rooms at Pontyberem's very own Southfork..).

He then asked how many young people were currently holed up in unsatisfactory HMOs. Ah, there were some, she said, unavoidable, I'm afraid, er, something we're addressing, she faltered.
Mind you, she could always ask Mr James for advice, he knows a thing or two about trying to make people homeless..

As for the council's Scrutiny Committees as hotbeds of executive questioning, they were recently subject to a review by the Wales Audit Office which found that they were still officer-led; Executive Board members were not being held accountable and presentations from external bodies took up a disproportionate amount of time. They found little evidence that Scrutiny took forward either internal audit or Wales Audit Office reports; public engagement was minimal and the meetings are not webcast; some members wandered out before the end of the meetings and attendance at training sessions was low.

Of course Caebrwyn can think of lots of questions to put to full council, from plunging the county into terminal debt for Mr James' Wellness Dream, to wasteful complaints to the Ombudsman, to the latest nonsense over the unlawful libel indemnities. And everything in between.
Including a £3.9m black hole in the revenue budget.
Though I was one of the first, in over ten years, to ask a public question back in 2015.

If political groups want to put out propaganda, which obviously they all do, and at any opportune moment, they have their own party machine and means to do it, and in Carmarthenshire, the current, and indeed previous administration, also have a well-resourced, and publicly funded press office who will happily oblige.
Whilst an element of political grandstanding and cross-party bickering at full council meetings is to be expected, full council meetings are not the place for these questions and take the already dire proceedings to a new low.
It would seem that the Plaid leadership are perhaps composing the 'questions' for their own councillors to read out. This is not what 'Councillor Questions' are for and are an abuse of the provision.

Perhaps it's time for the great Carmarthenshire public to get back down to County Hall ask a few questions ourselves.

Interesting piece over on Jac O'the North's blog (see 'A little place in the west') about our chief executive Mark James CBE who, when not Commanding the British Empire is busy building his own little fiefdom in west Wales, and wider afield with the Swansea City Deal. Control has always been the order of the day for Mr James, from deciding the set up of political 'power' to ensuring total compliance with his distorted world view. That view, unfortunately, has no one but himself at the centre, with councillors kept in the dark and the taxpaying residents no more than a means to an end. Remember, this public servant has used you to unlawfully bankroll his private vendettas and, some might say, look after his friends.

Jac considers the recently established arms-length housing company, Cartrefi Croeso. If there was ever going to be any democratic oversight it evaporated when full control was delegated to Mr James. The council is the only shareholder which means that he has the power to act on their behalf, he can also appoint and dismiss the directors (currently two, both council directors) and decide when funding will be released. You can also forget freedom of information requests. He will be answerable to no one.
What he likes to make certain of, with everything, is that if anything goes wrong, which it will, it will be his underlings who take the flak.
Jac o'the North is not the first person to liken Mr James to a mafia don, you may also recall a similar sentiment from the former police commissioner.

The Wellness village vanity project is another case in point. The track record and 'rebirth' of the company appointed to develop the private healthcare project is curious to say the least and the appointment of Mr James' devoted number one fan, former council leader Meryl Gravell on the board of directors would be laughable if it wasn't so serious. The project, if it ever materialises will be of very little benefit to the people of Llanelli, apart from a few low paid jobs, and none at all to the rest of the county. On the other hand, a few short term investors and some overseas bank balances might do rather well.

What I find even more remarkable is that alongside all this, Mr James, part time council CEO and Cardiff property magnate, has his own private property management business, he's a co-director in a company which, amongst other things, boasts access to planning and legal advice, and he's also a landlord. When I asked the council, last year, whether all this featured on the Register of Officers' Interests, it seems he hadn't thought it was worth the bother.

