Wales Office apologises and revises visit figures

Regular readers, both of you, may remember how last month the Wales Office suggested to MPs that the secretary of state for Wales had yet to visit his own office in Cardiff.

This sounded rather odd as the figures were said to include visits to his own office in Cardiff Bay. My scepticism at the time appears to have been well-founded. Today, the Wales Office Minister Stephen Crabb has apologised to parliament and published corrected figures.

Mr Crabb explained: "It has become apparent that not all of the visits made by the Wales Office ministerial team were correctly attributed. I would like to apologise to the House and submit the following revised information."

In the revised information, the number of visits made to the Cardiff Central constituency drops from 46 to 15.

The original error was down to confusion at the Wales Office over the location of its Cardiff office, a stone's throw from the National Assembly for Wales. Someone had assumed that Caspian Point is in Cardiff Central and not Cardiff South and Penarth.

The revised figures also contain an important footnote: "This now excludes departmental meetings in Cardiff".

UPDATE: Labour MP Wayne David has been studying the figures. "Jenny Randerson," he notes, "has made a total of 18 official visits as minister, half of these to her old constituency of Cardiff Central." That may just be a remarkable coincidence but Mr David clearly has his suspicions.