Institute of Welsh Affairs Blog

Women and the Media

2010-03-13T17:06:00.000Z

Brionhy Williams ponders some of the main themes that emerged from the IWA’s conference Making a Mark: Women, the Media and Politics earlier this week

Women are appearing on television are outnumbered two to one by men. In recent media job cuts women are being hit harder than men. The constant need for content means many journalists end up doing the work of others. Cuts in media funding are hitting women disproportionately.

Women are also handicapped by the fact that working in the media industry is so unpredictable. As a news reporter you could be following any story which may take you anywhere in the country. Fitting that around a 9-5 timetable isn’t possible. Women also find it harder than men to put off having a ‘media shelf-life’.

There is a gap in representation in women over 35 in the media because it is thought that once you take a break to have children it is difficult to make a return.

The IWA’s conference also underlined how rarely women are called upon as experts in the media. It always seems to be male professionals that are quoted rather than females. A better relationship was called for between journalists and non journalists. Women with expertise were urged not just to make themselves known to journalists reporting their field, but to be proactive and listen out for topics of discussion where they may be the right person interview.

Science was highlighted as a topic where women are generally unrepresented. And where they are they are expected to turn something dull into an alluring fact. As Professor Jenny Kitzinger, of Cardiff’s School of Journalism out it, “Women are expected to make science sexy and accessible.” Her research has found that five males get quoted for every one female scientist in the media.

When male scientists are described in the media they tend to be portrayed as ‘stereotypical geeks’, either young whizz kids or eccentric professors. On the other hand women in science tend to be measured against ideals of femininity. Enthusiasm is interpreted as ‘girlish flirtation’.

The way women in politics are treated by the media was explored by four Welsh politicians. Julie Morgan, Labour MP for Cardiff North, referred to Westminster as an “old boys club”. Kirsty Williams, Liberal Democrat AM for Brecon and Radnor, said the Welsh media always picked up on the clothes she was wearing rather than her campaigns. One newspaper had described her as being “dressed as an air hostess”.

Leanne Wood, Plaid Cymru AM for South Wales Central, suggested that the bad press they receive as female politicians was “chiefly about attitudes towards gender roles in society.” We still cannot shake off the stereotypes of yesteryear that dictate how women are perceived.

Karen Robson, Conservative Parliamentary Candidate, Cardiff Central said that in a workshop on how young people could become involved in politics one girl had told her she was put off by “the way women are portrayed.” She added that women “aren’t always as supportive as we could be.” This was a consistent theme of the conference.

The final session of the conference was with working journalists. BBC Wales Political Editor Betsan Powys said experts were picked not because they were male or female but because they were the best for the news story. The Western Mail’s Chief Reporter Martin Shipton observed that had to be a balance of what is published in newspapers and what sells them. Advertising and marketing revenue had fallen so newspapers were coping with less staff.

A widespread feeling at the conference was that whatever their path in the media women need to walk it together. More should be done to put women in contact with others that have experience of working in and with the media.

Brionhy Williams is a student at the Cardiff School of Journalism.

Hiraeth for Welsh Labour’s Hegemony

2010-03-10T08:52:00.000Z

Roger Scully probes the paradox of Welsh Labour’s electoral decline continuing amidst the sustained popularity of lost leader Rhodri Morgan

It is hardly controversial to suggest that the Labour party faces a tough time in the forthcoming general election – even if the polls and the analysts remain unsure as to the extent of the party’s difficulties. And Labour’s Welsh bastion is unlikely to be immune. To suggest the possibility of Labour winning its lowest proportion of Welsh parliamentary representation since 1931, or of the Conservatives coming close to matching their 14 Welsh MPs in 1983, is no longer wholly outrageous.

It would not be surprising if, licking their wounds in the immediate aftermath of the election, some Labour stalwarts were to experience a distinct degree of hiraeth: perhaps for the popularity of the recently-retired Rhodri Morgan; more generally for the ‘good old days’ when Labour’s dominance of electoral politics in Wales could almost be assumed. But, if so, they are probably mistaken about the former, and should at least think hard about the latter.

Rhodri Morgan was a remarkably popular leader of the Labour party in Wales. One of the most remarkable aspects of his popularity was the extent to which it was sustained until the very end of his term as First Minister. Compare and contrast with the evolution of public attitudes to Tony Blair. Such sustained popularity is highly unusual for democratic political leaders. The closest contemporary comparison I am aware of is President Lula of Brazil.

Moreover, Morgan’s continued popularity occurred during an era when, detailed electoral analysis suggests, leaders have generally become an increasingly influential factor in shaping the electoral fate of their parties. In that context, it is all the more striking that Rhodri’s personal popularity had pretty much no discernable electoral pay-off for his own party. From its most recent high-water mark in 1997, Labour’s support at the subsequent two general elections has fallen substantially further in Wales than in either England or Scotland.

