Scrutiny
The transcript of Episode 4 of 'Y Pumed Llawr - The Fifth Floor
Welcome to the Fifth Floor. This is where Ministers in the Welsh Government are based.
As soon as you take your oath of office you are in the spotlight, and under scrutiny.
In a democracy it is the quid pro quo for power - You get to make decisions but you have to account for them. The Parliament, the press and the public are all watching what do you, and what you don’t do.
But the elevator to the top of Ty Hywel in Cardiff Bay doesn’t just take you to a different floor, but a different world - a different branch of the constitution. From the Parliament to the Executive.
It may not seem much, but it is a paradigm shift.
A Senedd Member who makes the shift is no longer charged with holding the Government to account, but is now themselves accountable - to the Senedd through questioning and debate, and to the people of Wales, via the media and directly.
As well as being central to the way we do Parliamentary democracy scrutiny is important for the Government itself - it keeps Ministers sharp, and on their toes - responsive to the people they represent.
But theory and practice often diverge, in democracies around the world the executive overpowers the legislature, and Ministers are seldom properly tested by those who are meant to holding them to account:
Kirsty Williams served in the Senedd for over 20 years. A campaigner for devolution she was elected as the Liberal Democrat member for Brecon & Radnor in 1999, and to her surprise in 2016 became a Minister in the Welsh Government. She went from giving them hell to expecting the same…
[Kirsty Williams]
You know, no Minister likes to be rolled over or challenged, but I think being frightened of really good scrutiny makes for better Ministerial performance and decision making, and wider government, you know, civil servants.
[Lee Waters]
And were you?
[KW]
I'd sit there ahead of oral questions in the chamber, and I would have a list of things that I was really worried people would ask about. And very, very rarely were the things that I thought, ‘Oh, I'm in difficulty if they ask about these things’, very rarely were they asked, very rarely.
Not all Ministers embrace challenge, but the good ones see the value of being put through their paces.
‘Our critics are our friends’, Benjamin Franklin said, ‘they show us our faults’.
Lesley Griffiths was a Minister for 15 years. She said she was sometimes caught off-guard in front of Senedd scrutiny committees, and it teaches you to be careful what you say.
[LG]
So I always found committee scrutiny the most challenging. I think mainly because you had some members who - you know, you submit a paper as the Minister, and they stick to that. But you can go off and you can ask. I always used to think, ‘why aren't you asking me this or this or this?’
But some members are very, very good at committee scrutiny; they will keep coming back at you. So you know, in the chamber, you ask your tabled question, you ask one supplementary, and that's it. The Minister chooses not to answer the question or doesn't know the answer, then you can get away with it. You can't get away with it in committee, because they can keep coming back at you - they can ask you ten questions! And so I always found committee scrutiny done properly could be challenging.
But far too often committee scrutiny is not done properly. At its worst Senedd Members read-out pre-prepared questions, and Ministers reply by reading out answers to a script they’ve seen in advance.
Mick Antoniw speaks from the experience of both Chairing a Senedd committee and appearing before them as a Minister
[Mick Antoniw]
Senedd members in committee should not be there to read out questions. The questions are there to give you a guide as to ensure areas are covered. But you can only really do that properly if you actually understand fully what what it is that you're scrutinising, or what you're trying to seek out by way of an evidence scrutiny session.
My experience is that, you know, you get worn down, you get ground down. And that, again, is because, you know, I think it probably worked reasonably well for the first 7/8/9 years of the assembly, but the moment it became a proper Parliament, the moment took over proper legislative functions, the moment it had substantial expansion of economic, environmental resources, the moment all the issues arising from Brexit arose and so on. I think it has become overwhelming.
In the Westminster Parliament most MPs don’t sit on any Select Committee. But with just 60 members politicians in the Senedd have to double-up.
Most MSs sit on multiple committees. I’ve had periods as a backbencher when I’ve been a member of four different committee enquiries at the same time, which inevitably means that you just don’t have the prep time you’d like for each meeting. As a result Ministers are often given an easy ride
[KW]
I just think it's because in some ways the Senedd is small, and people are asked to do a lot of things. There's very little time to really develop expertise in a particular subject. And a lot of the scrutiny is very much local, rather than strategic and system scrutiny. It's about what's happening in this particular place, and I understand, gosh I was a backbencher for many more years than I was a Minister. So I understand all of that. But I just think that scrutiny leads to better government, and I think scrutiny could be improved within the Senedd.
The Senedd is small. There are fewer members of the Welsh Parliament than there are members of Carmarthenshire Council.
Several independent enquiries have concluded that there are too few Member of the Senedd to properly sustain the basic tasks of scrutiny. Which is why from May 2026 the number of MSs will increase from 60 to 96.
Mick Antoniw was the Minister who took the reforms through the Welsh Parliament, he says the quality of scrutiny in the Senedd is at least as good as the UK Parliament - which is all the more important as we don’t have a second chamber - but the smaller numbers does hamper the depth of challenge
[MA]
What I think is the weakness is the ability of Senedd members to develop real professional expertise into an area over a long period of time. I think one of the strengths of the Westminster parliamentary system is you have people there who have almost devoted a lifetime developing the skill, the expertise, the contact, the knowledge in particular specialist areas. You know, Foreign Affairs might be one, the other one might be housing, etc.
