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

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

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

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

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

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

Details are as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But back to the meeting of the Executive Board.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No questions, then.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why not join us for a really fun day out?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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