The delegation of liability, whilst retaining control can backfire of course, which it did over the unlawful libel indemnity. Mr James was so concerned with trying to make sure that the Executive Board took the blame for his actions that he had the 2014 draft Court of Appeal slush fund judgement amended to mention this.
What he conveniently failed to add was the fact that he had deliberately misled the Executive Board and stayed in the meeting to ensure their total compliance, that latter point itself made his indemnity illegal, even without the fact that he'd broken the law. This behaviour from both him and the Monitoring Officer, Linda Rees Jones, continues to this day.

As for the arms-length companies, if that is a road this council wishes to go down then it should be remembered that it is the council who is the shareholder, delegation is something which should be carefully thought through.
With the council's blind blessing Mr James has, over the years, been given the authority to do just about anything he pleases, he has lied, bullied and manipulated his way to total power, attempting to emasculate the local press on the way, whilst always trying to ensure he is liable for nothing. He keeps dossiers on his 'enemies' but, as the saying goes, he keeps his 'friends' even closer.

When Mr James went on gardening leave in 2014 whilst Gloucestershire Police carried out their criminal 'investigation' a fair few thought, and secretly hoped, he wouldn't come back. He did of course, as if nothing had happened. In 2015 he announced he was leaving but the collective sigh of relief was shortlived when he changed his mind a couple of months later, due solely to the fact that there was going to be opposition to his half a million quid pay off.

I am of the view that he should be brought to account before he goes anywhere, he has pocketed tens of thousands of pounds of public cash which he shouldn't have (fraud, in any other walk of life), including tax avoidance; he's lied, outrageously, to his employers, and misled the courts and he's used the council as his own personal office space, and the legal department as his personal defence lawyers.

Jac o'the North concludes; "It is quite amazing how, in a Western democracy, the employee of a public body can take over that body and run it as if it were some private company he had created himself! Which would be bad enough, but neither the elected representatives of those that employ him, nor the superior level of government that should be holding him to account, are prepared to do anything!"
Nov 9th; Later post and follow-up from Jac o'th North here.

Next week's full council meeting features several interesting questions concerning the 'Wellness Village' and, more specifically, the partnership between the council and Sterling Health. The latest craze for setting up arms-length companies also comes under the spotlight. It should be interesting.

The questions, listed below in bold, are pretty self-explanatory and are from opposition leader Cllr Rob James (Lab) to Plaid's Emlyn Dole, (the comment or link in italics are mine);

Could the Leader of Council please give a brief overview on the process that was undertaken in choosing a private sector partner for the Wellness Village, outlining how many organisations took part in the Competitive Dialogue process and the reason Sterling Health was chosen?

It seems that as well as Sterling Health being a reincarnation of the now-dissolved Kent Neurosciences (which were the original partners) they were the only bidders for the contract. It is not known whether any other organisations actually tried to tender, maybe Emlyn will tell us.
Wellness Village 'Private partners - something oddly familiar?

Could the Leader of Council highlight who the Directors are behind the Joint Venture Partner and what experience they bring to the project?

I'm thinking here of one recent, and inexplicable addition to Sterling's directors, Meryl Gravell... her notable achievements as leader of Carms Council included calling protesters campaigning against closure of their local A & E 'rabble'; calling the workforce lazy; and when the council were busy closing all the little schools, accused councillors of 'displaying weakness' for listening to parents' concerns. For more, please search this blog.
She was also known, in some quarters, as Mark James' cash cow, keeping him in the manner to which he's become accustomed, unlawful payments included.

The Collaboration Agreement for the projects on Delta Lakes with Swansea University and Sterling Health is said to cost £200 million, please could the Leader of Council detail how each partner will be expected to contribute to this cost?

Yes please, do tell us. The last set of ever-changing figures I saw showed a £127m contribution from the private sector, it will be interesting to know the details... Hopefully we will also be told exactly how much the council will be borrowing, with it's current tally of debt already at £400m.

Could the Leader of Council outline how much this Authority has paid in consultancy fees since May 2015, including those connected with projects relating to the Swansea Bay City Deal?