But what I find is that you had Senedd members who are on too many committees. And It was not really possible to actually put the time and develop the expertise into what are complex areas. The fact that we're looking at environmental issues, or we might be looking at agricultural issues within Wales, is as much demanding as if you were doing that in the UK, for a country with a population that is 10 times or 20 times greater. So the burden on a small number of people to do with the only a fraction of the resource and time on a similar task that Westminster would have, I think, was very, very notable, and I think people worked incredibly hard. And I think there was a real danger in terms of burnout within the committees.
What I noticed was that for the first year or two, people would be spending every hour they could to understand, to go and visit places, to do things. The next year, you do a little bit less, the next year.. because people are beginning to get tired. They're beginning to come overwhelmed. You begin to become more dependent on, for example, the questions that are written, you know.
There is no denying that the small talent pool, and the pressure of time, has an impact on the rigor of the scrutiny
But it’s not just about numbers, it's about culture. And that’s true of all Parliaments.
Opposition politicians are drawn into partisan point-scoring, and Governing parties frown on friendly fire from their own side.
It’s not welcome, and it's hard work.
The graft of digging into the policy detail brings little reward.
And so Ministers and their civil servants are more often than not let off the hook.
Dan Butler was Mark Drakeford’s special advisor on the environment and climate change for the whole of his five years as First Minister, I asked him to what extent it felt inside the government that scrutiny brought effective pressure?
[Dan Butler]
Extremely rarely. It’s the thing I suppose I found the most shocking, really, is actually quite how little [there is] - not just the scrutiny not being very robust, but actually there being a lack of enthusiasm for scrutiny. That's, that's what I felt.
The classic example of this being is anytime you talk to a Senedd committee or a lobby group, they want you to set up some sort of quango, some sort of independent body. As if, ‘oh, well if, if we could just have a group of people who are, you know, quote, unquote, independent looking at this, i.e doing the scrutiny, then everything would be fine’. And it's like, but what are you doing?
[LW]
In terms of the more general parliamentary scrutiny, committees and questions and so on. Did you feel any pressure from that to up your game?
[DB]
There were absolutely, without question, examples of questions, particularly from opposition, and to be fair, particularly to certain members of Plaid Cymru, where actually they were quite good at highlighting issues. And it kind of felt like, ‘Okay I can see why.
So there was a committee report and a bunch of questions around local authority farms. Well, you know, that is not an issue that's very high up the government's agenda. And local authorities have been selling off their local authority farms for many years because they're desperate for cash. But actually it does have quite big implications for entry into the sector, because that used to be a very important way, and over time, it has eroded. And, you know, the government faced pressure on shoring up the loss, and also, you know, examining other sorts of routes.
Okay, it's not a major example. But though there are definitely examples of somebody who will raise something, it's not something that the minister or many officials have given much thought to, so actually, stuff does happen as a result.
But that’s a tiny minority. The majority of what happens in the chamber, it seemed to me, is ‘I'm going to make my statement, I'm going to clip it and put it on social media, and I'm going to sit down’, and it's not, you know?
I think that applies to a degree in Westminster, although obviously they have a lot more time and space to do scrutiny. So I definitely felt, from a parliamentary point of view, and obviously as a special adviser this wasn't really my bag, but it did feel to me as if there was very limited parliamentary debate about lots of things. It tended to be quite repetitive things that would get brought up, there wasn't a lot of surprise in things.
Woodrow Wilson, who was US President 100 years ago, famously observed of his own parliament, “Congress in its committee rooms is Congress at work,”
And the same can be said of Westminster and the Senedd.
There’s a Parliamentary committee for each main policy area, and in large part they work through consensus. Certainly in the Senedd the rare visitor to the public gallery would be hard pressed to tell the different parties apart in committee meetings.
When it comes to policy detail the members and clerks generally follow the evidence that people present to them. It is rare for there to be a vote when agreeing a committee report.
The Welsh Parliament is elected through proportional representation and the ‘winners takes all’ culture of many parliaments is absent. The culture of looking for areas of agreement has been successfully established.
It’s only when committees vote on laws that the party whip is used, and even then a determined backbencher can exert influence behind the scenes if they are seriously unhappy.
In May 2024 I abstained on a vote to introduce a new law to make deliberate deception by politicians a crime. Because the Government has no majority this one vote had the effect of getting them to re-think. It is not a tool that can be over-used, but it does demonstrate that when the will is there the executive cannot take the legislature for granted.
But for the most part, the work of committees is probably fairly best described as ‘solid’.
Here’s former special adviser Dan Butler again.
DB
I definitely feel committee reports were such a missed opportunity, because I feel like the ministers I worked with wanted to be responsive to committee reports. The steer I always had from ministers was trying to make the officials' rather grim responses [to report recommendations] slightly more upbeat, positive, and receptive. But the reality is that they made it quite easy for us a lot of the time by putting in things that were pretty anodyne, or things that were just so barking mad that, you know, there's no way that they were going to happen.
There aren’t many of examples of committee reports that rock Ministers on their heels. Enquiries into mental health by the Education committee in the last Senedd, the ‘Mind over Matters’ report, stands out as the exception - not the rule.
