Prof. James Foreman-Peck, Cardiff Business School, on funding Welsh higher education:

Those of us easily distracted, and less embedded in bureaucracy, could be diverted by discovering that the current Review of Higher Education in Wales is being undertaken by a ‘Task and Finish Group’. In what sense, we might wonder, is Higher Education in Wales to be finished?

Web definitions offer no help: such a group is ‘an informal group of Members established by a Scrutiny Committee to examine a specific issue’. But further inspection of the Assembly website reveals the clue that ‘appointments to task and finish groups fall outside the remit of the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointment’s Code of Practice on Public Appointments’.

So, Higher Education in Wales is not to be terminated. But in a December report, according to Universities UK (which represents universities’ executives), it is threatened with relative decline. ‘There is concern that higher education in Wales gets funded less favourably than in England….Estimates of [the funding gap] in 2004/05 vary from £40 to £80 million…. If Scotland and Wales maintain their policies on fees their spending on higher education will be disadvantaged.’

Compared with England, Wales has preferred to emphasise subsidies to students rather than to higher education institutions. Although in 2007/08, full-time undergraduates in Wales were required to pay tuition fees up to £3,070, initially covered by a loan to defer payment (as in England), Welsh-domiciled students studying in Wales also received a £1,845 fee grant. Hence the fees they actually paid were a maximum of £1,225. As the full three years of undergraduate courses come to be eligible, the cost of this grant will jump from £22.3 million in 2007/08 to £78 million in 2010/11. The Assembly Government could have chosen to spend this money instead on the universities themselves.

Oddly enough, although many reports are mentioned in the terms of reference of the current review, there is no mention of the 2005 Rees Report on the subject of fees. Rees pointed out the problem of the funding gap. But the recommendations were somewhat hampered by two motions in the National Assembly two days before the independent review was due to report. The first was against variable fees in principle. The second, instructing the Assembly not to introduce top-up fees, was passed by one vote. The flat rate Tuition Fee Grant for Welsh-domiciled students was the compromise.

Consultation is now open on the recommendations of the section of the review concerned with student finance. The core proposal, approved by the education minister, Jane Hutt AM, is that the flat rate Tuition Fee Grant at the current level is inappropriate. Instead resources should be switched to the (means-tested) Assembly Learning maintenance grant, encouraging participation in higher education by students from low income families. The Minister also favours the recommendation of maintaining the deferred fee payment by extending the Tuition Fee Loan arrangement.

By the end of February 2009, the second report of the review – on the mission, purpose and role of higher education in Wales – is expected. This division of the review into two sequential parts separates the quality of what students are participating in from how they will be encouraged to participate. Yet both institutional quality and participation make demands upon the common pot of higher education funding; more for one category means less for the other.

Judging by the Times Higher Education piece at the beginning of the New Year on the Research Assessment Exercise, it is not self-evident that the Assembly Government has the balance right between these two objectives. Three universities were identified that had risen in the ranking between 2001 and 2008- all English, and four universities that had fallen were allowed to put their cases. Two of these four were Welsh; Cardiff slipped from number 8 to number 22 because of the merger with the University of Wales College of Medicine in 2004, and Lampeter fell from 56th to 83rd.

League tables like the Research Assessment Exercise appeal to the public’s sporting instinct but what the tables mean is often opaque. In this case, however, financial indicators increase the likelihood that Welsh Higher Education must be falling behind England. Universities UK point out that UK Research Council funding for Welsh Universities’ research is lower per head than in England and is declining. Revenue from non-EU students is proportionately higher in England and rising relative to Wales. On top of all this, then, the policy of favouring allocating funds to students rather than to universities does not augur well for the future international standing of Welsh higher education. We must hope the second part of the Review of Higher Education can find acceptable recommendations for boosting resources available to the sector.

Professor James Foreman-Peck is Director of the Welsh Institute for Research in Economics and Development.
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Lee Waters says the commitment that civil society would be given a real chance to influence National Assembly legislation was a hollow promise:

An "open, responsive, effective" system, that’s how the Assembly’s petitions system was sold by the Presiding Officer at its inception. Welsh civil society was urged to come forward with new ideas on how AMs could use their new powers. The call went out for embryonic LCOs (Legislative Competence Orders) to come flooding into the Senedd.