Funnily enough I've recently made a Freedom of Information request for consultancy fees, currently awaiting a response. By August 2017 the council had already spent £564k on 'Wellness Village' reports. That will have gone up sharply in the last twelve months.

Earlier this year, the governance and management structures of Cwm Environmental Limited, were changed to a Teckal company. Could the Leader of Council please indicate what impact, if any, these changes have had on pay and conditions of the employees?

Could the Leader of Council please provide information on the remuneration package attached to the new Operations Director post of Delta Wellbeing Limited?

This Authority has established several companies in the last eighteen months that has resulted in reduced oversight for services that ordinarily are carried out by the Council; Councillors and the public being unaware of what is happening in these companies; and public finances in connection with public sector ventures being questioned. Will the Leader of Council, therefore, pledge to halt the continuing outsourcing of services to teckal companies and promise not to create any new companies, including any relating to the City Deal, for the remainder of this term?

For some background to the arms-length outsourcing ventures (and of course the whole Wellness/City Deal thing) there have been numerous mentions on this blog, if you wish to search. My previous post, Mark James and the 'Sicilian Cartel', also gives a viewpoint.

As I am writing this, the responses, no doubt, are being dreamed up by the chief executive, for Emlyn to deliver, so I hope there's a few follow-up questions being lined up.
Whether related to the arrival of these questions on the chief executive's desk or not, the council/City Deal PR machine has been in overdrive again, this week the fanfare's been out for the exciting and amazing prospect of a new leisure centre, or the 'Wellness Hub' in the Wellness thing. Presumably this is to attract public support, with far less emphasis, funnily enough, on the private health care, the 'Wellness Hotel' and the holisitc therapy pods...

We can safely predict that the answers will be used as an opportunity for further spin and half truths, and anyone who suggests that this may not be the best thing since sliced bread will be accused of jeopardising the future prosperity of ~~Mark James and Co~~ the little children of Carmarthenshire.

In actual fact, after two years of nothing but PR puffery, this whole business is screaming for some proper scrutiny. Especially with Mr James CBE in charge.

We'll see.

Elsewhere on the agenda there's a question on the £500k development fund trumpeted by Plaid last year as a pot to help out struggling schools. According to Cllr Morgan (Ind), it's main use seems to be related to 'efficiency savings' rather than direct help. Nothing is ever quite as it seems.
As for the SEN budget there's been a £800k overspend as schools struggle to cope with demand.

As an aside, a recent meeting of the Education Scrutiny Committee tried to get to grips with the 'Performance Monitoring Report for the period 1st April to 30th June 2018 (Quarter 1); progress against actions and measures in the New Corporate Strategy 2018-23 to deliver the 2018/19 Well-being Objectives'

As the garbled Minutes below illustrate, there is clearly a problem with this type of report, and all Scrutiny meetings are stuffed with them;

"Concern was expressed that of the 27 measures reported, 20 have either not started or data is not collected for quarter 1 and 2 are not available. Also the with regard to the 67 actions reported as being on target, it was pointed out that the targets dates are not until 2019/20. The Head of Education Services explained that the term “on target” is historic and what is meant is that in relation to performance in quarter 1, officers do not perceive any challenges to meeting the targets;
Concern was expressed over the format of the report in that themes 11 and 13 appeared between themes 1 and 2. Officers agreed to look at the formatting of future reports"

***

Finally, a quick mention about the Planning Committee next Thursday, only because I've taken a passing interest in the use of 'commercially sensitive' viability appraisals to reduce the level of affordable homes or community contributions by large developers.
An application for 48 homes in Llannon, by Pennant Homes is on the agenda, (incidentally the Council's own Local Development Plan recommended 38, but never mind)

I'm not against housing developments nor am I in favour of unreasonable demands on developers, but viability appraisals are being used more and more and councils, when faced with stark figures, are held over a barrel. The problems arise when the figures are calculated specifically to satisfy the requested reduction (I'm not suggesting that this is the case here at all), and as these reports are withheld as 'commercially sensitive', it is impossible for councillors to question the basis of the reduction.