The decision to give the Chairs of committees greater independence by having them elected by the whole Senedd, rather than by party leaders has been an important and positive development. But the herd instinct of political groups is hard to change. Few Chairs pack a punch.
The enquiries themselves too often feel like an exercise in painting by numbers. Lobby groups put in their evidence and the committee clerks suggest a set of recommendations based on what is submitted.
But there is rarely much rigour in the process.
In a hurry to move on to the next thing the Senedd Members rush to draw conclusions, and seldom challenge each other to think deeply about a problem. Or work through the detail of solutions.
They make too many recommendations - eager to make sure every issue that is brought before them gets a mention - but rarely grapple with the trade-offs and capacity constraints that Ministers face in reality.
The end result is that the Government finds it easy to parry the conveyor belt of reports that are produced by the Senedd.
Occasionally the legislature lands a well aimed blow, but typically the Executive finds it easy to dominate.
Owain Lloyd was the top education civil servant in the Welsh Government. He often had the job of appearing before Senedd committees, and drawing up the Government response to reports on education
[OL]
There are definitely times where recommendations would come forward which I think would improve policy and make us tweak policy and delivery. I think that's fundamentally important. And I'd like to see Senedd Committees have more time and space to maybe delve into things and work through particularly difficult kind of delivery challenges and so on. That's different to the hoo-ha of oral questions in the Senedd and so on.
I often felt that the greatest scrutiny and challenge was from our partners and stakeholders, actually. So would be from local government, or in the education space you'd have your Estyn’s or Qualifications Wales. That’s where a lot of - not scrutiny - but I suppose a lot of the challenging conversations would happen around delivery.
And then I suppose, there were those such as the Children's Commissioner and the Welsh Language Commissioner, rightly in terms of their role, feeding through concerns coming through their sector. But that's probably as far as we go I think in the Welsh context from a scrutiny and challenge point of view.
[LW]
And do you think that’s a problem?
[OL]
I mean, with my ex-civil service hat on, not necessarily.
[Laughter]
[LW]
Well quite
[OL]
Is it a problem? I think where there is a gap in the Welsh context I suppose is around that fresh policy thinking. So, not so much scrutiny, but where are the ideas coming from, around doing things differently and so on?
I suppose in the English context you have organisations such as IPPR and others that would come forward with interesting ideas; who would do the research, would do the legwork, would talk about kind of service delivery in a different way. There are times where I think that is definitely missing from the Welsh context.
You know, we do have the Wales Centre for Public Policy and there's the Bevan Foundation and others, but I don't get a sense at times that there's a myriad of new policy thinking - challenging old ways of doing things - coming through.
And I think feeding through to the civil servants and ministers around discussions about ‘look, there's a knotty issue and problem here. Have you thought about doing it in this way?’. I do think there's a bit of a gap there, to be honest.
Having run one of the few Welsh think-tanks, the Institute for Welsh Affairs, I can vouch for the paucity of sources of alternative policy thinking.
In London rich benefactors are willing to fund policy institutes to float ideas for reform. In Wales neither the money, nor the appetite for challenge, is there.
The space outside Government for independent thinking and scrutiny is critical to the health of a democratic society.
It was outside the political institutions that the campaign for a Scottish Parliament gained momentum through the 1980s and 90s. The churches, trade unions, voluntary bodies and academics came together to identify the need for devolution from Westminster. It was the debate in this so-called ‘civil society’ that galvanised public debate, and informed the shape of the institutions that would emerge after the referendum in 1997.
But there really was no equivalent ‘civil society’ in Wales.
The narrowness of the vote for a Welsh Assembly was in part a reflection of the absence of a consensus for change outside the political elite.
And so since 1999 the task of cultivating a Welsh civil society has been active.
Most UK bodies now have some kind of Welsh off-shoot. The Universities have taken some steps - but not nearly enough - to apply their expertise to policy challenges within Wales. And even the business sector, not a supporter of devolution in either 1979 or 1997, has upped its engagement.
The outlines of a civil society have taken shape. But like any animal bred in captivity there are limitations. A smaller gene pool and weaker survival skills leads to a fragility that isn’t always robust enough to survive contact with the outside world.
Critics have described the Third Sector in Wales as a ‘client state’. In fact there aren’t many corners of Welsh life where the actors feel free of obligations to the State in some form.
Here’s Kirsty Williams again
[KW]
Then in civic society. You know, this is again the curse and the blessing of being a small nation. Many of the people that perhaps would speak out have a direct relationship with the government in some way, shape or form, and I think in some way, that stifles debate. And that's a real shame.
That is a real shame, because Ministers who are kept on their toes; Ministers who fear falling foul of that kind of scrutiny, work really hard to avoid those pitfalls and really, really challenge. And when you're developing policy you do need those disparate voices, don't you? You do need lots to hear from lots and lots of perspectives and voices, so that as a Minister, you know you've got the whole range in front of you.
We saw this with the with subsequently with the covid inquiry, didn't we? Too often you're just given one voice, there's one set of advice, or there's not that range of different views / options / opinions, you don't get to hear a lot of debate about that. As a Minister, you get to hear one view of the world.
