The big debate at our main council meeting last month was about the new administration’s first attempt at a corporate plan.

All councils have a corporate plan – it’s basically the main strategy document that sets out the council’s goals, policies, how they’re going to be delivered, how success will be measured and who’s responsible for delivering them.

For an organisation like Monmouthshire County Council, employing nearly 4,000 people and spending nearly a third of a billion pounds every year, this needs to be a comprehensive document.

When my team ran the council we had a very detailed corporate plan totalling 40 pages and setting out 22 goals with around 100 specific actions the council would undertake.

We’d cut the new administration some slack. Knowing that some of the new Labour councillors were paper candidates and were surprised to be elected (largely due to Partygate), we’ve given them the time and space to come up with policies for their new plan.

We were really disappointed when they published their plan totalling just six pages of vague goals, but no detail about how to achieve them, who’s responsible for delivery or how councillors can be held to account for delivery.

A lot of the statements were vague, such as ‘continue investment in active travel’. How? What are the priorities? Is the Council going to take on Welsh Government and demand a fairer share of active travel funding so we can better connect our rural villages?

At the moment councils can’t get funding to connect rural communities because it’s all targeted towards towns and cities, so councils like Cardiff and Swansea get a greater share of the cash. It was very unclear.

There were other generic commitments that sadly lacked substance such as ‘reduce avoidable hospital admissions’ – but absolutely no detail on what such a promise actually means or how it could be achieved.

The council’s vision for the entire economy was reduced to less than half a side of A4. There was no mention of public transport or of infrastructure more generally.

This is particularly odd because the administration wants to build thousands more homes in the county but many of our communities won’t cope with additional housing without significant investment in transport infrastructure.

Even Labour councillors conceded the document was a real disappointment by amending their own motion thereby committing themselves to bring back a better more detailed version in January.