In this case an unspecified amount of community contributions (S106 obligations) have been agreed, "on the basis of a viability report", the viability being compromised by the "necessary engineering to achieve a suitable highway gradient".
Out of 48 dwellings, only three will be 'affordable', far less than the usual 30%. And as this is in Cllr Emlyn Dole's ward I'm sure he won't want to send Plaid's affordable housing 'journey' off track...

The developers, Pennant Homes, are part of Coastal Housing, a housing association providing affordable accommodation and in receipt of government grant funding.

The officers report goes on to state that the "viability report is commercially sensitive, however it shows a developer return at a significantly lower level than would be normally acceptable, so further contributions would make the development commercially unviable."

The issue of viability appraisals across the UK has been a subject of investigation in the past by the Guardian newspaper, an editorial on the subject can be read here.

A few words about today's meeting.

As the whole meeting can be viewed on the archived webcast I'll focus on the questions from Cllr Rob James (Lab), and the responses from council leader Emlyn Dole (Plaid), as detailed in my previous post.

The responses from Emlyn Dole were predictable, shed no light on some of the stranger aspects of the collaboration with Sterling, offered no reassurance that the taxpayers' were not at risk, failed to mention the word 'accountability', and he confirmed Plaid's commitment to setting up lots of arms-length companies. And, indeed, Rob James was attacked, as I said he would be, for jeopardising the future prosperity of ~~Mark James Inc.~~ the children of the county.
Mark James himself didn't speak, there was no need, having had a week to primp and prime Emlyn and to prepare the answers. Cllr Dole didn't let his boss down. As I've mentioned before, Mr James never delegates authority, only liability.

The questions are in bold.

Could the Leader of Council please give a brief overview on the process that was undertaken in choosing a private sector partner for the Wellness Village, outlining how many organisations took part in the Competitive Dialogue process and the reason Sterling Health was chosen?

Cllr Dole started by criticising Labour's Rob James for 'undermining democracy' by 'sharing his questions' and corresponding with a Journal reporter prior to the meeting. Presumably the journalist had already read the questions published on the council website last week anyway. And presumably he's allowed to ask questions, even in Carmarthenshire...

Whatever the case, this cardinal sin was the same as Plaid's own Cllr Alun Lenny sharing a copy of his Motion over the libel damages in December 2016 to a reporter, this was also prior to the meeting. (The Motion was blocked by the chief executive).
Mind you, I don't suppose Emlyn approved of Cllr Lenny's actions, he didn't get to become leader by criticising Mark James, no siree!

The upshot of this is, in my opinion, that no councillor should be afraid to discuss questions, motions, policy or whatever, with the local press. Not even in Carmarthenshire.

As for answering the question, it turned out, as I thought, that despite '34 viewings' of the tender (whatever that may mean), Sterling was the only bidder. It wasn't clear whether the other 33 decided not to touch it with a barge pole, or were mysteriously put off from bidding, the council has had problems with tenders before...

Anyway, according to Cllr Dole there was then a robust Competitive Tendering process with the, erm, one bidder.

Rob James' supplementary question referred to the fact that Sterling was virtually the same company as Kent Neurosciences Ltd, see my post here. In April 2016 the council had entered a 12 month exclusivity agreement with KNS to develop the village but this had not been renewed and the company was dissolved, with a deficit of £128k, a couple of months later. Then KNS popped back up again as Sterling, and away to go!

KNS were behind a private hospital in Kent which opened in 2014 but by 2016 required a £20m refinancing deal due to heavy losses. Most of the original directors had, by that time, moved on.

He asked whether or not the council leadership were concerned about any of this, and added that none of it appeared either fair nor transparent.