So I think if we had that wider scrutiny, and that wider political discourse, and policy discourse, across a wider section, then that would lead to better decision making.
_________________
A key part of the jigsaw of any well-functioning civil society is a healthy media.
It’s not for nothing that the press became known as the ‘Fourth Estate’ - just as critical as the other branches of government, or estates, to the functioning of a democracy.
Whilst freedom of speech is being fetishised, the organisms necessary to facilitate an informed debate are atrophying.
Digital disruption has upended the business model of the traditional media, and this is particularly pronounced in Wales where it was very weak to begin with.
The Western Mail now sells fewer than 5,000 copies a day, 11 times lower than it was when the Welsh Assembly began in 1999. And even less than the north Wales Daily Post.
Less than 4,000 copies of the South Wales Echo pass through the newsstands, fewer still of the Argus.
Eyeballs have moved online. Walesonline claims it reaches half of all adults in Wales: 16 million visits a month.
But each reader only hovers for an average 2 minutes each- and a fair bit of that is spent fighting their way through pop-up adverts.
The development of so-called ‘algorithm led’ journalism means that day-to-day public-interest reporting is low down the list. And specialist policy reporting is almost entirely a thing of the past.
There is just no viable commercial market for it. It's not the fault of the journalists, this is a trend around the world.
Even public service platforms are following the trend.
And despite a peak in interest in news about Wales during the covid pandemic sources of news from London and elsewhere have reverted to type. Coverage is now largely back to stories about novelties or controversies.
[DB]
If there are lots of people following the Welsh media, I certainly didn't meet them. I mean, I don't know whether it's something to do with people here not being as interested, or, you know, whether it is just poorly served by our media. But I mean, if you read the Welsh media. It's just, it's pretty unedifying. And I can't believe that that's because, you know, Wales is just so much of a more boring place than anywhere else. I just think there's a lot less scrutiny. It felt very superficial. And especially the environmental reporting. I mean, it was just nonsensical. A lot of the time it was just, you know, it was like, ‘somebody said something, article gets written, somebody says this thing’, and it's just like, who cares, you know? And so, yeah, I spent very little time thinking about the Welsh media, because as far as I could tell, very few other people spent any time thinking about the Welsh media. And unfortunately, I think it's, it's kind of self reinforcing,
[LW]
One of the arguments the media make is that Ministers don't really put themselves up for scripting. They routinely turn down interview requests and are quite closed. Is there any justice to that argument?
[DB]
I mean, definitely, some ministers enjoy the media more than others, and some are more willing to do it. I am not sure you could apply that to all the ministers I work for. I think you possibly could apply it to some of them just not being very up for that, but some of them totally were.
I guess some of the specialist press, I would say some of the farming press, would scratch the surface a bit more, and tended to pick up on, you know, you would read things in the specialist press and think ‘is that a is that really a thing?’, and find out that it was. Whereas I cannot think of a single example of where I saw something reported on, you know, Wales online, or Nation Cymru or BBC that you thought ‘oh, I need to, I need to look into that’. You'd see it and you’d be like ‘Oh, that one’.
I mean, you know, they do the NRW trees story, they'd use the same picture of a pile of logs. [Laugher]
They couldn't even be bothered to find a second picture of a pile of logs with which to flog this story. And, you know, I think that really says a lot.
A recurring theme of the conversations is the challenges of doing Government and politics in a small nation.
There are all the crosswinds faced by leaders and administrator elsewhere, with some added extra.
But the upside is also apparent too. There is agency to a small number of people rooted in their communities, and committed to conditions in a political geography that has often been peripheral.
A country of just three million people, sparsely populated, and with entrenched social and economic inequalities, is challenging terrain. But the case for devolution of powers to Wales was based in part on the fact that it would bring power closer to people. And it has.
This can be a rich, and sometimes challenging, source of scrutiny - as my social media can attest.
Lesley Griffiths was Minister for Rural Affairs for 8 years from 2016 to 2024. The farming community are amongst the sharpest lobbyists but as she found the ability to reach past the gatekeepers is an advantage Welsh Ministers have over their Whitehall counterparts
LG
I used to go to the summer shows that the NFU would do a panel for me, that to me was good scrutiny. Farmers there didn't care you were the Minister. That was their opportunity to give you a hard time, or find out what you know - whether the NFU were telling them the truth. And so I used to find that level of scrutiny very helpful.
I remember the Royal Welsh a couple of years ago on the trees for instance. The whole show was completely dominated by ‘trees’. But for me, that was healthy. I knew what the NFU’s view was, but I didn't know what farmers views was. So that was really helpful. So we held a couple of sessions where they could come along and meet with me and talk about it.
But more importantly, officials were just there the whole time at the Welsh Government stand. And, you know, people could come in and give their views. And I think that is really good and really healthy. Officials take on the brunt of that work - meeting farmers; they go to the county meetings - you know things you just don't have time to do as a Minister.
And farmers would come up and say, ‘you need to come to my farm, and I will show you’. And I’d say, ‘right, that's fine, you know, give me your details, and I will try and come’. And I hope I did that every time I was asked to do that. They look quite shocked sometimes, particularly farmers who have never had anything to do with politics or never had anything to do with the farming union, they didn't expect you to say, ‘okay, I'll come’.