And for devolved elections, it is highly instructive to compare Labour’s fate in Scotland and Wales in 2007. In Scotland, led by the uninspiring Jack McConnell and facing resurgent Nationalists, Labour’s vote share declined by 1.4%. In Wales, under a much more popular leader and facing no opponent remotely as formidable as the Salmond-led SNP, Labour’s vote share fell by 7.4%.

Why? It may well be that, as suggested by Richard Wyn Jones, Rhodri had become – possibly because of the peculiar circumstances that led to his acquiring the leadership, or maybe just through of his avuncular personality – a figure above party politics for most people. Whatever the truth of this, and whatever his other strengths and qualities, it is clear that Rhodri was not much of a vote winner. And so replacing him with an (inevitably) less well-known and well-liked leader may not be much of a vote loser. In that sense, Labour’s task in the May 2011 National Assembly elections is probably rather less formidable that it will seem on the morning after the general election. An unpopular Conservative government in London might make that task less formidable still.

This doesn’t mean, however, that we should expect a return to the days of Labour hegemony in Wales. Sustained periods of single-party dominance do happen in democratic political systems, but only rarely. Once they subside it is rare too for them to be re-built.

And we should be very glad of that. Because, however immediately satisfying a crushing election victory may be to loyalists of the winning party, sustained single-party dominance is emphatically not a desirable state of affairs. It is not something anyone should wish for their country. Most instances of long-standing single-party dominance produce phenomena such as widespread corruption and intellectual stagnation. (Wholly foreign to Wales?). Of the democratic polities that have experienced it, probably only Sweden under the Social Democrats could remotely be classified as politically healthy.

In the National Assembly at least, Wales’ party system has moved over recent years in the direction of what the great Italian political scholar Giovanni Sartori classified as a ‘moderate pluralism’, a multi-party system with relatively modest ideological differences between the parties, where none are wholly beyond-the-pale as potential coalition partners or are irrevocably ‘anti-system’ in orientation.

We should not claim that this is in any sense a recipe for political perfection. Many of the imperfections are all-too-visible, all-too-frequently. But compared with the shape of party politics in Wales’s not-so-distant past – a dominant party system, where relations between that party and two of its major opponents were generally characterised by hatred and vitriolic abuse – it is incomparably healthier.

However bad the 2010 general election turns out to be for the Labour party, it will remain a major political force in Wales. But a return to the hegemony enjoyed for much of the last several decades is unlikely. Reluctant though their own members and supporters may be to accept this, a future for Welsh Labour as a major but not dominant force in a pluralistic multi-party politics, would be in many ways much better for it, and in most ways almost certainly far better for Wales, than the ‘good old days’ of dominance.

· Professor Roger Scully is Director of the Institute of Welsh Politics at Aberystwyth University which is currently offering bursaries for three new Masters Scholarships for the academic year 2010-11 (for details contact Gwenan Creunant on gwc@aber.ac.uk

Landscape, Community, Rugby and Tom Jones

2010-03-09T15:14:00.000Z

Rhys David looks at a new study into how young people feel about Wales and Welshness

There is good news and bad news about how that Holy Grail of the marketeeer – young people aged between 18 and 35 - feel about living in Wales and being Welsh. Yes, their views are positive and confident and they do seem as a group to genuinely like being Welsh. However, if politicians had been hoping that they were warming to Wales’s new political institutions they are going to be sadly disappointed. Reactions to the Assembly vary from “Lame Duck” to “Hasn’t done much for me” or more worryingly “Know nothing about it”.

The findings appear in a new kind of survey carried out by Wales’s biggest market research company, Beaufort Research. The new system is an online method of constructing what are essentially focus groups. But, instead of gathering people together in one room, they are contacted online and can answer the questions posed over a set period of time.

As with a conventional focus groups, participants – usually between 15-20 in number - are selected according to a particular set of criteria and given a password for accessing the site. Their comments are moderated and where necessary follow-up questions are posed. There are some drawbacks. The fact that the members of the group are not in the same room means non-verbal clues such as facial expressions and body movements will be missed and participants may be less willing to comment on what other people in the group have posted than if they heard the same remarks in conversation. In addition the subject has to be one that is sufficiently challenging to keep people engaged during the two-three day period in which their responses are being gathered.

Balancing this, however, is the ability to gauge the views of individuals who might not otherwise be drawn into focus group discussions, for example people living in rural areas away from the centres of population. As such it offers the prospect of obtaining more representative samples, as well as making it easier to subdivide and analyse the groups by different characteristics, such as rural or urban.

For its first use of the technique in Wales, Beaufort set out to explore Welsh identity among younger people, rural and town dwellers, Welsh-speakers and non-Welsh speakers. Welshness to this group, all aged between 18 and 35, was, as other surveys have shown, bound up with communities and friendship. “We’re like one big family,” said one respondent. “Everyone seems to help each other out”.

