I thank you very much for those questions, and you’re right, the report is very clear that inspectors did note that there was real commitment shown amongst the staff who actually showed some real resilience and professionalism during this period, but serious performance issues did arise and that was, in the view of the report, because of instability in management, poor and confused direction and weak governance. And certainly, when I’ve had discussions with the chief inspector myself, she has been very much at pains to press that point that it was deliberately very clear in the report that, actually, we should be recognising the commitment of the front-line staff who wanted to do a good job, but, however, the structures and the leadership and the governance and so on around them was preventing them from doing the better job that they could have done for the children in Powys.

With regard to the police issue, as I say, I found out about it through the media, just like everybody else, so I’ll certainly be pursuing that to get to the bottom of exactly what the issues are and what the police intend to do about it. Obviously, you wouldn’t expect me to comment any further, being in receipt of very little information on it myself. However, I certainly will be getting to the bottom of the issue.

The improvement board is going to be crucial in terms of driving forward improvement, as you can imagine, and Powys County Council have already convened that improvement board; that was one of the stipulations in the warning notice. I can tell you that the members of the board include Jack Straw, the former chief executive of Swansea, who retired from the council in the local authority in 2016; Phil Hodgson, the former director of social care at Blaenau Gwent; and Geoff Burrows, who, up until May 2017, was a Conservative member of Monmouthshire County Council. And those, alongside Phil Evans, who is the former director of social services at the Vale of Glamorgan, who is now taking over as the interim director of social services for Powys, will be working as a strong team in order to drive forward improvement. And they’ll be reporting back to Welsh Government on a monthly basis as we go through this period, but, as you can imagine, since the concerns were first raised, Welsh Government and the Welsh Local Government Authority have been in very close and constant contact with Powys on these issues.

I understand that those members of that board have already been holding discussions together with CSSIW about the work of the board and what they’ll need to do in terms of moving forward. It really is for Powys County Council to make sure that they provide significant funding to address these issues. As I say, funding had previously been moved out of children’s services, and I understand that money will be found from reserves to reinvest in children’s services to seek to address some of the issues that have been found in the inspection report. Some of these issues don’t require funding, of course. Some of the key issues were a lack of strategic direction and planning and lack of permanence in some of those senior and middle-management roles, a blame culture—. You know, some of these things are about the culture of the workplace and lack of leadership as opposed to necessarily investment and capacity and so on.