Officials like to sit you in a room, round a desk, PowerPoint, lots of information. For me, my learning was done out on the farm, in the hospital, you know, talking to GPs, talking to fisheries, talking to the food producers. That's where you learn about the portfolio. I mean don't get me wrong, officials as I just said, are often the experts. But for me, that's where I did my learning.
But what I find is that you had Senedd members who are on too many committees. And It was not really possible to actually put the time and develop the expertise into what are complex areas. The fact that we're looking at environmental issues, or we might be looking at agricultural issues within Wales, is as much demanding as if you were doing that in the UK, for a country with a population that is 10 times or 20 times greater. So the burden on a small number of people to do with the only a fraction of the resource and time on a similar task that Westminster would have, I think, was very, very notable, and I think people worked incredibly hard. And I think there was a real danger in terms of burnout within the committees.
What I noticed was that for the first year or two, people would be spending every hour they could to understand, to go and visit places, to do things. The next year, you do a little bit less, the next year.. because people are beginning to get tired. They're beginning to come overwhelmed. You begin to become more dependent on, for example, the questions that are written, you know.
There is no denying that the small talent pool, and the pressure of time, has an impact on the rigor of the scrutiny
But it’s not just about numbers, it's about culture. And that’s true of all Parliaments.
Opposition politicians are drawn into partisan point-scoring, and Governing parties frown on friendly fire from their own side.
It’s not welcome, and it's hard work.
The graft of digging into the policy detail brings little reward.
And so Ministers and their civil servants are more often than not let off the hook.
Dan Butler was Mark Drakeford’s special advisor on the environment and climate change for the whole of his five years as First Minister, I asked him to what extent it felt inside the government that scrutiny brought effective pressure?
[Dan Butler]
Extremely rarely. It’s the thing I suppose I found the most shocking, really, is actually quite how little [there is] - not just the scrutiny not being very robust, but actually there being a lack of enthusiasm for scrutiny. That's, that's what I felt.
The classic example of this being is anytime you talk to a Senedd committee or a lobby group, they want you to set up some sort of quango, some sort of independent body. As if, ‘oh, well if, if we could just have a group of people who are, you know, quote, unquote, independent looking at this, i.e doing the scrutiny, then everything would be fine’. And it's like, but what are you doing?
[LW]
In terms of the more general parliamentary scrutiny, committees and questions and so on. Did you feel any pressure from that to up your game?
[DB]
There were absolutely, without question, examples of questions, particularly from opposition, and to be fair, particularly to certain members of Plaid Cymru, where actually they were quite good at highlighting issues. And it kind of felt like, ‘Okay I can see why.
So there was a committee report and a bunch of questions around local authority farms. Well, you know, that is not an issue that's very high up the government's agenda. And local authorities have been selling off their local authority farms for many years because they're desperate for cash. But actually it does have quite big implications for entry into the sector, because that used to be a very important way, and over time, it has eroded. And, you know, the government faced pressure on shoring up the loss, and also, you know, examining other sorts of routes.
Okay, it's not a major example. But though there are definitely examples of somebody who will raise something, it's not something that the minister or many officials have given much thought to, so actually, stuff does happen as a result.
But that’s a tiny minority. The majority of what happens in the chamber, it seemed to me, is ‘I'm going to make my statement, I'm going to clip it and put it on social media, and I'm going to sit down’, and it's not, you know?
I think that applies to a degree in Westminster, although obviously they have a lot more time and space to do scrutiny. So I definitely felt, from a parliamentary point of view, and obviously as a special adviser this wasn't really my bag, but it did feel to me as if there was very limited parliamentary debate about lots of things. It tended to be quite repetitive things that would get brought up, there wasn't a lot of surprise in things.
Woodrow Wilson, who was US President 100 years ago, famously observed of his own parliament, “Congress in its committee rooms is Congress at work,”
And the same can be said of Westminster and the Senedd.
There’s a Parliamentary committee for each main policy area, and in large part they work through consensus. Certainly in the Senedd the rare visitor to the public gallery would be hard pressed to tell the different parties apart in committee meetings.
When it comes to policy detail the members and clerks generally follow the evidence that people present to them. It is rare for there to be a vote when agreeing a committee report.
The Welsh Parliament is elected through proportional representation and the ‘winners takes all’ culture of many parliaments is absent. The culture of looking for areas of agreement has been successfully established.
It’s only when committees vote on laws that the party whip is used, and even then a determined backbencher can exert influence behind the scenes if they are seriously unhappy.
In May 2024 I abstained on a vote to introduce a new law to make deliberate deception by politicians a crime. Because the Government has no majority this one vote had the effect of getting them to re-think. It is not a tool that can be over-used, but it does demonstrate that when the will is there the executive cannot take the legislature for granted.
But for the most part, the work of committees is probably fairly best described as ‘solid’.
Here’s former special adviser Dan Butler again.
DB
I definitely feel committee reports were such a missed opportunity, because I feel like the ministers I worked with wanted to be responsive to committee reports. The steer I always had from ministers was trying to make the officials' rather grim responses [to report recommendations] slightly more upbeat, positive, and receptive. But the reality is that they made it quite easy for us a lot of the time by putting in things that were pretty anodyne, or things that were just so barking mad that, you know, there's no way that they were going to happen.