Emlyn Dole, clearly having learned from the master, completely avoided the issue at hand and went on the attack. He accused Cllr James of trying to undermine the process and attacking their ambition. He then drifted into a robot like trance listing all the exciting things which would be part of this Wellness extravaganza. Followed by a round of applause from the Plaid ranks. Curiously, the words 'private health care', and 'luxury spa' had slipped his mind.

Rob James moved on to his second question.

Could the Leader of Council highlight who the Directors are behind the Joint Venture Partner and what experience they bring to the project?

Another curious thing about Sterling is the number of sister companies it has, Sterling Operating, Sterling International, Sterling Property, Sterling Holdings, etc. Emlyn Dole was careful just to identify one.

Another curious thing was that former leader, Meryl Gravell was, in July, made a Director of two of them. This was Cllr James area of interest.

With some smug satisfaction Cllr Dole listed the Directors, which did not include Dear Meryl. What he failed to add was that although she had resigned from Sterling Health Security Holdings Ltd (which was the one he had carefully identified) last week, she is still, as of today, listed as a director of Sterling Health Security Operating Ltd.

The latest accounts for Sterling Health Security Holdings Ltd show a net liability of £137,822 in the red, it requires a loan from the directors to continue as a going concern.

So Cllr Dole was being very economical with the truth. Furthermore, he failed to explain why she was/is a director at all. Maybe he's developed another u-turn and become an adoring fan.

The Collaboration Agreement for the projects on Delta Lakes with Swansea University and Sterling Health is said to cost £200 million, please could the Leader of Council detail how each partner will be expected to contribute to this cost?

Cllr Dole resorted to spin by saying that this was not a cost, oh no, this was an investment! The council would be contributing their £32m with the leisure centre and land value (planning permission still undecided). There was no mention of the borrowing (and the interest payable) which will be required for the upfront costs, estimated, I understand, to be at least £55m. The private investment couldn't be determined until the investors had been secured, through 'due diligence', of course...

Rob James' supplementary question asked how Sterling, currently £137k in the red, were going to come up with £127m.

Cllr Dole then wandered into the world of global networks, stakeholders and new Corporate Vehicles to enable public/private investment, liability and risk assessments and local governance requirements. Careful to avoid the toxic term 'PFI'.

None of which reassured anyone that the taxpayers' wouldn't be picking up a big bill if, and when, things go pear-shaped, and when the originators of this project have long gone.
Neither does it address the question as to what, exactly, the mysterious global investors hope to get as a return, unless they're doing it out of the kindness of their hearts of course.

Not sure that Cllr Dole was convinced by what he was saying either.

Could the Leader of Council outline how much this Authority has paid in consultancy fees since May 2015, including those connected with projects relating to the Swansea Bay City Deal?

Rather than give a figure, Cllr Dole went on the attack, it would be a huge ask for council directors to know how much they'd spent on consultants! Fancy asking such a thing. And as for the City Deal, that would also involve other councils and the Welsh Government! He again accused Cllr James of not wanting the Wellness Thing and in so many words, scuppering the process, presumably by asking awkward questions...

Rob James replied stating that the Plaid leadership clearly didn't like scrutiny. Would they promise, he asked, not to spend any more on consultants? "No", said Cllr Dole.

Scrutiny, of course, was what this was all about.

In fact, through my own research, I found that the council had already spent £564k on 'Wellness Village' reports by August 2017. That figure will have gone up sharply in the last twelve months.

Mark James remained silent throughout this 'debate' but I suspect that he has already started compiling one of his 'dossiers' with Cllr James name on the cover, and marked an entry in his little black book, especially after the CRWG libel indemnity episode back in the summer. He must be so proud of Emlyn, he's like a well-trained poodle.

The remainder of Cllr James' questions concerned the recent spate of arms-length companies set up by the administration. Essentially the concern is with the lack of democratic oversight, the future job security, and terms and conditions for employees and the secrecy cloaked in 'commercial sensitivity'.

