Are mergers always right? From the above, it can be seen that the direction of travel is to larger and fewer organisations. Those who look at it simply are calculating the savings. Mergers, however, are expensive; you've got redundancy costs, re-badging costs, and, more expensive of all, creating a single ICT system from the systems of the predecessor organisations. Anybody who went through local government reorganisation in 1995 will be able to tell you about the huge costs that took place, and most of the changes were by splitting rather than merging. It really is incredibly expensive.

ICT systems—I could talk for hours on this. Some will be under contract; others will need to be updated or closed down and merged into new systems. Look at NRW, where invest-to-save has been used to rescue the organisation's ICT services on several occasions. All these are upfront costs, and whilst the cost of local government reorganisation in 1996 was approximately 5 per cent of the annual expenditure of each council, that was without the variation in terms and conditions between local authorities that exists today. It would be incredibly difficult to merge local authorities today because we've got the situation, haven't we, that we went through job evaluation. So, if you're a social worker in Neath Port Talbot or a social worker in Swansea, you don't get paid the same, though many of us would like it to be. They went through their own different job evaluations. Actually, it's better to be a social worker in Swansea and to work in a library in Neath Port Talbot, in terms of what job evaluation gave them.

The simplistic conclusions of some is that, following a merger, all the senior post duplication is removed and then you have all the great savings. This ignores issues such as that senior managers carry out tasks and, if the number is reduced, the tasks have to be reassigned and the same number of decisions have to be made. Economic theory predicts that an organisation becomes less efficient if it becomes too large. Larger organisations often suffer poor communication because they find it difficult to maintain an effective flow of information between departments, divisions, or between head office and outlying parts. I was hoping somebody from Betsi Cadwaladr area would have come in to explain exactly how they know that's true. Co-ordination problems also affect large organisations with many departments and divisions, as they find it much harder to co-ordinate operations. 'X-inefficiency' is the loss of management efficiency that occurs when organisations become large and operate in uncompetitive markets. Such losses of efficiency include overpaying for resources, paying managers salaries higher than needed—I think that people have come across that on several occasions as well—and excessive waste of resources.

This leads to three questions on public services as they are currently configured. Do the larger organisations such as Betsi Cadwaladr perform better than the smaller ones? Has the creation of all-Wales organisations such as the Welsh ambulance service and Digital Health and Care Wales produced an improved service? Has the reduction in the number of organisations carrying out a function such as the trunk road agency, Natural Resources Wales and the National Procurement Service improved the services being provided? What I will say is that we need the same regional footprint for all public services provided by the Welsh Government.

To give an example of current inconsistencies, those of us who live in Swansea have a different regional footprint for almost every service. For health, it's Swansea Neath Port Talbot; for fire and rescue, we add Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Powys and Pembrokeshire; educational improvement, it's the same; but policing, which is currently non-devolved, includes all the former county of Glamorgan except for Caerphilly; and finally, the Welsh ambulance service covers the whole of Wales. The aim should be to have all services within the four footprints: the Cardiff city region, the Swansea bay city region, the mid Wales region and the north Wales region. This splitting of Wales into four regions was long overdue, and it really has given us an opportunity to get things right. Whilst services could, and in many cases will, be on a smaller footprint than the regions, no service should cut across the regional boundaries unless it is an all-Wales service, which should be very rare. This will allow regional working across services to be undertaken far more easily.

There is nothing intrinsically good about the current structure of local government in Wales. Why were the councils of Rhondda, Cynon Valley and Taff Ely merged but Blaenau Gwent and Merthyr district councils turned into unitary authorities without any mergers? Change should only be considered where there is a strong chance of improving services and/or reducing cost over the medium term because of the initial cost of change. Having spent several years discussing local government reorganisation as if it were some sort of silver bullet to solve the lack of funding for councils, the threat of reorganisation receded, was brought back again and has now receded again, but I expect it will be brought back again. It was as if the economic theory that predicts that an organisation may become less efficient if it becomes too large or that there are diseconomies of scale is unknown. Different services need a different method of joint working, and some are best carried out jointly, but most work best at the current local authority level. Examples of services that would benefit from a joint-working model based upon the regional footprint are transport, economic development and regional planning. 

I’ve left the most difficult to last. I would welcome hearing the Minister explain how well Betsi Cadwaladr, NRW and the Welsh ambulance service are performing, because it seems to go counter to anything I’ve come across, having dealt with constituents who have had problems with them. Replacing chairs, boards and chief executives has not solved the problems at Betsi Cadwaladr. If you just keep thinking you can get a chair and a chief executive and everything will be all right—. I’ve lost count of the number of chairs and chief executives that Betsi Cadwaladr has had, and it has been run by the Welsh Government, and I don’t think anybody is going to get up and say, 'Now they’ve got it right.'

If you look at Betsi Cadwaladr in terms of support functions, primary care and secondary care, whilst the first two can work on the current footprint, secondary care needs to be split between east and west. On splitting the Welsh ambulance service so it is being run by the health boards, whilst I would normally say reorganisation is not the answer, in the case of the ambulance service, could reorganisation make anything worse? NRW makes no sense at all. Whilst the merger of the Countryside Council for Wales and the Environment Agency had some logic behind it, adding the Forestry Commission had none whatsoever.

Finally, looking for a regional model of services, no service, unless a national service, should cross the regional boundary. Fire and rescue should become four not three, with Powys and Ceredigion splitting off mid and west Wales. A Wales of four regions has been created, and we need to use this footprint for public services. We should look to right-size organisations, rather than making them bigger and bigger. I’ll end on this: does anybody think that the careers service has got better because there’s only one careers service for Wales, or do you think it’s got worse? I’m in the 'got worse' camp.