There aren’t many of examples of committee reports that rock Ministers on their heels. Enquiries into mental health by the Education committee in the last Senedd, the ‘Mind over Matters’ report, stands out as the exception - not the rule.
The decision to give the Chairs of committees greater independence by having them elected by the whole Senedd, rather than by party leaders has been an important and positive development. But the herd instinct of political groups is hard to change. Few Chairs pack a punch.
The enquiries themselves too often feel like an exercise in painting by numbers. Lobby groups put in their evidence and the committee clerks suggest a set of recommendations based on what is submitted.
But there is rarely much rigour in the process.
In a hurry to move on to the next thing the Senedd Members rush to draw conclusions, and seldom challenge each other to think deeply about a problem. Or work through the detail of solutions.
They make too many recommendations - eager to make sure every issue that is brought before them gets a mention - but rarely grapple with the trade-offs and capacity constraints that Ministers face in reality.
The end result is that the Government finds it easy to parry the conveyor belt of reports that are produced by the Senedd.
Occasionally the legislature lands a well aimed blow, but typically the Executive finds it easy to dominate.
Owain Lloyd was the top education civil servant in the Welsh Government. He often had the job of appearing before Senedd committees, and drawing up the Government response to reports on education
[OL]
There are definitely times where recommendations would come forward which I think would improve policy and make us tweak policy and delivery. I think that's fundamentally important. And I'd like to see Senedd Committees have more time and space to maybe delve into things and work through particularly difficult kind of delivery challenges and so on. That's different to the hoo-ha of oral questions in the Senedd and so on.
I often felt that the greatest scrutiny and challenge was from our partners and stakeholders, actually. So would be from local government, or in the education space you'd have your Estyn’s or Qualifications Wales. That’s where a lot of - not scrutiny - but I suppose a lot of the challenging conversations would happen around delivery.
And then I suppose, there were those such as the Children's Commissioner and the Welsh Language Commissioner, rightly in terms of their role, feeding through concerns coming through their sector. But that's probably as far as we go I think in the Welsh context from a scrutiny and challenge point of view.
[LW]
And do you think that’s a problem?
[OL]
I mean, with my ex-civil service hat on, not necessarily.
[Laughter]
[LW]
Well quite
[OL]
Is it a problem? I think where there is a gap in the Welsh context I suppose is around that fresh policy thinking. So, not so much scrutiny, but where are the ideas coming from, around doing things differently and so on?
I suppose in the English context you have organisations such as IPPR and others that would come forward with interesting ideas; who would do the research, would do the legwork, would talk about kind of service delivery in a different way. There are times where I think that is definitely missing from the Welsh context.
You know, we do have the Wales Centre for Public Policy and there's the Bevan Foundation and others, but I don't get a sense at times that there's a myriad of new policy thinking - challenging old ways of doing things - coming through.
And I think feeding through to the civil servants and ministers around discussions about ‘look, there's a knotty issue and problem here. Have you thought about doing it in this way?’. I do think there's a bit of a gap there, to be honest.
Having run one of the few Welsh think-tanks, the Institute for Welsh Affairs, I can vouch for the paucity of sources of alternative policy thinking.
In London rich benefactors are willing to fund policy institutes to float ideas for reform. In Wales neither the money, nor the appetite for challenge, is there.
The space outside Government for independent thinking and scrutiny is critical to the health of a democratic society.
It was outside the political institutions that the campaign for a Scottish Parliament gained momentum through the 1980s and 90s. The churches, trade unions, voluntary bodies and academics came together to identify the need for devolution from Westminster. It was the debate in this so-called ‘civil society’ that galvanised public debate, and informed the shape of the institutions that would emerge after the referendum in 1997.
But there really was no equivalent ‘civil society’ in Wales.
The narrowness of the vote for a Welsh Assembly was in part a reflection of the absence of a consensus for change outside the political elite.
And so since 1999 the task of cultivating a Welsh civil society has been active.
Most UK bodies now have some kind of Welsh off-shoot. The Universities have taken some steps - but not nearly enough - to apply their expertise to policy challenges within Wales. And even the business sector, not a supporter of devolution in either 1979 or 1997, has upped its engagement.
The outlines of a civil society have taken shape. But like any animal bred in captivity there are limitations. A smaller gene pool and weaker survival skills leads to a fragility that isn’t always robust enough to survive contact with the outside world.
Critics have described the Third Sector in Wales as a ‘client state’. In fact there aren’t many corners of Welsh life where the actors feel free of obligations to the State in some form.
Here’s Kirsty Williams again
[KW]
Then in civic society. You know, this is again the curse and the blessing of being a small nation. Many of the people that perhaps would speak out have a direct relationship with the government in some way, shape or form, and I think in some way, that stifles debate. And that's a real shame.
That is a real shame, because Ministers who are kept on their toes; Ministers who fear falling foul of that kind of scrutiny, work really hard to avoid those pitfalls and really, really challenge. And when you're developing policy you do need those disparate voices, don't you? You do need lots to hear from lots and lots of perspectives and voices, so that as a Minister, you know you've got the whole range in front of you.
