Defending the Assembly Government’s record, the spokesman said: “Of the 5,250 laptops and mobile phones in use across the Assembly Government, less than 1% have been stolen or misplaced over the past two years despite our highly mobile workforce. We take information security very seriously.

The Assembly Government stated in its response to the Freedom of Information request that in some cases “it has not been possible to determine whether a laptop was lost as opposed to stolen”. However, three laptops and four mobiles devices have been found and returned since June 2008.

Peter Black, the Liberal Democrat finance spokesman, said: “While some thefts and losses may be unavoidable, the Labour-Plaid Government now needs to put in place much firmer systems to ensure that the cost to the taxpayer is kept to a bare minimum.”

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The Commission has spent the past 10 weeks trying out the question with members of the public. It will reveal if it believes the wording is suitable, or if it needs rewriting. Only when the question has been formally agreed can legal moves begin to call the referendum vote.

The BBC say that it is understood that the rest of the process for calling the referendum is close to completion, so this is seen as a major hurdle to be overcome before the vote goes ahead next year.

Update: The Electoral Commission say:

We conclude that the preamble to the question and the wording of the question itself are not easy to understand and are ambiguous.

6.8 Nevertheless, people do want an explanation of what they are being asked to vote for and prefer to have a preamble. Our public opinion research showed that people would prefer to have an easier to read format, rather than what appear as long paragraphs, and with bullet points. They would prefer to have shorter paragraphs. Young people especially would prefer an easier to read format.

Their suggested redraft is:

The National Assembly for Wales: what happens at the moment

Yes
No

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Oliver Townsend, Campaigns Officer for Liberal Youth Wales, said “It’s plain wrong. Almost half of those who suffer homophobic bullying at school consider suicide as a result. The neglect Labour and Plaid Cymru have shown is despicable. There are young teenagers suffering every single hour of every single day. The weight of the statistics is a story of pain for hundreds of vulnerable teenagers across Wales, yet they are just ignoring the issue. It’s unforgivable. It’s just plain wrong.”

Last year, Liberal Youth Wales appealed directly to the previous Education Minister Jane Hutt. In what aimed to be a cross-party campaign, gaining support from teaching unions and the Church in Wales, they called for compulsory homophobic bullying guidance to be given to all Welsh secondary schools.

They were prompted to take action by what they describe as terrible statistics released by Stonewall showing the brutal extent of homophobic bullying in schools, which can lead to self-harm, physical and sexual abuse, truancy, lack of achievement and other traumatic effects.

Matt Smith, Chair of Liberal Youth Wales, said, “We were told the guidance would be released in the spring and thought we’d succeeded. But the spring passed, and we were told the summer. The summer is now here and we’ve heard nothing. We’ve gone through two Education Ministers and neither of them has done anything.”

“They’ve got the power to do it, they’ve got the support to do it, so we have to ask ourselves: why aren’t they doing it? We’re not talking abstract here. We’re talking about abuse, bullying and potential suicide. Lives are at risk. So waiting nearly a year for guidance is completely unacceptable. We hope that the new Education Minister Leighton Andrews will finally take action.”

The new campaign will be called Homophobia is Still Gay, and the petition to introduce compulsory homophobic bullying guidance will be available to sign at Welsh Liberal Democrat stall at the Cardiff Mardi Gras, at Liberal Youth Wales stalls at Fresher’s Fayres in Welsh Universities throughout over the next month.

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This person has a mental health condition, just like millions across the UK and hundreds of thousands of people in Wales. In fact a quarter of people in the UK will experience mental ill health at some point in their lives. Nearly 750,000 of them live in Wales.

Statistically we all know someone with a mental health condition. However according to a the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s ‘Who Do You See?’ research, people with mental health conditions are one of the most discriminated against groups in Wales.
The study found that 37per cent of people would be unhappy if a close relative married or formed a long term relationship with someone with a mental health condition and only 40per cent of people think that people with a mental health condition are suitable to be Primary School teachers.
The problem is lack of awareness. We generally know what we need to do if there is something physically wrong either with ourselves or our loved ones. It should be the same with mental health, but we just don’t know what to do, we all need some help.

Mind Cymru is training trainers to deliver Mental Health First Aid courses across Wales so that people can deal with mental distress in the work place and elsewhere. But we need to go further.

Perhaps it is time that Wales had its own anti-stigma campaign such as ‘Time to Change’ in England and ‘See Me’ in Scotland. Both these campaigns have been operating in their respective countries to change the way people think about mental health conditions. Through effective media campaigns, working locally and regionally and holding the media to account over negative press, they have begun to address and change the way people perceive mental health conditions.

