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Tee off at the Celtic Manor is still a couple of days away - contain yourselves - but in Cardiff Bay, local government minister Carl Sargeant has taken what looks like a mighty swing at Welsh local authorities, which will have repercussions well after Team America have waved goodbye to Newport.

Most of the Assembly Government's efforts this week are aimed at maximising their substantial public investment in the Ryder Cup. A camera? Let's talk about the Ryder Cup. A lobby briefing? Did I mention the Ryder Cup?

Any ideas, by the way, how to persuade your children that it's cool to dress up as golfers to go to school on Thursday? At least they won't have to do it again on Friday. There'll be no school on Friday. An inset day. Did I mention the Ryder Cup ..?

But the exception was the statement by Mr Sargeant, innocuously titled "Your Services, Your Say" - billed as an update on his summer tour meeting public sector workers.

Once the minister had sat down it slowly dawned on some AMs that a better title could have been "My Money, My Way". For what he announced was nothing less that a complete re-evaluation of how local services are delivered in Wales: an independent inquiry, to report before Christmas, which will look at all functions carried out by councils in Wales and decide whether they could be better carried out at a regional or even national level.

We're not talking about back office here - HR, payroll and so on. It appears that the Minister is now prepared to wrest control of whole areas from local government and put them on a wholly different footing - waste, social services, trading standards for example, run regionally or even as a single national service. Mr Sargeant put it more simply - "I'm not precious about who does what."

Is he serious? A government source tells us he's deadly serious. "He is determined to take them on. He holds a lot of cards and he will play them."

But how many cards will he actually need to play? A senior local government source says that the days of councils jealously guarding their powers to protect their budgets and bureaucracy have now gone.

Ten years ago the word "regional" was a dirty word in local government for exactly those reasons. But since then, particularly in the area of waste disposal, councils have slowly begun to realise the advantages of working together. Instead of building 22 anaerobic digesters, they've built six. Cheaper all round.

The financial projections now look so grim, apparently, that even the most isolationist elements in local government are realising that the alternative to doing things differently is a very real risk that some services will become simply unsustainable. They've looked at the financial projections, woken up and as Leighton Andrews once put it, smelled the Starbucks.

Given the strength of the Minister's statement and that fact that councils are, by and large, on the same page rather than pushing against him, it appears that there are some very major changes on the way.

However, for those advocates of wholesale reorganisation of the 22 local authorities, there isn't much cheer in what Carl Sargeant had to say.

Reorganisation is the wrong message, according to the Minister. This isn't about the structures of democracy but about how we deliver services.

"Reorg" as he snappily put it, "is not where I want to be."

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