We need a Welsh Minister of Police and Justice accountable to a Welsh parliament, nothing short of direct accountability to the people of Wales, just like in Scotland.

Operationally, there should be a Chief Constable for Community Policing for North, West, Mid and South, but I see no reason why back office operations need to be in Cardiff. Bridgend seems logical. I also recommend a ‘national crime squad’ to deal with CID, a fraud squad, a national forensics service (Aberystwyth) and integrating British Transport Police into the community policing commands, these officers part of ‘traffic’ specialist units north and south. Armed units under specialist command based in Merthyr and Rhyl.

We don’t need to look at England for a model. Ireland and Sweden has similar ‘geographical challenges’, so we should look there for best practice.

No butchers aprons on uniforms and all branding to be Heddlu (no need for English like the Gardai in Ireland) and full operational control to the Senedd via the Policing minister.

I too have had to refrain from commenting on Nation.Cymru since have been forced through Facebook. I did e-mail IMJ to express my displeasure at people being forced to use Facebook to comment, and also asked for my subscription to be cancelled, but it seems my request has been ignored, and my concerns over being forced to use Facebook dismissed.

It’s a very retrograde step for a site that was beginning to develop and show promise. The added danger of course, is that employers frequently check social media like Facebook, and I’m sure that there are some employers who would take issue with some of the legitimate opinions expressed in the comments on Nation.Cymru by their employees.

It’s amazing how many housing associations and third sector outfits give themselves Welsh names, and then operate in a way that can often be described as anti-Welsh. It’s obviously done as a form of ‘disguise’, in the hope of fooling people.

Brychan’s comments home in on many of the self inflicted limitations of local government in Wales and probably throughout the U.K. The centralised “design, acquisition and processing” of services is a big symptom of the bureaucratic condition where the integrity and survival of the bureaucracy is deemed more important than the quality and integrity of those services. They never got on top of it when they bought all those big IBM’s and similar kit and the agility and flexibility afforded by distributed PC and hand held kit is way beyond them. That hasn’t stopped them buying the stuff at grossly inflated prices when, as you say, the front line staff could easily have got specified gear from a major retailer for relative “bladders”. Top down interference has often inhibited maxing out on the use of these bits of kit because some high ranking twit prefers to tell everybody what they are allowed to do and how to do it.

Which leads us to the latest of a long list of bureaucratic blind alleys, this infamous N.P.S, a haven for dud procurement professionals who never got exposed to lean, agile practice in a commercial environment had speedread a few books and decided that the best way forward was to do deals with major corporate suppliers who must have thought Xmas come early, and often ! Buying crap at inflated prices is not a way to generate savings – that is a fact of basic arithmetic and does not need some exotic management theory to underpin it.

My cynical side, which comes out for the occasional trip, has concluded that local government attracts a seriously defective type of person into its upper echelons. These are often people who will build bureaucratic empires to suit their egos or other underlying personality traits/defects whether you present them with a smallish unit like Ceredigion or a bigger unit like Cardiff. They just can’t help it.

Perhaps C.E.O’s and senior tier people should be recruited into those senior leadership roles on fixed terms which would do away with compensation culture at termination. Elected councillors should be made to define and agree service mandates based on accurate “market” information like how many miles of A,B or unclassified roads have you got to service, how many kids will travel through various school age bands over next 5 years, how many old people will travel through various 60+ age bands, and better definition for housing planning because they have a better grasp of their local demographic mix. Right now they behave like everything is a big surprise or that the end of the world is nigh. With clearer understanding of service needs these bodies could move to flatter management structures with more scope for letting the workers at the sharp end get on with their jobs.

It was even more complex than I suggested, some districts were given powers to act as an education authority or split the provision of services. No councillors were paid prior to 1972 they could all claim an attendance allowance. Where I think there is more of a problem is with the power of the chief executives being more powerful than that of the council leader and in some cases seeming to dictate the agenda of full council meetings. I propose a two tier system because in the rural areas because of the large size of the regional bodies would be too geographically remote, while smaller units are too small to have the expertise needed to handle all functions. In urban areas the need is more about regional planning coupled with a sense of identification with their locality that demands some recognition of that locality as a political entity.

A man well known for his devotion to his family

Anyway off topic but something that i’m sure you and your readers would be interested in an independent Scottish Politics fact checking blog called ‘Ferret Fact Service’ in its first year it found the Tories in Scotland are the biggest liars with only 12% of their output being true and 88% being lies and half truths. The SNP are the most truthful with 75% of their stuff being true, https://theferret.scot/ferret-fact-service-fact-checking-numbers/

Something similar is desperately needed for welsh politics to expose the Labour Party and Welsh Government corruption, lies and dirty tricks.

In 1974 an argument for ‘big is better’ was that ‘personnel Departments and sharing Salaries / Pay Departments and sharing Estates Departments and sharing Strategic Planning and sharing some parts of their Legal Departments and sharing Tourism promotions’ had to be done on an IBM35 mainframe costing millions. That processing power can now be done on a desktop PC with Wifi to tablets in field and high street, for a few hundred quid. There is no longer a ‘technology’ argument for ‘big is more cost effective’.

Also, the reason why the ‘national procurement service’ for local government failed is because it’s cheaper for Cerys or Ianto in a council portacabin to find the best value item using google. There is no need for councils to ‘warehouse stock’ and the ‘best price bulk buy theory’ no longer applies. That process is already done by the likes of Amazon in Swansea.

Is there any ‘document’ that can prove that creating ‘mega-councils’ will actually save money? I suspect it’s just a pet project for overpaid executives to garner more power and prestige and middle management to justify their existence. There a false premise that the oily mechanic working under a lorry needs someone in a collar and tie to order the best track-rod-end, a throwback to the English class system that has been imposed upon our country. It’s also the reason why ‘small states’ like the Baltics and Ireland have better productivity than the United Kingdom because they have by-passed this unnecessary administrative burden.