Sir Samuel Thomas Evans

There will be a short commemoration of the 90th anniversary of Sir Sam Evans' death on 13th September. It will take place at the grave-side in the churchyard of St John the Baptist church at 11 a.m. this coming Saturday.

Goldsworthy knifes the PM

Not Welsh LibDems Ali, but Julia of that ilk in a Q-and-A session in the Independent:

Do you feel sorry for Gordon Brown? NEIL CATTERMOLE, Ayr

Yes. But nobody wants their country to be run by someone they pity.

When is local not local?

Answer: when the term is used by Nationalists. The Scottish Nationalist government is even more centrist than Labour.

Step 1 of central control: every local council in Scotland was "persuaded" not to increase council tax last April. This had an impact on education budgets across Scotland, and in places like Highland have particularly affected rural schools. This makes nonsense of their proposed Rural Schools Bill.

Step 2: introduce an extension to income tax to replace council tax (one cheer from us), but fix the rate centrally, thus denying local authorities the power to set it according to their individual needs. Call it "Local" Income Tax, in the hope of attracting naive Liberal Democrat votes.

Ros Scott calls in

After photos on Cimla Common and a courtesy call on mayor Mal Gunter (picture left), Baroness Scott was entertained by Annette and Councillor Des Sparkes at their house in Tonmawr.

There was a lively discussion between local activists and Ros and her husband Mark. Ros praised the work of the local party, stressing the important place which the many smaller parties held within the Liberal Democrats. She also outlined her platform for the presidential contest, which opens officially on 1st September.

Party finances - read the small print

Liberal Democrat Voice explains why you should not only mistrust the media, but also the spin which quangos put on their press releases.

Baroness Scott Neath itinerary

Baroness Scott will arrive at Neath rail station at 13:29 tomorrow (provided First Great Western keep to timetable!). She will then accompany Councillors John Warman and Des Sparkes to Cimla, to discuss local problems. This will be followed at 14:30 by a visit to Neath Port Talbot council at the civic centre, where she will sign the Mayor's visitors' book.

The afternoon will be completed at around 17:00 by refreshments at Brynhyfryd House in Tonmawr, where the Baroness will meet local activists. From there, she will travel to Bridgend, completing the day with a function at the "Haywain".

Members, local and from other parts of the region, are welcome.

Scottish Leadership Election result

Tavish Scott MSP has been elected as new Scottish LibDem leader.

Comfortable win on first preferences giving him a strong mandate.
Tavish Scott 1450 (59.0%)
Ross Finnie 568 (23.1%)
Mike Rumbles 439 (17.9%)

(Turnout 61%)

Baroness Scott to visit Neath and Port Talbot

Rosalind Scott (Baroness Scott of Needham Market) will meet members in Cimla, Port Talbot and Tonmawr this coming Wednesday, 27th August.

Details to follow.

Clegg unveils super powers?

We are grateful to Jonathan Calder's "Liberal England" for this pointer.

The Cabin must be more than a political football

Nine months ago we stressed the need to keep a youth activity centre in Cwmgwrach and later to publish the report which was the ostensible reason for keeping the Cabin closed.

Labour was largely helped to its capture of Blaengwrach by harnessing the grievances of local families. It should not be left to legal action by the Friends of the Cabin to ensure the restoration of facilities.

The leader of Neath Port Talbot Council has recently publicly subscribed to an extension of the scrutiny facility of the council. Maybe the first subject should be an examination of provision for young people out-of-hours, throughout the borough.

Local taxation

It is the twentieth anniversary of the Local Government Finance Act which saw the introduction of the community charge ("poll tax") to the whole of the United Kingdom.

The poll tax has gone, repealed by a later Conservative government, to be replaced with the council tax, only slightly more fair.

What hasn't gone is the uniform non-domestic rate, under which central government takes taxes in from local businesses and doles it out to local authorities again according to a formula. Thus Neath Port Talbot does not gain from the operations of amazon.co.uk directly, but only from the increase in jobs, with the consequent indirect effect on council tax. Stall-holders in Neath Market complain about the increase in business rates.

Local government should be given more control over business rates, or at least more flexibility.

Baglan Energy Park - nearly full?

The leader of Neath Port Talbot in a barnstorming speech to council last week, announced that the Energy Park was nearly full. This claim is notably missing from the report of the speech on the council's web site.

Let us recap. BP at its peak employed over 2,300 people in Baglan Bay. In 1999, the then Secretary of State announced that the Energy Park would provide 10,000 johs. Between then and 2004, this target was scaled down to 6,000.