Cllr Dole confirmed that ~~Mark James~~ Plaid's agenda to set up even more arms-length companies would continue, It was NOT 'outsourcing' at all and he blamed the Labour Welsh Government for making such 'innovations' necessary. He may have a point but Plaid have supported Labour's budget in the Senedd since 2016.

Funnily enough, back in March 2015, with just one arms-length company (Cwm Environmental) in existence, and just before Plaid took 'power', this was what they had to say about 'arms length' companies;

"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."

How the tables turn in politics.

I am not a fan of Labour, or Plaid, or any of them really, but I am a fan of scrutiny and transparency. Whether it's Rob James, or Sian Caiach and a few others before him, someone has to have the bottle, whatever their motivation, to ask 'awkward' questions in Carmarthenshire. Emlyn Dole's response, a mixture of belligerence and evasiveness is disappointing, and worse still, uncannily similar to Meryl Gravell.

(For further posts about the Wellness project and the City Deal, please use the searchbox on the right.)

* * *

Before I go, and with the Wellness spending extravaganza well underway and little clarity on how much has been spent setting up the latest raft of arms-length companies, it's worth mentioning that the latest budget proposals will be on the agenda for Monday's Exec Board meeting. The full list, here, will then go out for consultation.

The current proposals are to cut £28m over three years and include closing more primary schools and charging for post-16 transport, withdrawing funding support for vulnerable young people attending a town centre youth project, three Welsh Language medium youth clubs, specialist provision for Harmful Sexual Behaviour and county youth club provision. Council tax will increase 4.89%.

As I've said, it's not clear just how much has been, and will be, siphoned off into the Delta Lakes swamp. Sacking the chief executive, or securing his well-deserved detention at Her Majesty's Pleasure would save £200k a year, but sadly that's not in the proposals, although I may suggest this in my consultation response.
The cost of senior management continues to rise and according to the accounts, all directors had pay increases last year, of varying amounts, and the number of other employees upwards of £90k, went from nine to fourteen.

One of the proposals being put forward is to reduce full council meetings from monthly to quarterly, ie from eleven, to three or four a year. As the saving will be a mere £7000 I find it unlikely that this will be supported but, you never know.

In some ways, given that this council is so officer-led, full council meetings are almost superfluous, as are most of the 74 councillors. They are regarded as a minor irritant and a necessary evil by the chief executive. They do not make 'decisions', they accept, by and large, the recommendations presented to them by officers and nod them through accordingly.
This reduction is almost certainly Mark' James' idea, it will suit him just fine, and perhaps give him more time to spend on his private affairs....

The level of democracy, and democratic debate in Carmarthenshire is dire, and always has been but it's all we've got, and as @mjmilan put it rather well on Twitter;

"@caebrwyn @CarmsCouncil You absolutely must not drop to quarterly full council meetings, lest the last faint whiff of accountability on the carcass of democracy in your town be lost forever..."

Since the end of July, the 27th to be precise, I have been trying to obtain documents concerning officers' libel indemnities discussed at the CRWG meeting held on that date.

To recap, the Labour opposition leader Cllr Rob James tabled a Motion for the Constitution Review Working Group (CRWG) for the purpose of completely removing the suspended libel clause from the council's constitution.

Despite the cross-party CRWG being set up to improve governance and transparency following the pension and libel indemnity scandals, and the equally damning governance audit by the WLGA, the agendas and minutes are not published and the meetings are held in private.

The group, which is not properly constituted (conveniently), is overseen, and advised by Mark James and Monitoring Officer Linda Rees Jones, the former to blame for the scandals, and the toxic culture in the first place and the latter his personal legal rubber stamp.

With the Motion arriving on the chief executive's desk several days prior to the meeting, Ms Rees Jones was tasked with writing a report to accompany Cllr Rob James' Motion.

