Frank Little

Preparing for yesterday’s audit committee meeting, I was setting myself up to deliver a spiel on how well-regulated the Spanish banks were, and why wasn’t more of our taxpayers’ money invested there instead of Iceland. Then I heard the news that Banco Santander had been caught in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. The man must have kissed the Blarney Stone to have taken in both Santander and a tough investor like Nicola Horlick.

There was also a shiver down my spine when I saw that HSBC, the only bank from the Big Three not to get the begging bowl out to government recently, revealed that it had been stung for the best part of one billion pounds.

Anyway, as a committee we are beginning, cross-party, to question the financial officers in more detail. It is going to take some time to establish mutual trust (the administration need to be assured that we are not going to rush off to the media with distorted reports, and we need to overcome the suspicion that they are hiding things),  but I think we are getting there.

There has been a partial account of Blaenhonddan Council’s decision to cease to operate Caewern community hall. It is unfortunate that neither the Guardian nor the Evening Post were able to send a reporter to the public meeting last Monday at which the issues were addressed. That meeting listened to the protests from the two users of the hall who felt that the six weeks notice given was insufficient for them to make other arrangements, and that, since the council’s accounting year ran until April, the existing precept should take account of running costs until then.

Cllr. Peters (Plaid Cymru) successfully moved suspension of standing orders so that an amendment could be made to the original decision. The hall will now stay open until April. My own view is that the matter of the precept is somewhat irrelevant, and, though December 31st was a tight deadline, a further month should have been sufficient.

Let’s state the facts on which the decision was made, since they rather got lost in the general furore last Monday.

Caewern community centre is less than a kilometre away from a more spacious, purpose-built, 21st-century centre, the Owain Glyndwr.

It requires work to bring it up to modern safety standards. The cost of this work is not yet known, but it will be of the order of thousands of pounds.

In 2007/8, it cost over £1200 per month (in rates, utilities, maintenance, cleaning materials and caretaker wages) to run. The receipts were less than £170 per month on average.

We therefore propose in the short term to close the centre, saving on the running costs and hopefully increasing the revenue of the Owain Glyndwr, which is also running at a loss. We are giving the two groups, who currently use the centre regularly, a few months to decide whether to relocate to the Owain Glyndwr on the same terms, or to make other arrangements.

In the long term, we are looking to give up the lease on the centre to the owners, Neath Port Talbot County Borough. Although we cannot force a break in the contract until 2011, under the terms of the lease, we are seeking to negotiate an end to the lease by mutual agreement.

We accept that the primary purpose of such halls is to provide a service to the community, not to make a profit. However, we must seek to make best use of the council taxpayers’ money while maintaining that service.

The only reason for holding in camera the meeting which decided on the closure was because confidential staff matters were involved.

I am not in the business of closing centres for the sake of it. Each facility must be looked at on a case-by-case basis. This will involve not only economies, but also encouraging their use to maximise their potential.

Councillor Mike Richards (Labour) and I attended the consultation workshop organised on behalf of the Local Government Boundary Commission for Wales held in Carmarthen yesterday.

This sort of outreach exercise is a departure for the Commission. It is very much a brain-child of the outgoing chair, Susan Smith. She had felt that the AGM of the Commission had become too stuffy and unproductive, so organised a less formal discussion in conjunction with this year’s. This had been successful, but was necessarily limited to those who were motivated enough to journey to Llandudno. Therefore, two further consultations for South & East Wales, and for Mid & West Wales, had been arranged. The Carmarthen event represented the latter.

It was gratifying that the “top table” seemed to take on board the general feeling of those present: that, in terms of boundaries and ratio of representation, one size did not fit all. There seemed to be general agreement that the Welsh ratio of councillors to electors, of 1:1750, was about right. Hovever, such factors as geography (affecting communications), the nature of population (rural, urban or mixed) and local economics affected decisions about communtiy council representation.

The outgoing chair and her successor were also quick to defend their independence against the suspicion voiced by a number of councillors that the drawing of boundaries favoured the ruling party. The new man, Paul Woods, declared that if he felt that pressure was put on him by government to come to a particular decision then he would resign.

The sessions were so arranged that people from different disciplines met in groups. I was with representatives from small community councils, one large one with the biggest private housing estate in Wales, a full-time officer (NPT’s own Rhys George) and a town clerk. The interchange of experiences and views - not restricted to boundary concerns - was as valuable as being able to put forward ones views about the Commission.

There may be more after we have a chance to compare notes at the next Blaenhonddan meeting.

The Ramblers’ Association has a Downing Street petition here which is self-explanatory. I would only add that not only paths enjoyed by long-distance walkers are affected. Habitual footpaths, such as those taken as a short cut by ordinary members of the public and which may be taken for granted, are liable to be lost.

I know that Cadoxton’s footpaths have already been defined and are preserved by good use.  However, we can help others save their habitual rights-of-way from being lost.

Labour members, at council seminars and occasionally at full council, have been openly critical of non-attendance by councillors. I myself expressed regret at the absence of Swansea valley representatives for the presentation by bus company representatives a few weeks ago. (Apologies for not reporting on this at the time; I hope to get around to commenting on it here before too long.) Most of the frequent absentees are Plaid and independent members, but Labour is guilty also.

A number of recent council meetings which have had to be scheduled later in the day has revealed one of the reasons for non-attendance. There is a higher proportion of people in employment on the Plaid, SDP and independent benches than in the Labour ranks. Moreover, not all those employers are very accommodating when it comes to allowing time off for council business. When it is a matter of just taking an hour at the end of the day, rather than a whole morning or afternoon, it is much easier. At the last planning committee meeting starting at 16:00, Labour was actually in a minority of one.