We saw this with the with subsequently with the covid inquiry, didn't we? Too often you're just given one voice, there's one set of advice, or there's not that range of different views / options / opinions, you don't get to hear a lot of debate about that. As a Minister, you get to hear one view of the world.
So I think if we had that wider scrutiny, and that wider political discourse, and policy discourse, across a wider section, then that would lead to better decision making.
_________________
A key part of the jigsaw of any well-functioning civil society is a healthy media.
It’s not for nothing that the press became known as the ‘Fourth Estate’ - just as critical as the other branches of government, or estates, to the functioning of a democracy.
Whilst freedom of speech is being fetishised, the organisms necessary to facilitate an informed debate are atrophying.
Digital disruption has upended the business model of the traditional media, and this is particularly pronounced in Wales where it was very weak to begin with.
The Western Mail now sells fewer than 5,000 copies a day, 11 times lower than it was when the Welsh Assembly began in 1999. And even less than the north Wales Daily Post.
Less than 4,000 copies of the South Wales Echo pass through the newsstands, fewer still of the Argus.
Eyeballs have moved online. Walesonline claims it reaches half of all adults in Wales: 16 million visits a month.
But each reader only hovers for an average 2 minutes each- and a fair bit of that is spent fighting their way through pop-up adverts.
The development of so-called ‘algorithm led’ journalism means that day-to-day public-interest reporting is low down the list. And specialist policy reporting is almost entirely a thing of the past.
There is just no viable commercial market for it. It's not the fault of the journalists, this is a trend around the world.
Even public service platforms are following the trend.
And despite a peak in interest in news about Wales during the covid pandemic sources of news from London and elsewhere have reverted to type. Coverage is now largely back to stories about novelties or controversies.
[DB]
If there are lots of people following the Welsh media, I certainly didn't meet them. I mean, I don't know whether it's something to do with people here not being as interested, or, you know, whether it is just poorly served by our media. But I mean, if you read the Welsh media. It's just, it's pretty unedifying. And I can't believe that that's because, you know, Wales is just so much of a more boring place than anywhere else. I just think there's a lot less scrutiny. It felt very superficial. And especially the environmental reporting. I mean, it was just nonsensical. A lot of the time it was just, you know, it was like, ‘somebody said something, article gets written, somebody says this thing’, and it's just like, who cares, you know? And so, yeah, I spent very little time thinking about the Welsh media, because as far as I could tell, very few other people spent any time thinking about the Welsh media. And unfortunately, I think it's, it's kind of self reinforcing,
[LW]
One of the arguments the media make is that Ministers don't really put themselves up for scripting. They routinely turn down interview requests and are quite closed. Is there any justice to that argument?
[DB]
I mean, definitely, some ministers enjoy the media more than others, and some are more willing to do it. I am not sure you could apply that to all the ministers I work for. I think you possibly could apply it to some of them just not being very up for that, but some of them totally were.
I guess some of the specialist press, I would say some of the farming press, would scratch the surface a bit more, and tended to pick up on, you know, you would read things in the specialist press and think ‘is that a is that really a thing?’, and find out that it was. Whereas I cannot think of a single example of where I saw something reported on, you know, Wales online, or Nation Cymru or BBC that you thought ‘oh, I need to, I need to look into that’. You'd see it and you’d be like ‘Oh, that one’.
I mean, you know, they do the NRW trees story, they'd use the same picture of a pile of logs. [Laugher]
They couldn't even be bothered to find a second picture of a pile of logs with which to flog this story. And, you know, I think that really says a lot.
A recurring theme of the conversations is the challenges of doing Government and politics in a small nation.
There are all the crosswinds faced by leaders and administrator elsewhere, with some added extra.
But the upside is also apparent too. There is agency to a small number of people rooted in their communities, and committed to conditions in a political geography that has often been peripheral.
A country of just three million people, sparsely populated, and with entrenched social and economic inequalities, is challenging terrain. But the case for devolution of powers to Wales was based in part on the fact that it would bring power closer to people. And it has.
This can be a rich, and sometimes challenging, source of scrutiny - as my social media can attest.
Lesley Griffiths was Minister for Rural Affairs for 8 years from 2016 to 2024. The farming community are amongst the sharpest lobbyists but as she found the ability to reach past the gatekeepers is an advantage Welsh Ministers have over their Whitehall counterparts
LG
I used to go to the summer shows that the NFU would do a panel for me, that to me was good scrutiny. Farmers there didn't care you were the Minister. That was their opportunity to give you a hard time, or find out what you know - whether the NFU were telling them the truth. And so I used to find that level of scrutiny very helpful.
I remember the Royal Welsh a couple of years ago on the trees for instance. The whole show was completely dominated by ‘trees’. But for me, that was healthy. I knew what the NFU’s view was, but I didn't know what farmers views was. So that was really helpful. So we held a couple of sessions where they could come along and meet with me and talk about it.
But more importantly, officials were just there the whole time at the Welsh Government stand. And, you know, people could come in and give their views. And I think that is really good and really healthy. Officials take on the brunt of that work - meeting farmers; they go to the county meetings - you know things you just don't have time to do as a Minister.
