A couple of people have contacted me, suggesting I take a look at an outfit operating in Carmarthen. A town close to my heart. Many’s the pint I sank there when I was younger.
Have a skinful in the old Ceffyl Du, and if we couldn’t find a party, or no student fell for my manifest charms, then it was the milk train back to Swansea High Street in the early hours and the long walk home. Happy Days!
This piece wasn’t really planned, and so it’s quite short, around 1,100 words.
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INTRO
The outfit in question is called LocalMotion. Here’s the main website. And here’s the website for the Carmarthen operation. Read it, look at the pictures, and you’ll see why I chose the headline.
If we go to the main website – HQ, as it were – we find, explaining the genesis of LocalMotion, the first example of a word salad. Translations are invited. Though I doubt if it makes sense in any language.
It’s all there: “collective . . . funders . . . collaborating . . . deep-rooted challenges . . . communities . . . shift power . . . decision-making . . . transformative change . . . “. If I wanted to take the piss out of a bunch of chancers looking to squeeze money from charities or the public purse I’d use exactly the same words and phrases.
But these people are being serious!
When I look at a crew like this I always check how and where it’s registered. Is it a company? A charity? Or what? Also, when it was registered.
First stop was the Companies House (CH) website, where I turned this up. You’ll see that CH directs us to the Charity Commission, where the registration is very recent – December 2024 – and what’s listed is ‘LocalMotion Enfield‘.
All rather confusing. Especially as an organisation named LocalMotion seems to have been operating in Carmarthen as early as May 2020. Certainly, according to this piece put out in 2022 by the Carmarthenshire Association of Voluntary Services (CAVS).
How could that be?
And if the charity registered is LocalMotion Enfield, and it tells the Charity Commission it operates only in Enfield, why the hell is it in Carmarthen?
There’s clearly something not right about LocalMotion.
But let’s finish this section with a bit more information on CAVS. Most of its funding comes from the ‘Welsh Government’. And half of this income goes in salaries, expenses and pensions. The woman with the biggest lanyard is on £60,000+ per year.
Grants also received to take out a lease on this building at the top of Castle Hill.
Basically, a publicly-funded job creation scheme for the otherwise unemployable.
And, boy! Has Wales got plenty of such schemes!
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WHO’S WHO IN LOCALMOTION?
Looking at the Charity Commission entry we see that the chair of LocalMotion Enfield is Parin Bahl. Who was formerly a director of Combining Opinions to Generate Solutions CIC, which was Dissolved in July 2025. Also a trustee of this CIC was Noelle Skivington, who’s joined Bahl at the charity LocalMotion Enfield.
The third trustee is Alex Tambourides. He’s CEO at Mind in Enfield and Barnet.
So was LocalMotion operating previously as Combining Opinions to Generate Solutions CIC? If not, then how do we explain the reference to an organisation operating in 2020 that didn’t officially exist until December 2024?
On the ground, in Carmarthen, we find Owen Griffiths, described as ‘Carmarthen Coordinator’. Griffiths is local to the area, and a recognised artist, having led the project to re-purpose the old Vetch Field in Swansea. (Such memories!)
Here’s a clip from his Linkedin page.
‘Peak Cymru’ is registered with the Charity Commission as Peak – Art in the Black Mountains. Here’s the website. Basically, another bunch of good-lifers and ‘artists’ who’ve washed up in Abergavennyshire, and now rely almost exclusively on our money – in the form of ‘Welsh Government’ funding – to lecture us on this, that and t’other.
There is, inevitably, a Corruption Bay connection on the Peak Board. Two, at least. There’s Sarah Dickens, former BBC journalist and communications advisor to the first minister. And Jenny McConnel, “Sustainable Development Advisor at the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales“.
Together we shape a creative programme that addresses social, environmental and racial justice in the context of South Wales
“Racial justice” for South Wales. Yeah, I lose sleep over it. People in the Heads of the Valleys worry about nothing else. I’m told there was a BLM march in the Gurnos last weekend.
Owen Griffiths’ link to the Centre for Alternative Technology is interesting. If you were sitting next to me now I’d be tempted to go: “Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more, squire”. Because in recent decades few money pits have had more dosh thrown into them by the ‘Welsh Government’ than this one.
I clicked on the email address the website gives for Owen Griffiths and this is what opened in MS Outlook:
Owen Griffiths is there to give the scam a Welsh gloss. And provide connections.
Two others are named in connection with LocalMotion in Carmarthen. The first is Project Coordinator Mariana Lopez Rojas, from Mexico.
