Jacob Williams https://jacobwilliams.com

With the summer meeting of full council tomorrow at 10am, it’s not so much what’s on the agenda that interests JW, but what doesn’t appear on it.

Cllr. Bob ‘Long Grass’ Kilmister will be doing his nut, because for a long time (and entirely correctly, I may add) he has lamented the way in which legitimate items of business that should be returned for discussion and approval by council, get ‘kicked into the long grass,’ and never see the light of day ever again.

Three of the items that may have been expected to have been referred to tomorrow’s meeting, were shoved into the council’s black hole of doom at the very same time and for the exact same reasons. It was when they came up for discussion at Corporate Governance Committee on June 24th, the three motions being:

• My proposal for members of the public to be able to submit and ask questions at council meetings, which officers recommended should be approved.

• Cllr. Tessa Hodgson’s idea that a panel should be set-up that has the power to make certain appointments of councillors to outside bodies (rather than all of these appointments being decided by the leader alone.)

• The brainchild of Cllr. Rob Lewis which has serious potential to restrict any councillor’s ability scrutinise matters at full council, by calling for the current system for submitting and dealing with questions to be reviewed, and that council “evaluates options for considering questions submitted to Full Council prior to the meeting taking place, in order to ensure that the valuable time of Council is used efficiently and effectively.”

Only the die hard fans of council affairs will recall that for months – if not years – the Welsh Assembly has been working on a draft new constitution for local authorities. Before it was published, some attempts made by Pembrokeshire councillors to put right constitutional pitfalls, or tie up loose ends within the constitution, or even the creation of new provisions which would open the council up, have been shot down by the leader and his predecessor, and the excuse given for not supporting x, y or z, was that, with a new constitution coming down the line from Cardiff Bay, ‘we’ll wait until then.’

Now that the draft constitution has finally been published and received by Welsh councils, the leader’s approach has changed. His new attitude is that he doesn’t want to introduce any changes to the constitution in a “piecemeal approach” as he wants to look at the constitution in its entirety. With his IPPG cohort backing him, the vote taken by Corporate Governance was to refer these three items to a re-kindled ‘Constitutional Issues Working Group’ to look at introducing the whole new constitution in its entirety, ready for adoption by council in December.

Now, you may feel that this is fair enough, but my proposal for public question time was recommended to be accepted by officers, and had little to do with the much larger ‘body of work’ that is entailed in adopting a whole new constitution, and the same can be said for the other two. It was also entirely possible that council agreed with officers, and not the leader, that my proposal should be adopted right now, as per the recommendation, so this is surely one of the only times that the leader has effectively said the official advice is unsound.

I raised several questions during the Corporate Governance Committee meeting, none of which received satisfactory or convincing answers, the most basic question, how Corporate Governance could exercise the power to further-delegate a matter that had been delegated to it by full council, without the prior approval of full council (which would have been at tomorrow’s meeting!)

There is a fourth notice of motion that doesn’t appear on tomorrow’s agenda, too, and it goes to show that no councillor is immune to the grizzly fate of the long grass, because it was a proposal put to council by the leader, Cllr. Jamie Adams. He called for CRB checks to be mandatory for councillors.

I must admit to playing a rather large part in the derailment of this ill thought-out proposal. It was all set to be approved at the February council meeting. Indeed, the leader prefaced his opening remarks by letting members know that he wouldn’t speak long as he was sure it received the wide backing of members and didn’t want to hold up proceedings.

The problem with it was that it was legally unenforceable, and my comments at the February council meeting, following the leader’s opening remarks, brought out other councillors including Plaid Cymru’s Rhys Sinnett, who were not quite happy with the wording or how well it had been thought out, either.

Council resolved to refer the matter back (again) to Corporate Governance, at which point, on the 15th April, the powers that be reluctantly acceded to the previously highlighted fact that council had no power to require members to mandatorily undertake a CRB check, and so the wording was changed to a ‘strong expectation,’ the minutes for the meeting record:

“The Leader, however, acknowledged that compliance with the Council’s strongly expressed expectation that Members should make applications for a DBS Certificate was ultimately a matter for each Member to determine.”

This item still hasn’t found its way out of the long grass and come back to the full council for approval. If it had followed the protocol, it should actually have been passed off at the May council meeting. Its failure to appear on the agenda for a second time, at tomorrow’s meeting, makes me think it may never see the light of day again. I think someone wishes to avoid getting egg on his face!

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Poor bookkeeping

This is the same authority, remember, that would probably have us believe that the three month rule governing its members’ claims for travelling expenses, is also a ‘strongly expressed expectation’ rather than a firm rule which members must adhere to.

In the wake of the very current scandal in which it was revealed by Old Grumpy that the council leader, Cllr. Jamie Adams last year submitted successful claims for historical travelling expenses dating back to 2008, a statement given to the Western Telegraph by a council spokesperson suggests this is exactly the attitude:

“A council spokesman said a three-month time limit for claims to be submitted was in place, but “nothing prevents the authority from making a payment where the allowance is not claimed within this period.””

For reasons I shan’t go into, there are grounds for me to suspect that this statement is far from conclusive, and that the signing-off of these expenses claims could have exceeded authority.

I understand that a lynch mob, that has gathered on the comments section of the Western Telegraph article, has arranged a draft letter for readers to refer the matter to the Wales Audit Office. Whatever the outcome, I don’t think Cllr. Adams will ever be able to recover entirely from his decision to submit vastly out-dated claims, and his excuse that it was ‘poor bookkeeping’ on his behalf, does him no favours.

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Allowances and expenses for the 2012/2013 municipal year

The council has, today, finally published on its website the table of councillors’ allowances and expenses for the 2012/2013 municipal year.

The link to the page:

http://www.pembrokeshire.gov.uk/content.asp?nav=101,1579,1518&parent_directory_id=646