When an MP succeeds in the ballot for Private Members Bills, we were told, backbenchers are showered with pleas from campaigners to take forward ready-made Bills. Now was the time for Welsh organisations to step up to the plate.

In October 2007 the green transport charity Sustrans did just that. It put forward a legislative bid for the Assembly to gain the power to create a network of traffic-free routes across Wales. Not only that, it assembled an impressive coalition of civil society organisations in support, not just environmental groups but seemingly unlikely allies like BT, Royal Mail and the BMA. On the steps of the Senedd Dafydd Elis-Thomas accepted the petition from a postman and we were on our way to discovering a new delivery route.

Quiet deliberately Sustrans set about forging an alliance that could not be easily dismissed. Age Concern, the NUT and the RSPB added their names to a list of respected NGOs which supported a practical proposal to help cut carbon emissions and address the growing obesity epidemic at the same time.

But a lesson quickly learned was that it is no good conducting a text book campaign to influence a law making procedure that is far from a text book.

By early summer 2008 the Sustrans proposal had reached the Enterprise Committee and for the first time they agreed to take forward an LCO in their own name.

The autumn brought a round of pre-legislative scrutiny and the evidence piled in. Even Richard Brunstrom and the Children’s Commissioner added their support to the proposals to force Councils to treat pedestrians, disabled people and cyclists with the same priority as they accord to cars. It we are serious about climate change then new thinking is needed.

Though Committees are able to sponsor LCOs Ministers found they had already allocated a fifth of their legislative time to backbenchers and any more initiatives would threaten to overwhelm the goodwill of the new system. “Taking forward this LCO would divert resources away from taking forward the Assembly Government’s legislative programme,” Ieuan Wyn Jones told the committee.

The draft LCO is effectively dead. The Committee have put it on hold hoping to win the Assembly Government round and may even decide to put it forward to the full Assembly to vote on as a point of principle.

However, without Government backing it is going nowhere. Far from being an "open, responsive, effective" system it would seem that our new law-making mechanisms are entirely dominated by Ministers.

Doubts have been expressed about whether AMs have ideas for new legislation.

But why should anyone come forward with any further proposals for extras powers to be passed down to the Assembly before the next election when the Government have said there is no more capacity? And why should any organisation invest the time and resources in developing proposals that have very little chance of success?

Lee Waters is national director of Sustrans Cymru, an organisation campaigning for 'sustainable transport'.
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Geraint Talfan Davies reflects on Ofcom's second public service broadcasting review:

Send up two, but not three cheers for Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator. The first for finishing a marathon consultation that involved two thick reports, massive opinion research, all sorts of economic modelling, seminars and conferences, all designed to inform its view of what we want to see or should be seeing on our public service television channels in the future.

By now even the most luddite faction has been unable to resist Ofcom’s longstanding conviction that large parts of the public service system – notably ITV and Channel 4 – are broke and that quite radical change is necessary. This month’s reduction in both ITV Wales’s news output and its general programming is the most obvious sign.

ITV Wales – the old HTV - a company that once delivered 12 hours a week of programmes made in Wales for Wales, is now reduced to four hours of news and only 90 minutes of general programmes, and ITV is saying it cannot even guarantee that until the end of its licence in 2014. In fact it will be hard pushed to do so beyond 2010.

The second cheer is for Ofcom’s firm view of the importance of news in the devolved nations, and the regions of England, and recommendations for what needs to happen in the short and long term. The audience and almost all its consultees have told Ofcom in no uncertain terms that maintaining a news service that can compete effectively with the BBC is essential.

The BBC has itself thrown a lifeline to ITV, offering to share technical resources and even pool news footage, to ease ITV’s regional news costs. Ofcom is rightly wary of this arrangement, for the devil will be in the detail. There may be some benefit, but there are also threats the very plurality it is designed to safeguard. The thought of BBC and ITV news editors talking to each other every morning to decide what they will cover, doesn’t smack of the healthy competition we all need.

Ofcom has no illusions about the nature of ITV, where the Welsh operation is a mere cost centre, unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland that have their own ITV companies. Even with the BBC’s offer, says Ofcom, “We are concerned that ITV plc, seeking to reduce costs further to increase profitability, will have no incentive to continue resourcing this dedicated coverage to an editorially distinct level.” That has been proved to the hilt.