It seems that Mariana’s full-time job is in Swansea, helping “asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants“, with The Centre for African Entrepreneurship (CAE). Though the website failed to provide any evidence of entrepreneurship. Unless milking the public purse is now seen as a legitimate business.
I’m so surprised to see “wellbeing” mentioned below! And as for “The Welsh Dream“? Shouldn’t that read, ‘nightmare’?
When she’s not helping asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants at CAE in Swansea, you might find Mariana at the Make and Mend Workshop CIC in Carmarthen.
The other named principal at LocalMotion Carmarthen is Ali Franks. Who seems to work as The Reconnection Coach. Is that on the NHS?
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CONCLUSION
Apart from Owen Griffiths, who may be no more than a figurehead, there is clearly nothing local about LocalMotion.
It’s just another gimme gimme bunch, demanding funding to spew out word salads that mean fuck all to real people. Money to organise one conference after another, workshops without end, seminars stretching into the distant future.
But most importantly from their perspective, is the promise of being allowed into schools, where they can lecture kids from sink estates about their white privilege destroying the planet, and their farm labourer ancestors’ responsibility for slavery.
LocalMotion uses a mission statement so hackneyed, and a template so well worn, that it’s clear they’ll simply duplicate the work (work!) of dozens if not hundreds of other groups already operating in Wales.
I would be very disappointed to see these buggers get a penny from Corruption Bay or County Hall. If they do, I’ll be digging deeper and writing about them again.
Let them sod off back to Enfield with their word salads and their insulting bullshit.
♦ end ♦
© Royston Jones 2026
I heard the Centre for African Entrepreneurship operates out of a space shared with the Centre for Dwarf Polevaulting Training and Carmarthen Halal Whiskey Distillery. But jokes aside, I got to wondering – could Companies House operating out of Cardiff be a factor in so many grifters and their ephemeral ‘companies’ operating here?
Speaking of obnoxious blow-in twats, if you want to upheave your mid-morning Malbec, take a look at this fruit loop: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/people/i-moved-from-london-to-rural-wales/. We simply cannot get enough of these Yakky Da tossers.
It might streamline your output a touch if instead of clicking email links, hover over and look out for a ‘mailto:’ URL to get a look at the address.
Some of these shysters, aware of the perception of duplication, do seek ever more imaginative ways of getting hold of public money. So I wouldn’t rule out a ‘Centre for Dwarf Polevaulting Training’.
The Telegraph piece highlights a truth that dare not speak its name. For if the problem is locals unable to buy a place to live due to high property values, then a bigger contributor to that problem than holiday homes is good-lifers and retirees moving here permanently.
But leftist parties will never address this problem. For while hitting holiday homes can be given a socialist gloss, criticising a phenomenon from which they might gain electorally is obviously taboo.
I was arrested many moons ago for drinking under age at the Ceffyl Du. If I remember correctly, I was fined £2. There was another cellar-bar at the square at the time in close proximity. As you say, happy days. .
At one time drinking underage was taken quite seriously. When I was 15/16 the local pubs were out of the question because too many would know you and the word would get back to your parents if you just tried to get a drink. So it tended to be pubs down town where you were less likely to be known and a more ‘relaxed’ attitude prevailed.
The denizens of the old Ceffyl Du of the 60’s would be shocked by the influx of assorted carpetbaggers and spongers that has flowed steadily into our country. England thinks it has a problem with the influx of uninvited from mostly warmer climes, we in Cymru have to put up with the all year round migration of opportunists and sharks mostly from the English cities. These have identified that since 1999 successive Welsh governments and local authorities are very prone to buying into anything that churns out the kind of word salad you quote above. Plaid Cymru has often embraced these organisations as bearers of some undeniable truths, embarrassing to anyone with a more critical, possibly cynical perspective. Our Opposition parties don’t seem to offer much in the way of critical thinking either despite all the posturing. Reform spokesmen to date seem unable to clear a 6 inch hurdle while Labour is tainted by being in charge until a month ago and now reduced to a mere shadow of its former self with likes of Smiler Skates in their front rank.
Seems like open season will step up a gear rather than get shut down.
As you say, Dafis, the real problem is that we have a political establishment – not just parties – that welcome these chancers with open arms, and then fund them.
In a competitive environment, where each outfit had to prove its worth, and deliver the goods, most would go out of business pretty damn quick. But that can’t happen because no matter how useless and unnecessary they are they’re all featherbedded with public money.
But that’s how socialism works. And why it eventually fails. The trouble is that when it does fail it takes everything and everybody down with it.
I’m not writing Reform off yet. If nothing else, they can draw attention to this duplication and waste of public money.