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I well remember the ‘KISS’ acronym from my working days – an encouragement to everyone not to make their job and procedures too complicated, not only for their colleagues, but for customers/contacts, etc. – in short, anyone else involved with what they were doing.

It’s a lesson we should go back to and would do well to apply to public services in Wales, which are currently in an almighty mess. But to begin at the beginning (I’m coming over a bit ‘Dylan Thomas’ now!), when you look back at the Victorian origins of local government, you’ll see that those pioneers made life as simple as they could – and it worked.

At a very local level councils and service boards were named after the parishes that they served. Above that, they combined to deliver district-wide services in borough, urban district and rural district councils. These councils were combined to form parliamentary constituencies of sufficient size to elect MPs, and above that they joined to form county councils. All these larger organisations delivered ‘economies of scale’, meaning they could provide services more cheaply at the higher level rather than duplicate them at lower levels. Local justice operated in a similar way, where magistrates knew their areas, their people, and their local criminals! Likewise for the health boards which came later. It was like having a set of toy building blocks which you could piece together to construct whatever geographical organisation was needed for each area. Those of us who grew up in Monmouthshire, later Gwent, will be familiar with that sort of arrangement, and I dare say they applied equally well in the rest of Wales.

However, in the last 30 years or so, it’s all started to unravel thanks to the cack-handed interference of politicians and bureaucrats who understand neither geography, business, local communities, nor basic organisational good practice. They have ignored the old adage of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ and created the unbelievable mish-mash of public services we, as taxpayers, are paying through the nose for, and getting a worse service for our money!

My solution: let’s have some simple organisations for Gwent, having the same geographical boundaries for all public bodies within it. Call them what they are – Gwent County Council, Police, or Health Board, etc., so that users can understand what the ‘label on the tin’ means, instead of all the rebranding we’ve endured in recent years. At a very basic level it also means scrapping the 70-odd town and community councils that cover most of the county; they deliver no, repeat NO, essential services, are no longer fit for purpose, and pander only to the vanity of those puffed-up minor politicians who sit on them. It would also save taxpayers over £8 million each year.

Sadly the chances of that are next to zero, as it’s the Senedd in Cardiff who are now responsible for taking such decisions. They’ve demonstrated by the growth in their own size and levels of bureaucracy that they have no idea how to run a bath, let alone a country. They want to preserve the status quo, both to offer sinecures to their fellow-politicians at grass-roots level and to build layers of bureaucracy that will keep the voters well beyond arms-length from themselves.

Well, I can dream, can’t I? But I’d gladly vote for anyone who could make that dream a reality.