Even before I joined the council, I bemoaned the tendency for councillors throughout the land, and especially in the old Labour areas, to be drawn from the ranks of the retired or the unemployable. The answer was obviously to reduce the number of meetings and to have most in the evenings. Neath Port Talbot CBC has not gone that far, but the late afternoon sessions have seen a broadening of the council membership in attendance.

We on the Liberal Democrat benches will press for more of the regular meetings to be programmed for evening or late afternoon, based on the evident success of recent 4 o’clock meetings.

There was an interesting, if somewhat technical, presentation to county council members yesterday morning, on the subject of the European Noise Directive. (The background is this decision by the Welsh Assembly Government.) Nigel Jones, the MD of consultants Extrium, and one of his boffins explained what they had been doing on behalf of WAG.

A lot of work has gone into drawing up noise maps such as this one for the Swansea-Neath-Port Talbot “agglomeration*”. Because of the time scale and practicalities these maps are not the result of on-the-ground measurements, but are from computer models which are fed data such as the amount of traffic, the nature of the traffic (e.g. the percentage of goods as opposed to private) and, in the case of roads, the type of surface. Those suffering from noise from the A465 will be particularly interested in the last point. (In questions afterwards, our trunk roads man revealed that there is some money earmarked for noise reduction on this road. Hopefully, the need for more public works under Mr Darling’s recovery programme will bring this forward.)

The next stage is to draw up an action plan, starting in early 2009. So far, elected members have not been involved, though there has been some input from the council’s officers. Environmental health, planning and roads people have contributed, though it seems they have not had time to consult even committee members. That should change in January.

Most of the questions and other responses from councillors yesterday reflected the need for consultation with  democratically-elected representatives. Those from the M4 motorway and (what I still think of as) the Great Western railway corridors (like Briton Ferry and Sandfields councillors) were especially doubtful about the figures going into the model and hence the noise map of their area which resulted. The synthetic maps will surely have to be adjusted to reflect real-world conditions.

This is important because the consultants, presumably under pressure from WAG, have set a high threshold for remedial action. The maps’ noise “contour line” starts at 68 decibels (dB), because this is a limit specified in industrial noise legislation. However, the initial action plan aims to tackle only those areas suffering 74 dB. It was difficult to establish on the day what this level represented in practical terms, but a few minutes scanning the Web suggests that it was chosen because it was the point on the scale immediately below that (75 dB) at which physical damage is known to be caused. There is a complication in that the decibel scale is not a straight line, but progresses logarithmically. (I’m rather floundering here, and if any constituent with the relevant technical knowledge can come to my aid, I’d be grateful!)

Another drawback to the WAG regulations is that they do not cover rural areas, although the EU directive itself does so. On the positive side, they do provide for “quiet areas” which must be preserved. Our planning people have submitted a provisional list to WAG, which includes Victoria Gardens. I think there is a good case for adding Craig Gwladus and the Tennant Canal to the list, and will put these forward when the consultation phase starts.

*There is a definition here.

The Ramblers’ Association organised a useful training day at Llandarcy today. As well as grounding in basic footpath law, we had a presentation on the Wales Coastal Path.

Some long-held erroneous beliefs were dispelled, while there was reassurance that the law was stronger than I assumed. However, it has yet to be tested in some cases.

Another gratifying message was that our county borough is among the more progressive authorities in respect of footpaths. Neath Port Talbot is cooperating over the missing sections of the coastal path, though there are some tricky problems to solve.

A major benefit of events like this is the opportunity to meet the keen walkers who use our footpaths, as well as people from other communities in South Wales. Two ramblers from Llanelli brought the good news that Carmarthenshire county council are reconsidering their decision to abandon St Illtyd’s Way, which might encourage our environment people to maintain the eastern section down to Margam.

An application has been made to upgrade footpath26 (shown alongside on map copied from Blaenhonddan community council’s guide to public rights of way) to a bridleway.

If anyone has any comments, could they send them to me, or to the Head of Legal Services of the City of Swansea who is coordinating, by 7th December.

The occasional frost of recent nights is a warning of the seasons of colds, influenza and the consequent seizing-up of the bronchi, to come. I am taking precautions, as I hope others in my situation are doing: I had the ‘flu jab yesterday and will have the one for pneumonia next week.

Even so, I will do well to keep up my record of attending council meetings. I was fortunate enough to miss only two county borough seminars and one community council meeting because of ill-health in the spring. It is unlikely that I will be able to keep this up through the winter, but I shall try. I also am prepared to defend my attendance record in public, which is why I want to see Neath Port Talbot being brought into line with other councils, which publish such details, along with the register of members’ interests, on their web-sites. I understand that a review by officers of the council is already looking at this, and I hope that there will be a favourable outcome.

The councillor surgery will take place as planned on Saturday 29th November in the small room at Cadoxton Community Centre, between 10 and 12 in the morning.

I assume that people will have more important concerns during the festive season, so I do not intend to hold a surgery at the end of December, unless there is a public demand.

At the last community council meeting, it was agreed that the pilot web-site was (party political links aside!) had been a success, and that a permanent World-Wide Web presence should be established. The pages will be non-party-political and under the control of our clerk, Mavis Hewitt, with the discretion to call in technical expertise as required. Councillors have already been asked to provide personal details for inclusion on the site.