Hence, adds Ofcom, the necessity for ‘an independently funded news consortium” to fill the gap, with ITV merely guaranteeing the slots in the ITV schedule. This presents an intriguing opportunity for all kinds of providers – news agencies, newspapers, ITN, Reuters - to team up with locally based companies to create a second significant television news force in Wales. The worry is that Ofcom is talking only about safeguarding the status quo, rather than restoring resources to a level that the journalistic challenge in Wales demands.

More unexpectedly, S4C has apparently suggested to Ofcom that S4C itself should commission a Welsh language service – rather than receive their present gifted service from BBC Wales - and a parallel English service for the ITV channel. There may be arguments for doing so, but there are also large and serious economic implications for BBC Wales as a whole, for the BBC/S4C relationship and for the independent sector. Synergies gained across S4C and ITV, might be balanced by synergies lost between both languages within the BBC’s news services, pushing up the cost of the English language news service.

If there is case for the S4C proposal, and there may well be, the public does know it because S4C has so far refused to publish its submission to Ofcom - an astonishing and unacceptable state of affairs given that Ofcom is not a listed company, like ITV, but a public authority. It contrasts with the extensive documentation published by the BBC and Channel 4. It would be in everyone’s interests, including S4C’s, to publish quickly.

But why withhold a third cheer for Ofcom? Because it has utterly failed to understand the importance of general programming in the nations. In the news area it presents firm and detailed recommendations and costs. On general programming its discussion is shallow and perfunctory. It merely points to evidence that the public values these programmes, and says that the Government should consider this issue ‘in the context of finite resources’. In other words, finding money for general programmes, that are declining in number now, could have to compete against broadband investment whose benefits may not be universal for another ten years.

It is true that 90% of the public told Ofcom that news was the most important consideration, but 71% said the same thing about general programmes about their own patch. In most democracies 71% would be regarded as a landslide victory. The difference in the two figures does not justify Ofcom’s implied view of general programmes as an optional extra.

On this blog two weeks ago, I said the trap for Wales lay in accepting a minimal deal. That is currently what as put on the table yesterday. But the game is not over, the real public debate will start now as the issues move over to the politicians. Wales is going to have to shout a lot louder.

Geraint Talfan Davies is chairman of the Institute of Welsh Affairs.
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John Osmond finds a new argument for devolution in the nuclear debate

The late Gwyn Alf Williams, that most charismatic of Welsh historians, used to say, “We won’t get rid of the bomb until we get rid of Britain.” His prediction has been underlined in the past week with the almost total silence that greeted the views of three respected retired soldiers who declared that Britain’s nuclear deterrence is an irrelevance and a waste of money.

On 15 January Lords Bramall and Ramsbotham and Sir Hugh Beach signed a letter to The Times urging the cancellation of the projected £25 billion replacement for Britain’s Trident nuclear system. “Our independent deterrent has become virtually irrelevant except in the context of domestic politics,” they wrote.

As the journalist and defence expert Max Hastings put it in a Guardian piece (19 January), no major British party sees any political advantage in debating this question. In early 2007, ahead of taking over from Tony Blair, Gordon Brown unilaterally declared in favour of renewing Trident – without any party let alone parliamentary debate – presumably to confirm his credentials as being “safe on defence.” In the unlikely event of Cameron opening up the issue he would simply provoke a Conservative party split.

What is the purpose of Britain’s nuclear deterrent? The Government’s 2007 White Paper, making the case for the Trident replacement, mentions the possibility of terrorists gaining weapons of mass destruction. But if a terrorist group launched a nuclear attack against Britain what would be the target for a nuclear retaliation? Would it be, as Hastings speculated, a flat in Karachi, Hamburg or north London?

It was revealing that last week the Conservative chair of the Commons defence select committee, Hampshire MP James Arbuthnot, declared that if it became a non-nuclear power Britain’s permanent UN security council seat would be in jeopardy. That appears to be the argument in a nutshell: Trident is needed to underwrite Britain’s big power status.

Therein lies a further argument for constitutional change and the advance of devolution to re-invent imperial Britain as a new partnership of its component nations. A by-product will be the emergence of a more distinctive English identity. Indeed, this is happening already. Stripped of British pretentiousness, is England likely to harbour the same aspirations for expressing in nuclear terms, and at a cost of billions of pounds, the historical trappings of its imperial past?

