Schools compromise on cards for county

All is not well with Pembrokeshire’s secondary education. The headline problems are these: Pupil attainment at GCSE in Pembrokeshire is ranked at sixteenth among the 22 Welsh counties when it should be eighth, on the basis of the socio-economic background. Meanwhile, there are 1,500 surplus secondary school places across the county, making a reorganisation necessary to save money. If the council does not act to correct these problems the Welsh Government will act for it. In January the council proposed the following changes:

•  Merge Tasker Millward and Sir Thomas Picton secondary schools in Haverfordwest and create a new 11-16 English-medium secondary school on the Sir Thomas Picton site.
•  Create a new Sixth Form Centre at the Pembrokeshire College campus in Haverfordwest.
• Remove the sixth forms from Ysgol Bro Gwaun in Fishguard and Ysgol Dewi Sant in St Davids, re-designate them as 11-16 schools, and transfer their post-16 provision to the new Sixth Form Centre.
•  Create a new Welsh-medium 11-16 secondary school in Haverfordwest at the Tasker Millward site.

 Some of these changes were readily agreed, in particular combining the two English-medium schools and creating a new Welsh-medium school in Haverfordwest. However, there has been uproar at the proposal for removing sixth form provision from the schools and centralising it at the proposed Centre at Pembrokeshire College.

The council has pressed the advantages of the sixth form college concept which, it claims, delivers better results. This has been bitterly contested by the schools, parents and pupils. According to Sir Thomas Picton’s head, Dr N. Poole, the row has led to an atmosphere of anxiety and distrust “borne out by claims and counter claims concerning results, class sizes, university admissions etc without clear transparent data being issued for everyone to view.”

There has been an impressive community-based campaign in St Davids to retain its sixth form. Schools for the Future has come up with an innovative scheme to establish, in effect, a federalised sixth form linking Fishguard, St David’s and Haverfordwest. Some subjects would be taught in all three locations, with video facilities and some travel by staff and students used for connecting the teaching between the three sites.

Pembrokeshire’s Director of Education Kate Evan-Hughes, will be publishing a revised plan on 13 July and a meeting of the full council will decide three days later. What will she propose? Something along the following lines, I suggest. The site for the English-medium school in Haverfordwest will be moved to Tasker Millward. This is closer to Pembrokshire College and will enable some kind of amalgamated Sixth Form Centre to be shared between them. The Schools for the Future proposal for a new 3-16 school in St Davids, embracing the two primary schools in the town, will be accepted. There will also be a proposal for sixth form units to be kept at Fishguard and St Davids, but closely integrated with the new Sixth Form Centre in Haverfordwest.

Will this be a compromise acceptable to the warring factions that have been moblised on this hotly contested issue? Let us hope so. And let us remember, too, that school attainment is more an outcome achieved by good teachers and good leadership in our schools and not by reorganisations, however necessary.

Haven’s marine power opportunity

Last week’s announcement that the Department of the Energy and Climate Change is backing the proposed Tidal Lagoon in Swansea Bay could be momentous news for Pembrokeshire. If we play our cards right breathe new life will be breathed into Pembroke Dock which is well placed to become a hub for an entirely new industry.

Tidal Lagoon Power, the company that wants to build the £1billion lagoon off Swansea, says it will be a game changer for the renewable energy industry in Wales. If it goes ahead, and we will know for certain by the end of the year, it could be the first of six such lagoons off the Welsh coast, bringing an estimated 35,000 jobs over the next 15 years.

      

        The Swansea lagoon would produce enough renewable power for 155,000 homes for the next 120 years, supplying 90 per cent of Swansea Bay’s annual domestic energy use. It entails building a six-mile long seawall two miles out to sea from close to Swansea Docks, looping round and making landfall close to Swansea University's new Fabian Way campus to the east.

         

        The lagoon would house 16 underwater turbines generating electricity on both the rising and falling tide. And it’s the chance of assembling those turbines that provides Pembrokeshire with its opportunity. The hope is that engineering firms like Ledwood in Pembroke Dock will be well placed to help assemble the turbines whose parts are likely to be manufactured in Rugby. Ledwood took a hit from the closure of the Murco oil refinery last year. Its employees in Pembroke Dock have fallen from 1,000 at the peak to around 200. But the dawn of a new marine energy industry is offering fresh possibilities.

It’s good to learn that for once we’re ahead of the game with the creation of the Marine Energy Pembrokeshire partnership. This is bringing together technology developers, supply chain companies, the Welsh Government and others to proclaim what Pembrokeshire has to offer. Project Director David Jones says: “If you combine our natural resources with the grid connection possibilities, the transferable skills of the oil and gas industry supply chain, research links, the world class port facilities and the area’s designation as an energy Enterprise Zone, it all adds up to provide a very attractive package for developers.”

Of course, there have been false dawns promising economic revival for the Haven, not least the promise of oil discoveries in the Celtic Sea. But the potential for major marine energy developments off the western coast of Wales is much more tangible. The main hurdle is that Tidal Lagoon Power now has to negotiate with the UK government how much subsidy will be paid for the energy Swansea’s Tidal Lagoon will generate. And it is asking for a higher incentive than is presently given to wind turbines, solar power and nuclear. On the other hand the attraction for the government is the creation of a completely new industry with a massive economic impact.