The actual figure in 2006 was 280. Since then, according to the county borough's own press releases, no more than five hundred new commercial jobs have been created: Intertissue 300, Halford (say) 25, Shield Medical 120. (Mardon's 480 are only potential jobs.)

Then there are the council's own people at The Quays. 1300 staff would have transferred from Penllergaer to Baglan, and it was also announced that 300 depot staff would be based there. These are not new jobs, but they were previously located outside the borough. This gives a grand total of 2045 extra since 2006, which just about brings us up to BP levels.

Mycouncillor websites - temporary problem

ALDC (the Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors) apologises for mycouncillor web sites, including that for Cadoxton, being unavailable since Thursday last.

They say: "This is a problem with the Webspace company, NativeSpace, who have apprently experienced a major problem with one of their servers which has affected a wide variety of sites which they host.

"We understand the server has been reloaded at NativeSpace, and we will be seeing a return to normal service this morning.

"Apologies from us, and we will be taking this up with the NativeSpace when its all finished."

Standards Committee - a lack of transparency

The choice of a community councils representative on the Neath Port Talbot standards committee came before full council on Thursday. But there was no real choice: it was pushed through without discussion on the council leader's say-so.

(Regular readers will remember that the standards committee has not actually met since last October, when the last external member left. The failure to recruit replacement external members since then has meant that a backlog of cases has built up. External volunteers have now been found, leaving the choice of a CC representative as the last piece in the jigsaw.)

There were three candidates for two posts: committee member, plus one reserve. The candidates were the town mayor for Neath (Labour); a nomination from Dyffryn Clydach CC (Plaid); and one from Coedffranc (Independent).

At the end of a session on possibly the hottest morning of the year so far, prolonged by a slide-show of a (mostly) positive review of the borough's social services followed by mutually laudatory speeches, members were understandably keen to get away for a spot of lunch.

So when council leader Derek Vaughan said that he knew all three candidates, but that clearly the mayor had to be the best, and that he thought that the Plaid community councillor should be reserve (not for the first time, apparently), Labour and Plaid members muttered "aye" and started putting their papers together.

It was left to Liberal Democrats to call "no" and vainly request a vote.

Three questions arise:
- why, when one Labour councillor declared an interest in knowing the unsuccessful candidate, did not the leader excuse himself? His recommended candidate was the mayor of his own community council;
- why should a man with no party affiliation (and, we are told, a respected former officer of both Port Talbot and Neath Port Talbot councils with 30 years of public service) be rejected out-of-hand for standards committee membership, where a non-party attitude is surely welcome?;
- why did not Plaid and the Independent group join the Liberal Democrats in calling for at least a vote on the matter?

It may be that the two successful candidates were genuinely the best. However, the manner in which they were chosen, without discussion or even the merest show of hands, must cast a slight shadow over their selection.

Tory knife plans would add penny on income tax - Huhne

The Conservatives’ plans to lock up young knife carriers would put a penny on the basic rate of income tax, according to Liberal Democrat research.

The Tories would have to lock up over 330,000 young people at a cost of £4.9 billion a year - a penny on the basic rate of income tax- if they want to follow through their pledge to imprison all young people carrying knives.

Tory leader David Cameron recently said: "If you are carrying a knife and you are caught, you should expect to go to prison. Plain, simple, clear."

The huge cost of the pledge is based on the £40,992 annual price of keeping a prisoner behind bars, on top of the cost of building the 100,000 thousand additional prison places that would be needed to house them all.

The Home Office’s 2006 Offending, Crime and Justice Survey reveal that 3% of 10 to 25 year olds admitted to carrying a knife in the past year, equivalent to 334,167 people.

The average sentence currently given to under 18s caught carrying a knife is 3.4 months. Based on this sentence, nearly 100,000 10 to 25 year olds would be behind bars at any one time. Housing these people alone would cost £3.8 billion.

The capital cost of building the 100,000 additional prison places (equivalent to 40 titan prisons) would mean an annual cost of £1.1 billion paying interest on the debt.

Commenting, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Huhne said:
"These figures demonstrate just how little grip on reality David Cameron has. The Tories have been just as irresponsible in threatening prison as Labour has been in pledging hospital visits for offenders.

"By promising to imprison everyone who carries a knife, David Cameron appears to want to double the prison population which is already at record levels and the highest in Europe.

"These figures for knife-carrying also demonstrate the total failure of the Government to get a grip on the knife culture that exists in parts of this country.

"Instead of chasing headlines, Labour and the Tories need to come down to earth and forge a consensus on what works, such as hot-spot policing, intelligence-led stop and search, and restorative justice that brings offenders face to face with their own victims.

"The evidence shows the best way to cut crime is not by posturing on penalties but by increasing detection."