Not only does Mark James have a conflict of interest with this issue but so does Ms Rees Jones; as a witness for Mark James in the libel trial, her witness statement concerned itself with the 'legality' of the libel indemnity clause, the slush fund.
As I said here, neither of them should be advising councillors on these matters.

At the meeting, with Emlyn Dole in the Chair and Ms Rees Jones on hand to impart her master's voice, (Mark James had kept away, pulling the strings from afar, delegating liability again and not wishing to get his hands any dirtier than they already are, if that's possible), things took an unexpected turn.

Instead of a unanimous and sensible decision to immediately remove the unlawful clauses, which would also have removed the potential for a massive financial risk, it was resolved, by a majority vote, to write to the WAO to 'clarify the legal position' with a view to reinstate the clause.
I understand that at least one senior Plaid councillor wanted to know if Members too could be provided with libel indemnities if they so desired....

I published an outline of what transpired at the meeting on this blog but not the details and documents, as I did not have that information. This blog post was classed as a 'leak' and tempers flared accordingly.
See also here.

Since then I have asked the council, and the Wales Audit Office, for a copy of the letter that CRWG resolved to send, and which would have been written by Mark James and signed by Ms Rees Jones.

Nearly four months have now passed and no letter has been written. The clause remains suspended, but is still there, and the issue is once again being shovelled under those lumpy carpets of the Presidential Suite.

I'm not sure what 'writing to the WAO' would have achieved anyway, I understand that their legal position remains the same.

What is interesting though, as an issue of governance, is the nature of CRWG Resolutions. How soon after the meeting, and a formal Resolution no less, did someone say, ahh, let's not bother, let's not open that can of worms. I have asked Ms Rees Jones to clarify the nature of a CRWG resolution, is it binding? Or is it not?
She is refusing to tell me.

Anyway, I also asked for her report to the CRWG meeting and this, as you can see here, was refused under legal professional (advice) privilege. I have now made a complaint to the ICO and I await their response. As I have said, her conflict of interest is obvious.

My arguments against the use of legal professional privilege; and for the overriding public interest to disclose, include the fact that this whole issue arose from a WAO report, published IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST, and also the fact that the substantive legal advice has already been published back in 2014, on the council website, when Mark James and the then Exec Board were expensively defending the indefensible.

In addition, the implications of publicly funding libel actions for senior officers is very much in the public interest, across the UK.
This is not an issue which is just of interest to some members of the public, it is in the public interest that the information is released. There is a difference between the two concepts. Public money should not be used for this purpose anywhere, and legislation prevents it, unless you are Mark James.

To bring you bang up to date, I recently asked for the 'Minutes' of the CRWG meeting.

The 20 day limit came and went last Friday the 9th November. After a couple of prompts, including a final nudge yesterday, the response duly arrived about an hour later. I am certain that the delay is down to the fact that it is Mr James who is actually providing the response.

The response, which is published in full at the end of this post, was a refusal. The Minutes (or 'Action Notes') are being withheld under Legal Advice Privilege, just like Ms Rees Jones' report, because, so it says, the minutes refer to the report.

What?!
This, as before, is utter nonsense. It also has the potential to prevent the disclosure of anything written by a council solicitor to elected members, if it suits the agenda of Mark James.

It is totally absurd that the minutes from a meeting of a few cross-party councillors will not be shared with the rest of the elected members.

I will, of course, ask for an internal review etc etc but the secrecy over this is inexplicable, bonkers really. Mr James is quite accustomed to flouting the law, undertakings, the truth etc but playing fast and loose with Legal Professional Privilege to this extent, widening its scope to prevent public debate on a controversial subject, is a relatively new venture. He continues to change the rules to protect his own back.