In the past we missed the opportunity to develop the technology behind onshore wind and as a result the most valuable parts of onshore wind farms are imported. We must make sure that the same does not happen with marine renewables, and that Pembrokeshire takes full advantage of the opportunities that are now presenting themselves. 

Unfairness of the pesky parking tax

Few things are more calculated to provoke irritation and opposition in Pembrokeshire than car parking charges in our town centres. Witness the 8,893 people who signed a petition against them in St Thomas Green near the centre of Haverfordwest. Or the people from Goodwick who protested outside County Hall last week against proposals to charge in the town’s Station Hill car park.

Why is the opposition so intense in this part of Wales when elsewhere, especially in city centres like Cardiff and Swansea, charging for parking is long established and relatively uncontroversial? Pembrokeshire Council’s Head of Paid Services Ian Westley says its because nobody wants to pay for something they aren’t already paying. But it’s not that simple.

There’s a clue in one argument against the proposals to charge in St Dogmaels’ High Street. Local councillor Mike James said, “St Dogmaels is a village not a town and it is not somewhere where people come to shop or browse.” He added that the community was being treated like Narberth and Haverfordwest and that was not fair.

There is a sense in Pembrokeshire that all our villages and towns are in a similar position, certainly in comparison with large urban centres in southeast Wales. For instance, many people who pay for car parking in Cardiff are commuters or shoppers who live outside. For them parking fees operate as a congestion charge. And people who live close to or inside cities have a real alternative choice with public transport. If they’re over sixty they can use their free bus pass.

It’s not the same in rural Wales. Here many people have no choice but to travel by car. For them parking charges are in effect just another tax, and one that does not vary according to their ability to pay.

It is noteworthy that a while ago the Welsh Government stopped the NHS from imposing charges in hospital car parks. The argument was that it was unfair to impose charges on outpatients and people visiting friends or relatives in hospital. The same certainly applies in Goodwick where the Station Hill car park is widely used by patients at the adjoining Health Centre.

There’s another consideration, too. Many of our towns are run-down with shops boarded up, to a great extent the result of the poor planning by the county that has led to a rash of out-of-town developments. Imposing parking charges in town centres will only make this worse.

So what could be an alternative income for our cash-strapped council for which, as Ian Westley says, “every little helps”? How else could the council collect the £12m it hopes to raise from the proposed new parking charges? We urgently need to up-date the value of properties across the county, the basis upon which council tax is calculated. The last such re-valuation in Wales was in 2005. Since then the value of properties has risen considerably. An up-to-date re-evaluation would result in putting more properties into higher tax bands. It would mean asking the better off to pay a bit more. That would be a fairer way to raise the money Pembrokeshire needs.

Topsy turvy world of Welsh politics

Sometimes Welsh politics seem like a topsy turvy world. No so long ago the Conservatives were extremely hostile to the Welsh Assembly set up by Labour in Cardiff Bay. Today, however, it is they rather than Labour who are advocating more powers for the Assembly. Last week the Secretary of State for Wales, Preseli’s Conservative MP Stephen Crabb, said the Assembly should become a Parliament and take on responsibility for raising a significant proportion of the money it spends. “There is no parliament in any other part of the world that doesn’t have responsibility for raising money as well as spending it,” he said.

Stephen Crabb has come full circle on devolution. Writing in 2007 he declared, “Over the last ten years my opposition to devolution in Scotland and Wales has been driven by a belief that, far from satisfying the nationalist tendencies in these countries, devolution would foster and feed an increasingly separatist and socialist discourse in which sensible Conservative policies that could promote national cohesion, economic liberalism and smaller government would find little oxygen for survival.”

So what changed Mr Crabbe’s mind? The crucial factor was witnessing the debates in Scotland’s independence referendum, shortly after he became Secretary of State in July. This is how he explained it in a lecture to the Institute of Welsh Affairs, in Cardiff last November: “During the summer I visited Scotland three times to campaign alongside Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat activists to defend the Union. But I was reminded again on those visits just how far away Westminster is from the lives of most Scots. I stood inside the empty Parliament at Holyrood one afternoon with Ruth Davidson [the Scottish Conservative leader] and it struck me that this is no mere shadow of the Westminster Parliament; this is a full legislature in its own right; it is where Scots increasingly look for answers on so many of the issues they care about; and this Parliament is here to stay. And this growth in legitimacy and competence and authority is now unquestionably the path of our own Assembly – because the people of Wales have destined it to be so. I came away from Scotland on that Wednesday night before the Referendum absolutely certain that whatever the outcome the following night, nothing would ever be the same again in terms of our constitution.”

But the change Mr Crabb wants Wales to embrace is being fiercely resisted. The Welsh Labour Government is fearful that making Wales responsible for raising its own money will undermine the amount of the block grant it receives from London. This sum, it argues, is already inadequate and will be reduced even further by George Osborne’s spending cuts. Welsh Labour is also worried about going into a future election with the Welsh Conservatives promising tax cuts. In future these will be the dividing lines in Welsh politics. But don’t expect them to appear very soon. Before the Welsh Government can raise (or lower) taxation it has to get approval in a referendum.