And farmers would come up and say, ‘you need to come to my farm, and I will show you’. And I’d say, ‘right, that's fine, you know, give me your details, and I will try and come’. And I hope I did that every time I was asked to do that. They look quite shocked sometimes, particularly farmers who have never had anything to do with politics or never had anything to do with the farming union, they didn't expect you to say, ‘okay, I'll come’.
Officials like to sit you in a room, round a desk, PowerPoint, lots of information. For me, my learning was done out on the farm, in the hospital, you know, talking to GPs, talking to fisheries, talking to the food producers. That's where you learn about the portfolio. I mean don't get me wrong, officials as I just said, are often the experts. But for me, that's where I did my learning.
Knowing where the shoe is pinching is critical political intelligence for Ministers. They can't possibly see into the detail of every area of policy responsibility they have so a responsive democracy relies on an open feedback loop. Effective scrutiny is essential to that.
You can only apply a correction mechanism if you know if you are going off course.
But as we’ve discussed in this episode the feedback processes are not always well calibrated.
That’s a problem for Ministers.
There’s always been politics in Wales but its only in the last 25 years that we can really say we’ve had Welsh politics.
The institutions are still new and have been slow to develop, but even sometimes they have been operating in advance of the political culture. And that opens up a danger spot that is vulnerable to exploitation.
Kirsty Williams was elected to the original National Assembly in 1999 and served in it for 22 years. She was a campaigner for devolution ahead of the referendum in 1997, a formidable backbencher, a committee Chair, a party leader and finally a reforming Education Minister during the biggest crisis in a Century. She stood down from the Senedd in 2021 but remains within its orbit, as a vice-chair of a health board and a Commissioner helping to run a crisis-hit fire service.
So she has a pretty rounded view and where we are, and what we face
[LW]
So let's try and put these things together. Do you think the weak media, the self-censoring within government and within parties to a degree? Do you think that's the sign of an immature, and slowly maturing political culture. Or do you think it's a sign of something else?
[KW]
I think it is a sign of a generation of politicians who worked really hard to establish this institution, and in the first 25 years of devolution, have tried their very best to make this place function, and to try and embed it into the accepted way in which we do things in Wales.
So there's a bit of that. I think some of us, we've not wanted to be too critical of ‘the project’, because we don't want to feed the beast that was against the project in the first place. So sometimes, I think, we haven't been as frank with ourselves about what needs to happen.
But we are still young, 25 years in, you know, we shouldn't be too ‘hair-cloth’ about it. You know, it is amazing what has been achieved. There's clearly loads more that should have, could have, and will hopefully be done, in the future.
But I think developing that culture of scrutiny, that tradition; if you look to Westminster, you know that tradition of the committee chair, the power of the committees, and you know the the very, very fine tradition of backbenchers who've been a thorn in their own government side, but have actually really, really contributed to the public discourse.
And having institutions, and I think many of our institutions are still finding their feet in understanding that things are different here; you know, we've seen a flourishing of organisations creating a Welsh office, but just because you've got a Welsh office doesn't necessarily mean you understand and ‘do Wales’ and get the opportunities.
You can only apply a correction mechanism if you know if you are going off course.
But as we’ve discussed in this episode the feedback processes are not always well calibrated.
That’s a problem for Ministers.
There’s always been politics in Wales but its only in the last 25 years that we can really say we’ve had Welsh politics.
The institutions are still new and have been slow to develop, but even sometimes they have been operating in advance of the political culture. And that opens up a danger spot that is vulnerable to exploitation.
Kirsty Williams was elected to the original National Assembly in 1999 and served in it for 22 years. She was a campaigner for devolution ahead of the referendum in 1997, a formidable backbencher, a committee Chair, a party leader and finally a reforming Education Minister during the biggest crisis in a Century. She stood down from the Senedd in 2021 but remains within its orbit, as a vice-chair of a health board and a Commissioner helping to run a crisis-hit fire service.
So she has a pretty rounded view and where we are, and what we face
[LW]
So let's try and put these things together. Do you think the weak media, the self-censoring within government and within parties to a degree? Do you think that's the sign of an immature, and slowly maturing political culture. Or do you think it's a sign of something else?
[KW]
I think it is a sign of a generation of politicians who worked really hard to establish this institution, and in the first 25 years of devolution, have tried their very best to make this place function, and to try and embed it into the accepted way in which we do things in Wales.
So there's a bit of that. I think some of us, we've not wanted to be too critical of ‘the project’, because we don't want to feed the beast that was against the project in the first place. So sometimes, I think, we haven't been as frank with ourselves about what needs to happen.
But we are still young, 25 years in, you know, we shouldn't be too ‘hair-cloth’ about it. You know, it is amazing what has been achieved. There's clearly loads more that should have, could have, and will hopefully be done, in the future.
But I think developing that culture of scrutiny, that tradition; if you look to Westminster, you know that tradition of the committee chair, the power of the committees, and you know the the very, very fine tradition of backbenchers who've been a thorn in their own government side, but have actually really, really contributed to the public discourse.
And having institutions, and I think many of our institutions are still finding their feet in understanding that things are different here; you know, we've seen a flourishing of organisations creating a Welsh office, but just because you've got a Welsh office doesn't necessarily mean you understand and ‘do Wales’ and get the opportunities.
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