The trust paid out more than £517,507 on cabs in the last financial year alone to ferry non-emergency patients to their hospital appointments. Last year’s taxi bill – £1,417 a day on average – was just £120,000 less than it spent buying 27 new ambulances and patient transport vehicles.

Peter Black called for an urgent review of spending on taxis fares:

“I am obviously concerned that the Welsh Ambulance Service are not getting value for money out of their vehicles. They are using a very expensive form of transport, when if they invested in their own vehicles they would get better value for money.”

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He has written to the Deputy Minister for Social Services after visiting Accident and Emergency Departments and talking to social service professionals and being been told that there is no national child protection register. Instead each local authority maintains its own register separately and independently from its neighbours. He says that this is particularly disturbing in the light of a worrying rise in violence against young children recorded by Welsh researchers.

“I am very concerned about this situation for a number of reasons. Firstly, Accident and Emergency units only hold the at-risk register for the area they are situated in despite the fact that they may well serve several local authority areas. Thus Morriston Hospital Accident and Emergency unit only holds the Swansea register though children present themselves from Bridgend, Neath Port Talbot, Powys, Carmarthenshire and sometimes from further afield. This makes it possible for parents to take an abused child to a different A&E each time without being flagged up as at-risk due to regular injuries being inflicted on the child.

“This is a matter that requires urgent attention by the Deputy Minister. We cannot allow loopholes to exist in our systems through which child abusers can escape.”

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Welsh Liberal Democrat Shadow Health Minister Peter Black said:

“It is disappointing to see yet another fall in performance on the part of the ambulance trust. Patients are continuing to be let down by the failure to respond to emergency calls within the target times and lives are being put at risk.

“The minister needs to knock heads together to get this sorted and quickly.”

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Research by BBC Wales into the latest combined financial position shows the seven boards have a running deficit of around £67m, which they forecast being able to bring down to £43m.

However, it currently has a deficit of £10.4m.

Commenting Welsh Liberal Democrat Shadow Health Minister Peter Black said:

“We know that there is wastage in the health service, that former Senior Managers are still being paid to do very little in the new boards and that reorganization is being viewed as a panacea when the Government should be tackling structural problems such as duplication of expenditure between social care and health, so it should not really be a surprise that they are going over-budget.”

“We were originally told that these boards would be more cost effective and save us money, but as time goes by it appears that this reorganisation has been botched. The Government should have shown leadership and tackled the difficult issues such as waste and redundancies, but until they do, we will continue to see the financial situation in the health service deteriorate.”

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They report that the predicted cut in the Home Office grant of up to 20% annually from 2011, as part of a programme of public sector savings, will leave chief officers facing difficult decisions. All four police authorities are set are set to raise the local council tax precept by around 5%, which means council taxpayers will pay around £7 or £8 extra for policing next year. The increase will keep the forces on a more-or-less even keel this year. But they are likely to encounter serious difficulties next year.

Despite this some forces still face problems in the next financial year. South Wales Police for example are looking at a cut in its budget of around £30m to 2014, which they say will have serious staffing implications. The Chair of the South Wales Police Federation, Wayne Baker, said that after a £6.5m programme of cutbacks last year, which saw four Cardiff police stations earmarked for closure and police officers taken from back-office roles onto the frontline, it was difficult to see where further savings can be made.

“Police stations, PCSOs [Police Community Support Officers], other police staff roles and other areas of policing activity are likely to be threatened. It is our view, though, that the frontline police officer role cannot be degraded any further than it currently has.

“We will soon reach a point, if not already there, when radical and brave decisions will need to be taken by those charged with over-seeing the police service in Wales in order to ensure its future sustainability.”

Welsh Liberal Democrats voted against the police settlement in the Assembly last week because they argued that the capping and the funding criteria left police forces dangerously under-resourced. Welsh Liberal Democrat Local Government Spoksperson, Peter Black told Plenary that the Assembly Government does not have the money to pass on to Police Authorities. However, what makes this situation worse is the fact that police authorities are prevented from raising the money that they need for essential policing.

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The English Liberal Democrats have recently announced a policy that will see £1 billion invested in grants to put empty properties back into use as affordable homes within the social sector. The Westminster Government has announced that £1 million will be given to 17 councils in Britain to invest in bringing empty properties back into use.

The grants proposed by the Liberal Democrats would be given to owners of long term empty properties to renovate their property and bring it back into use. In exchange the owner would have to let the property be used as social housing for a minimum of ten years. There are currently over 92,000 households on social housing waiting lists within Wales and an estimated 26,000 empty private sector properties.

The Welsh Liberal Democrats have also proposed allowing councils in Wales to charge additional council tax on empty properties. This would act as an additional payment to compensate the community for the blight caused by a long-term empty property as well as an incentive for the owner to bring the home back into use. The Welsh Assembly Government has included this proposal in the new Affordable Housing LCO.

Peter Black said:

“The large number of empty residential properties around Wales is a massive social and environmental problem that needs to be tackled. With such a shortage of affordable homes it is madness to keep building more when we have a potential resource such as this that can be brought back into use.

“One of the weaknesses of the Welsh Government’s current housing policies is that they have no strategy to deal with empty properties. That must change and these proposals can prove an important part of that work.”

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