While knife crime is not as significant in South Wales as in English cities, the Cameron policy has implications for us. Over-filling English prisons would put pressure on Welsh gaols, leading to unchecked early releases and use of open prisons for inappropriate convicts.

Notes:
1. Using the survey figures given by the Home Office and the Government’s own population figures, it was estimated that 334,167 young people (10 to 25 year olds) carried a knife in the last year;

2. Young people and crime: findings from the 2006 Offending, Crime and Justice Survey;

3. Population figures taken from the Office for National Statistics;

4. Prison costs based on Howard League for Penal Reform estimate, based on a parliamentary answer;

5. If everyone who was caught carrying a knife was sentenced to prison for a year, then the cost to the public purse would be £13.6 billion. This figure comes from multiplying the total number (334,167) by the average cost of a prison place (£40,992). This is £13,698,173,664. This, however, assumes they are sentenced to an average of one year and does not take into account the cost of building extra prison places. The average sentence for possession of a knife or sharp instrument in a public place was 3.4 months for under-18s in 2006. 3.4 months is 28.33% of a year. On average, 28.33% of all 334,167 people would be in prison at any one time. That is 94,670 people. To house them would cost 94,670 x 40,992 = 3,880,712,640 (£3.9 billion).

6. The prison population is already at breaking point. There are not enough spaces available. The Government is already embarking on a huge building project. To house all the knife carriers the Tories want to, extra places would have to be built for them all. This would cost: a) 10,500 new places are going to cost £2.3 billion, Straw admitted to the Justice Select Committee. At that rate, 100,000 would cost 9.5238 times more. This is a total building cost: £21,904,761,904.76 (£22 billion);

7. The cost to the Government of borrowing the £22 billion required at the standard ten year bond rate of 4.9% would be £1.1 billion per annum.

8. As outlined above, the annual cost of keeping these people in prison would be £3.8 billion plus £1.1billion annual cost of the capital programme, totalling £4.9 billion.

Police in too many fatal accidents - Baker

Commenting on the annual report of the Indpendent Police Complaints Commission, which revealed that 23 people were killed in collisions involving police vehicles last year, Liberal Democrat Shadow Transport Secretary, Norman Baker said:

"The IPCC is right to be concerned. Police vehicles are involved in too many fatal accidents, but it is not just a problem for the police.

"We need a thorough review of procedures for all emergency vehicles to ensure that other road users are not put in danger."

The report comes out just as a crash, which took the life of a Neath taxi driver, is reported to have involved a stolen car hotly pursued by a police vehicle.

The half-mill. hunt for missing HMRC discs

silicon.com reports that the taxpayer has been landed with a £473,544 bill for the hunt for the missing HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) data discs.

The Metropolitan Police Service mounted a months-long search for the data discs containing 25 million child benefit records after they went missing in October 2007.

Ministers must implement Soham recommendations

Commenting on the news that recommendations made after the official inquiry into the Soham murders remain unimplemented, Liberal Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Huhne said:

"Serious crime can only be tackled by cooperating with our EU neighbours.

"Ministers continually trumpet their record on deporting foreign criminals but no one can be sure how many have slipped through the net because of their failure to implement basic safeguards.

"Four years is an awfully long time in which to have made no progress on a number of Bichard’s recommendations, including a much needed common IT system."

£14bn lost in tax credits

Almost £14bn has been lost though overpayments, fraud and error in tax credits since their introduction in 2003, analysis by the Liberal Democrats has revealed.

Tax Credits fraud and error statistics released last week show that over
£4bn was lost in the last two years, taking the total lost through overpayments, fraud and error to £14bn.

Liberal Democrat Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, Jenny Willott, MP for Cardiff Central, said:

"The tax credits system is so complex that it is abused by fraudsters, misunderstood by claimants and mismanaged by officials.

"The amount lost through overpayments, fraud and error is now over £13bn and likely to keep on rising if changes are not made.

"Not only are costs spiralling, but families are riding a financial rollercoaster when they are forced to pay for mistakes made by officials who can’t understand the system themselves.

"Tax credits must be made simpler - we need to return to fixed awards which are easy to administer and ensure families aren’t burdened with overpayments."

Yet more revelations of confidential data leaks

On top of their admission that their staff had over the last four years had lost 347 laptops, containing official information, the Ministry of Defence has now revealed that over 100 flash memory devices have been taken off MoD premises and mislaid. The story and Sarah Teather's response are here.

It is all very well to say that commercial organisations have been just as careless with data (which they were - see previous stories on this blog), but government servants have an extra duty of care towards personal data. The MoD, which has sensitive data relating to our security, and that of our forces, has even more responsibility.