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Well you didn't think council Finance Directors kept the millions they get from the Assembly Government in a bucket under the bed, did you?

They didn't. Some - - were attracted by investment opportunities in Icelandic banks, like Landsbanki's promise of "Creative, positive, sustainable" plans to invest their money and better interest rates than they were offered elsewhere you assume. Now they're wishing they'd put in a bucket under the bed.

How much are we talking about? The exposure, to use the word of the moment, is around £12 million, not a lot perhaps when you hear that some of England's largest councils are sweating over £40million and more.

But hang on. Powys County Council have just been discussing a controversial plan to switch off street lamps which would save them all of a quarter of a million. The extra money they've got coming to them in this spending round is somewhere in the region of £2.5million. The £4million they handed over to Landsbanki and Glitnir amounts to 6% of their investment portfolio and is going to hurt if it doesn't make it back to the schools and old people of Powys.

Gordon Brown's office said yesterday that they weren't getting "much or any information out of the Icelandic authorities". Try again is the advice from the Welsh Local Government Association or better still give us "the necessary cover for public sector investments which have been undertaken in accord with normal practice".

They add that "until very recently these banks were rated as creditworthy by the leading credit rating agencies".

If I lived in Powys, Flintshire, Rhondda Cynon Taf, Monmouthsire and Ceredigion I think I'd like, at the very least, to know just how recently?

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