I don't know what the ICO will say, but I will take this refusal, and the refusal to disclose the officer's report, as far as I can, if necessary

It is absolutely remarkable that anyone at that council is continuing to pander to Mr James over this. With the authority facing £28m cuts over the next three years, does anyone, other than him, think it right that potentially, a cool million or two should be spent on massaging his fragile ego?
The cash he took last time, and the thousands spent fruitlessly fighting with the WAO, would have been better spent on vital services. Not that he cares a jot.

One of the reasons that it is in Mr James' interest for the clause to remain 'suspended' is that any change to the constitution, reinstatement or removal, will have to be decided, eventually, by full council, in the full glare of publicity. If it's removed, he's lost the argument and he'll have a bloody nose, if there is any attempt to reinstate, he's definitely lost the plot.

As I have mentioned above, this is all very much in the public interest. I personally will never let the matter drop until the clause is removed and this disreputable and dishonest chief executive brought to account, whether he's at the council, or moved on elsewhere.

The Freedom of Information response;

Dear Mrs Thompson,

I refer to your request for information, which was received on 5thOctober, 2018 and has been dealt with under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Please accept my apologies for the delay in providing this response.

The specific information you requested was as follows:

"1. Thank you for your reply dated 20th September. Could you please tell me if the letter to the Wales Audit Office regarding unlawful libel indemnities has been sent yet? If so then could you please provide me with a copy.

2. I would also be grateful for a copy of the minutes from the CRWG meeting held on the 27th July."

In response to the first part of your request, the Council does not hold this information.

With regard to the second part of your request, this information is held.

However, the substantive content of the action notes is information relating to a report which is subject to legal professional privilege. We therefore believe that the content of the notes is itself privileged, as it is information relating to a communication between a legal professional and a client.
In responding to you on previous requests, I have set out our position and the relevant case law regarding legal professional privilege and the Freedom of Information Act. For ease of reference, I will revisit this here.

A determination by the Information Tribunal, in Bellamy v the Information Commissioner and the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry (EA/2005/0023, 4th April, 2006), provides a clear definition of legal professional privilege:

“a set of rules or principles which are designed to protect the confidentiality of legal or legally related communications and exchanges between the client and his, her or its lawyers, as well as exchanges which contain or refer to legal advice which might be imparted to the client, and even exchanges between the clients and [third] parties if such communications or exchanges come into being for the purposes of preparing for litigation.”

The Bellamy decision also defined two types of privilege, namely litigation and advice privilege. I believe in this case that the report is subject to advice privilege, which applies where no litigation is in progress or being contemplated. This would include confidential communications between the legal professional and the client, for the main purpose of seeking or giving legal advice. A report which in which a lawyer provides advice is by definition, legal advice, as are notes which refer to or discuss that information.

Under Section 42 of the Act, a public authority may refuse to provide information where a claim to legal professional privilege could be maintained. In view of the above, I believe this exemption is therefore engaged.

However, the Section 42 exemption is qualified and subject to a public interest test. In doing so, I must make a distinction between what is genuinely in the public interest and what may merely be of interest to a member of members of the public.

I accept that there are public interest factors which favour disclosure in this case, namely transparency and furthering public knowledge in relation to a matter which has been subject to some publicity in the past.

However, there is an inherent public interest in maintaining this exemption, which will always be strong due to the importance of the principle behind legal professional privilege, which is to protect the privacy of communications between client and lawyer to ensure access to full and frank legal advice, which in turn is fundamental to the administration of justice.

I am not persuaded on this occasion that this is outweighed by the factors favouring disclosure set out above. Accordingly, I believe the exemption should be maintained and the information withheld from disclosure.

As I am refusing to provide the requested information, please therefore consider this email to be a formal notice of refusal under Section 17 of the Act.

John Tillman
Rheolwr Llywodraethu Gwybodaeth a Chwynion
Adfywio a Pholisi
Adran y Prif Weithredwr
Cyngor Sir Gaerfyrddin

Information Governance & Complaints Manager
Regeneration & Policy
Chief Executive’s Department
Carmarthenshire County Council

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