My thanks to Y Cneifiwr, the Newcastle Emlyn blogger, for reproducing the above summary of Councillor Rob James' attendances over the years and for the thoroughly entertaining and informative articles dealing with the pre-election fun and games in the wild West of Carmarthenshire.

http://cneifiwr-emlyn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/election-tour-2017-complaints-galore.html

The statistics in the table are built up from two sources. Years 2012/13 to 2015/16 are basically information supplied by NPT Council itself following a Freedom of Information request by a third party. The figures produced from May 2016 to 28 October 2016 are built up by checking the attendance records during that period for all the meetings that Rob James was supposed to attend. Not very clever, are they?

But then something strange occurs. You'll see from the footnote to the Table that Rob seemingly no longer sits on the committees he previously did, being on the circulation papers in November 2016 then disappearing from the list in December 2016.

Not just something strange though, but something truly miraculous. Because if you were to check Rob James' attendances since 29 October 2016 you'd find an astonishing turnaround in the figures. He has attended 9 out of 10 meetings, a whopping great 90% attendance record.

Now what has caused this sudden dedication to duty? Well clearly, if you cut down the number of meetings you have to attend then it's a lot easier for percentages to go massively up - and also down, though in Rob's case it wasn't possible to go much lower. But I wonder if it was also the fact that quite simply, his failure to meet his responsibilities had been exposed to the world in my article dated 27 October 2016 entitled "The Tale of Councillor Rob James"

http://www.spanglefish.com/stan/news.asp?intent=viewstory&newsid=85266

and a second article "The Invisible Man" dated 30 October 2016.

http://www.spanglefish.com/stan/news.asp?intent=viewstory&newsid=85322

In my opinion Rob James' behaviour is contemptible. Over four and a half years he is invisible a lot of the time. When caught out he comes up with a load of excuses like committee meetings are not held at a convenient time in the day and he has a young family as well. But suddenly - he can get his attendances up there with the best of them.

Rob James is actually the clearest evidence that you can get that if records are made publicly available about councillors' attendances - they will improve, dramatically in many cases. This Labour led Council has let its citizens down badly. We do not get the service provided by Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire, Swansea, Bridgend, Powys, Merthyr Tydfil and Cardiff, where councillors' attendances are published as a matter of course. And Rob James is the result.

The fact is - he's not the only one. If you checked the attendance records of many of those Labour councillors just deselected, you'd find appalling attendances (I have), and you'll also find some pretty poor attendances for several of those currently up for election as well. (Just so the Labour Party don't get all holier than thou and say, "look, we've put our house in order now"). You'll find it's something they don't want to talk about much because they know they haven't got a leg to stand on. The fact is we've been paying the buggers while they didn't turn up, weren't able to find out about it, and Labour now thinks it's got away with it by deselecting many of those persistent absentees. Why didn't they sort it out at any time during the five years since the last election then? This dereliction of duty needs to be shouted from the rooftops so the public know how they have taken us for a ride while they themselves rode the Gravy Train.

Again, I'm really surprised that these unacceptable attendance figures have not been used by those opposing Labour. Why not? I'll tell you why. Because Plaid do not have a perfect record either, and nor do certain Independents. It's another case, regrettably, when I feel that their sense of duty to each other is given greater weighting than their duty to the public who put them there.