Where’s the tipping point for Welsh voters?

It’s no surprise that in his first speech after the summer recess First Minister Carwyn Jones chose to talk about constitutional niceties rather than the day to day business of governing Wales when the latest in a long line of damming reports from the Wales Audit Office (WAO) on the state of the Welsh Health and Education services have been published in the last fortnight.

Yesterday’s  WAO report along with Estyn’s in to teacher absence shouldn't really come as a surprise, common sense would tell you if pupils keep having different teachers for the same subject it disrupts their learning and achievement in exams. And all efforts from the schools, local authority’s, parents and teaching unions should be made to address the situation. 

The response from the opposition parties and the teaching unions was depressing they don’t want anymore Welsh Government interference in education – so we’ll just leave things as they are to keep getting progressively worse for Welsh teachers and pupils.  No wonder Welsh politics is considered an irrelevance by so many.

Then last week we had the WAO report on the Health service capacity to deal with the coming winter pressures.

The headline from the press release states ‘Sustained improvement needed to tackle pressures in unscheduled care services - rising demand, workforce challenges and problems with patient flow through acute hospitals have combined to place significant pressure on unscheduled care services in Wales.’

The report states there have been improvements since the last Auditor General report on the matter in 2009 and they need to be sustained. Yet aside from a few press articles on the day the report was published (12^th Sept) and a Peter Black blog post the report has already sunk without trace.

It makes you wonder do Welsh voters care if our hospitals are facing another winter beds crisis or if the NHS has enough doctors and nurses and financial resources to see them through the winter when long waits at A& E, ambulances times missed and unable to unload patients due to bed blocking and people dying on trolleys that will surely be reported in the months ahead?

If they do care they've got a funny way of showing it rewarding the party that has presided over such a mess in Health and Education and that’s before I mention the dreadful state of the economy.

But before I get to depressed can we expect either of these reports to be raised with the First Minster and his colleagues when the AM’s return in October?

UPDATE The Joseph Rowntree poverty monitoring report for Wales published yesterday and proved that those in low paid work are the worst off -  this earth shattering news (that’s common knowledge to most folk) will be met with the usual hand wringing and faux outrage from the political class and the report will end up on a shelf.

And reports of champagne corks popping at these revelations by the Rowntree Foundation in Transport House earlier are at present unverified.  

Any source