Lindsay Foyster, Director of Mind Cymru, said “…An effective campaign will make a real difference to the 1 in 4 of us who will experience mental distress in our lifetimes.

“For maximum impact, any campaign needs to work on local, regional and national levels. In today’s economic climate, an anti-stigma campaign is more important than ever and would help focus attention on the health and wellbeing of the population of Wales more widely”.

I believe strongly that as a society we need to change the way we treat those with mental health conditions. We need to work towards a society where people are not afraid to talk about their mental health.

Ewan Hilton, Executive Director of Gofal Cymru, said: “I want to be part of a society in which everyone feels able to ‘come out’ and discuss their mental health openly, without fear of uncomfortable reactions from friends and family or discrimination from employers if they explain that they’re unwell. I want to be part of a society where no-one feels ashamed to seek support or treatment for a period of mental ill health and where there are role models from all professions and in all communities who stand as reminders that people can and do recover. This will require a real step change; we need to challenge the way we all think about, talk about and respond to mental health and wellbeing”.

We are all affected by mental health conditions in some way but we may not even know it, it shouldn’t be this way. Mental health has been described as ‘The last taboo’; I want Wales to be a part of changing this, then maybe ‘coming out’ will be a thing of the past.

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This is not the place to discuss Ed Miliband’s pitch to the core Labour membership, nor even to wonder why the Indy is giving so much space to this particular candidate. What is worth looking at is his contention that Labour, under him, would appeal to Liberal Democrat voters.

Political editor Andrew Grice quotes him as offering “a home to former Liberal Democrats and bring together a social democratic economic policy, redistribution, greater equality and putting individual liberty at the centre of who we are.”

“Why is he so well qualified?,” asks Grice: “Because I share the Liberal Democrats’ agenda on civil liberties, ID cards, the detention of terrorist suspects without charge and university tuition fees,” replies Miliband. “The Liberal Democrats are on a journey. Clegg is taking them in a direction a lot of Lib Dem supporters are deeply dismayed about. I offer a home for Liberal Democrat voters in which they don’t have to trade abolition of ID cards for a reactionary assault on the welfare state, and they can be true to their values on both civil liberties and economic policy.”

Note that there is no appeal to Liberal Democrat members to join the Labour Party. The average Liberal Democrat would not be welcomed by the average member of the Labour Party, which has a different ethos. Moreover, a defector would soon be put off by the “spin, triangulation and internecine warfare” identified by Diane Abbott in an interview with Ed Stourton on Radio 4.

Nor would Ed Miliband’s pitch work currently. We already lost most of our waverers at the last general election, scared by the press campaign against the dangers of a coalition. If anything, we would gain votes if there were to be another general election soon, as those doubters would have been reassured by the solidity of the coalition and would return.

No, Ed Miliband is relying on short memories. Now, we can ask where he was between 1997 and 2009 when Blair and Brown were pushing their agenda “on civil liberties, ID cards, the detention of terrorist suspects without charge and university tuition fees”, not to mention the invasion of Iraq, the refusal to restore the earnings link to state pensions and the encouragement of “build now, pay over the odds later” PFI schemes in English education and health. In five years time, we will have to remind voters of these things, as well as pointing out that, under Labour, we will never have real voting reform, proper engagement with the EU nor a serious look at our “independent” nuclear deterrent.

Frank Little is a Liberal Democrat member of Neath Port Talbot council and blogs at ffranc sais

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The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) said in its revised guidelines in June 2008 that all pregnant women should be offered, on the NHS, a combined scan and blood tests for foetal chromosomal problems. But currently, women are only offered a different blood test after 15 weeks.

The recommended test is a specialised ultrasound scan checking for raised levels of fluid at the back of the foetus’ neck, which can indicate chromosomal abnormalities such as Down’s or Edward’s syndromes. It is done alongside a blood test which looks for raised levels of certain proteins and hormones, which can also suggest a problem. It has to be carried out between 11 weeks and 13 weeks plus six days of a pregnancy.

The Welsh Government say that subject to the development of the plans and availability of funding, they aim to deliver the screening from April 2011.

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Alun was “appalled at the material, which has been circulating in political and media circles since the weekend.

The material wrongly suggests Mr Davies’ company Bute Communications was awarded a contract by S4C in contravention of EU competition law, as part of a deal under which he relinquished his role as the broadcaster’s director of corporate affairs in 2004″

Displeased, Alun went on to clarify his reason for leaving the broadcaster

“The fact is that I decided to leave S4C because I wanted to be a candidate in the 2005 General Election [he stood unsuccessfully in Ceredigion]”

The Liberal Democrats of course are well aware of the result in Ceredigion. There really were only two parties in with a chance in that election, Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats. The voters plumped for the latter and Mark Williams MP. The Labour party came fourth. The same position they came in the 2000 byelection and the 2001 general election.