Design work for the Trident replacement goes ahead. But the big building decisions will not be taken until around 2013. Let’s hope that by then the devolution process will have advanced far enough to produce the major financial dividend that would accrue from cancellation of an irrelevant, costly, and ultimately dangerous so-called defence system.

• John Osmond is Director of the IWA.
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Geraint Talfan Davies, IWA Chairman:

2009: There has not been a more important year for the media in Wales for decades past, nor will there be for decades to come. This will be the year when we truly see the shape of things to come, with much of the action shoe-horned into the first three months.

By now the communications regulator, Ofcom, will have decided how it would like to see the future of public service broadcasting. Its board will give the proposals some final tweaks at its meeting this month before revealing all in February. This is likely to be a crucial announcement for the future of television broadcasting in Wales – not only for ITV’s Welsh news service, but also for the future of general programming made for Wales.

Hard on the heels of Ofcom, the Communications Minister, Lord Carter, will publish his report on Digital Britain that, apart from endorsing some or all of Ofcom’s proposals, could boost the prospects for superfast broadband. It is significant that in his new year interview with The Observer Gordon Brown, mentioned superfast broadband in the context of a possible job-creating public works programme that could also assist the cause of carbon efficiency.

The big issue is whether such a commitment will provide for a universal service that would reach both poorer and more sparsely populated parts of the country. Wales could be into it early with BT planning to pilot superfast broadband for the UK in Whitchurch, Cardiff. Without a wider switch the higher speeds would be confined to Virgin Media’s cable system, with its limited geographical reach, thus entrenching the digital divide.

Later in the year the switching-off of analogue television transmission will begin with Kilvey Hill, near Swansea, and Preseli and Carmel in August, with Llanddona, in the north-west, and Moel-y-Parc in the north-east, following in October. The process will be completed early in 2010 with the Blaenplwyf transmitter in February, followed by Wenvoe in March.

2009 will also see two less well-publicised events that could, nevertheless be very significant. First is the auction of broadcasting spectrum that could allow for a local television service for Cardiff and Newport. Regulations for this auction came into effect on 5 January. It has to be said that the commercial precedents for local television in the UK are not encouraging, so it will be interesting to see how many bidders for this spectrum emerge, and who they might be. It could be an indicator of new coalitions of forces in Welsh media.

Since any successful bidder will own this spectrum in perpetuity, and will be able to trade it the market place, some players may well think they can pick up an important but cheap playing card for the future.

A second development, later in the year, will be the launch of Real Radio’s service for north and West Wales, to add to its service across south Wales. Last year there were only two bidders for this radio licence, the other being a group wanting to provide a more local service in the north-east. The award of the licence gives Real Radio (part of the Guardian Media Group) an all Wales footprint – the first all-Wales commercial radio service. We shall have to see whether this leads to any significant development in radio journalism, which has not been strong in the radio sector.

But the big interest for Wales lies in decisions on public service broadcasting, and the extent to which Ofcom and the Government will take note of the real concerns. There has been a tendency in London to believe that the only broadcasting issue in Wales is broadcasting in the Welsh language. The current Ofcom review of the system is the first in which services in the English language have been the main concern.

Ofcom’s own advisory committee for Wales, advocated a Welsh Broadcasting Commission and an investment of £40m ‘to sustain and improve the range of output.’ The Assembly Government’s Broadcasting Advisory Group (of which, I should say, I was a member) called for something very similar, a Wales Media Commission, with at least £30m needed simply “to restore the value to Welsh broadcasting likely to be lost between 2006 and 2013,” but rising to £50m to fund a possible English language channel for Wales, along with online development. Its proposals were endorsed by the Welsh Assembly Government and its Heritage Minister, Alun Ffred Jones.

Almost every observer expects ITV’s news service for Wales to be rescued by some means or other: either by a renewed commitment from ITV, some additional public funding, some resource sharing with the BBC, or a combination of all these. The trap for Wales lies in accepting such a minimal deal.

At ITV Wales’s Politician of the Year event before Christmas, several politicians rightly underlined the importance of plurality in news, but the biggest threat now is to the English language general programming. By the end of this year, in English language television for Wales, sport will account for more hours than the combined total devoted to drama, music, arts, factual and light entertainment programmes. Wales needs a complete television service in English as well as in Welsh.

Geraint Talfan Davies is chairman of the Institute of Welsh Affairs.
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