Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Back
After three and a half hours on the road I arrived back in the Welsh Assembly to a huge pile of correspondence, 160 e-mails and a mass of preparation work for today's Plenary. The big debate was on Clywch, although the Welsh Liberal Democrats also had a significant amendment down to regulations to determine the formula by which schools are funded. We want to introduce a three year funding scheme with the objective of introducing stability for schools so that they can plan ahead better. However, despite us putting up a detailed argument, the Tories abstained on the grounds that they didn't understand the amendment, whilst Labour moaned about us not having brought the matter up 18 months ago and voted against without putting up a single substantive reason for doing so. The other issue was this and I did a number of interviews on the subject of school transport and the Education and Lifelong Learning Committee's review of the subject. A sad incident but a subject on which we can hopefully make a difference as an Assembly.