Alun Davies is rightly regarded as a smart operator.  If the sole reason for leaving his well-paid job was to stand in a no hope seat as he claims, where he went on to lose his deposit, then that was an uncharacteristic miscalculation.

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Do you like football? If so, has anyone ever accused you of planning to change the team you support mid-season? Well, that’s what’s been going on in the World of Őpik this week. But in my case they don’t mean football teams. For teams, read “parties.” Some journalistic Willy Wonkas have been writing that I’m about to join the Labour party. This caused a flurry of excitement with the usual suspects in the Press— the kind of people who’d never get a job with the Sport because, well, they’re too scared to. Sadly, for all of them, I’m not planning a jump to the left—or a step to the right. But, hey everyone, what’s the big deal? My boss, Clever Cleggs, is “in and out” of Cameron’s house more often than Tiger Woods is in and out of his. Nobody thinks he’s about to give up on the Lib Dems and go Tory-hugging instead. My mate, former Labour MP Paul Marsden, jumped across to the Lib Dems before defecting back to Labour again like a political boomerang. And what about war-winning Winston Churchill? He joined up with the Liberals before sneaking back to the Conservatives a few years later. When he was described as a “rat”, the slang term for changing parties, Wiley Winston said “anyone can rat, but it takes a Statesman to re-rat.” Personally, I prefer Labour to the Tories. But I’m sticking with the LibDems. After all, if I joined Labour it would be a bit tougher for me to stand as the Lib Dem candidate for Mayor of London!

Later on he reflects on the name of the Camerons’ new baby:

CONGRATULATIONS to Prime Minister David Cameron and his delightful other half on their new daughter. They’ve called her Florence Rose Endellion which sounds a bit complicated to me, but with a name like Lembit, I’m one to talk. By a strange coincidence, part of it includes my late brother’s name “Endel” which is also Estonian like mine. So she’s got a bit of class in there anyway.

Such erudition is bound to impress the voters in the London Mayoral election.

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Most respondents (70%) also said they found it fairly or very easy to obtain information from officials, while nearly a quarter (23%) said it was fairly or very difficult. But other stakeholders said the Assembly Government needed to be more “proactive” in reaching out to organisations, and that much contact had been one-way:

An NHS organisation said: “I think they are about 20 years behind where most knowledge management organisations are in terms of how you actually go out and engage with those who do the day job, and they’re the ones with the greatest amount of knowledge.”

A third sector organisation said: “There isn’t [any] kind of follow-up… [We are] always wondering [whether] the work that we are developing is in line with what the Assembly thinks we ought to be doing and [whether] they are understanding why we are doing what we are doing. That kind of feedback never really seems to come back.”

Findings also indicated that the Government’s Welsh language engagement was not highly regarded, with most Welsh speakers not always or often able to speak the language when dealing with civil servants.

Among Welsh-speaking respondents, 42% said they were rarely or never able to engage officials in Welsh, 31% said they were sometimes able to and only 28% said they were always or often able to speak it.

The paper says that the research follows findings released from an internal staff survey this week that was commissioned by the Welsh Government, which showed that only 37% of staff gave a “favourable” response when asked to rate their overall confidence in the senior civil service. When asked if they believed that the Assembly Government was well-managed, only 36% gave a favourable response.

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Statistics from the International Centre for Drugs Policy show that 102 drugs-related deaths were recorded in Wales in 2009, compared to 69 in 2006. The position is particularly acute in Swansea where agencies have estimated that there are roughly 7,000 heroin users. However, despite that there are only 450 treatment places. An addict seeking treatment could wait 6 to 9 months to get a place.

The truth is that the best way to get treated for drug addiction across Wales is to commit a crime. That cannot be right and I will be raising it again with the health minister. I will also be raising with her the prevalence of hepatitis B and hepatitis C in the City. Hepatitis is 100 times more infectious that HIV. Hepatitis B can be prevented through vaccination. But the budget to deliver that service is underfunded and needs to be reviewed.

I recently spent some time with the homeless nurse, who works with substance misusers in Swansea where I discovered that in addition to heroin use there a growing steroid-abuse problem in the City, with many users accessing needle exchanges to assist them with their habit.

It seems to me that the substance misuse services in Swansea are massively under-resourced. Unless the Welsh Government help professionals in meeting the demand from addicts, often with chaotic lifestyles, then the death toll will rise.

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