Pride in Wales is another strong feeling in this age group, with urban and non-urban alike expressing a strong attachment to the land. “Our countryside and unique views are privileges we have on our doorstep,” comented one respondent. “What is unique about Wales is the heritage,” said another. “One of the great things about Wales and being Welsh is that we have so many great historical points of interest,” were among typical comments.

The environment was seen as a great Welsh resource, with wildlife on the doorstep and a general feeling of being safer. Amenities in Wales, the range of activities, architecture and the process of regeneration were all regarded favourably. Some respondents were concerned, however, that parts of Wales were dying, with smaller shops closing, smaller towns losing out, pubs shutting down, housing becoming too expensive, and insufficient attractions for teens and young people generally in rural areas. “The cities in Wales seem to have all the funding and small towns don’t see any of it,” was one view.

When asked to name typical Welsh qualities those brought to mind were positive. Young Welsh people see themselves and others as friendly (but wary of outsiders); passionate, but with a bit of a temper; espousing traditional values; community minded; family focused; hard working; possessing a sense of humour; and proud of the Welsh language. Rugby inevitably was also seen as an important part of Welsh identity.

It was when the questions turned to the the National Assembly that the answers suddenly became more negative. One individual indicated that he was just not interested, the main reason being that he did not fully understand the Assembly and politics. Others felt the institution had yet to prove itself, was wasting money, was a lame duck or at best needed more power.

“The new Welsh Assembly building is very lavish and grand – a complete waste of money. The money should have been spent on the NHS and improving schools. I have really lost faith in MPs since the expenses scandal – they should all be sacked,” was the comment of one female respondent, a Welsh speaker from mid Wales.

This group did, however, have their icons. The Welsh people they admired were understandably drawn roughly from within or just beyond their own age group – apart from one notable exception. There was no place for any of Wales’s politicians, businessmen, scientists or other representatives of the great and good. Step forward as the heroes and heroines of the young Welsh: Ryan Giggs, Gareth Thomas, Katherine Jenkins, Shane Williams, Catherine Zeta Jones --- and Tom Jones.

· Rhys David is a trustee of the IWA.

T-Shirts for Men, Bikini Tops for Women

2010-03-08T15:59:00.001Z

John Osmond reports from today’s IWA conference on ways that women are represented in the media and politics

A call for a Presiding Officer’s Conference on gender balance in the National Assembly was made today by Professor Laura McAllister, Chair of IWA Women at a Cardiff conference on Making a Mark: Women, the Media and Politics in Wales. Professor McAllister, who teaches politics at Liverpool University, said, “Gender is not woven into our new democracy.” Despite some eye-catching achievements for women’s representation in the first three terms of the Assembly, the advances were not culturally embedded and could well retreat following the May 2011 election.

She thought the Presiding Officer Lord Dafydd Elis-Thomas would respond positively to the idea of a Conference so long as there was a cross-party consensus backing one. The agenda would be to find ways of influencing the parties to take the importance of women’s representation more seriously in a situation where, when there was a choice, party affiliation invariably trumped gender. Ways should be found for constructing different definitions of success in politics that could, in turn, influence the way the media portrays political debate and conflict. As Professor McAllister put it:

· To be controversial is not always important or newsworthy.

· Rows and arguments are not always worth reporting.

· There is news to be found in building consensus.

Professor McAllister said appearance and age were endemic in the way the press and media reported the activities of female politicians. “When Kirsty Williams became leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats in the Assembly last year she was subjected to a hideous campaign of trivialisation, including remarks that she dressed like an air hostess,” she said.

“During the coalition negotiations in the wake of the 2007 Assembly election, four female members of the Plaid Group who indicated their strong preference for a deal with Labour were subjected to a host of derogatory remarks in the blogosphere, being referred to as lesbians and witches.”

Professor McAllister, who has recently been appointed Chair of the Sports Council for Wales, said sexist attitudes were also rife in the sporting world where women were routinely objectified, trivialised and sexualised. “In media reporting of sport women are three times more likely than men to be referred to by their first names,” she said. In Beach Volley Ball the official Olympic dress code for men was T-shirts, but bikini tops for women.

· John Osmond is Chair of the IWA.

Welsh Shares Barrel On

2010-03-05T15:42:00.003Z

There is one star performer in the index of Welsh shares and it operates in an unlikely sector, Rhys David notes
The Welsh share index which we started last November reached its highest point to date at the beginning of March, mirroring a stronger performance by shares as a whole since the post Christmas dip in January. The nominal £1,200 which we committed to Welsh shares four months ago would now be worth £1,253 compared with £1,214 a month earlier, a rise of 3.2 per cent.
The good news is limited, however, the overall performance of the 12 shares representing the Welsh economy concealing some very wide variations in performance. Indeed, in a month when the FTSE 100 rose by 3.9 per cent, the FTSE All share by 7.4 per cent and the Aim small share market, on which most of our 12 selections are represented by a much more modest 0.3 per cent, only five of our Welsh shares actually ended the period higher than they started, with one marking time and the other six falling.
The real star, as indeed in earlier months, was Wales’s little-known oil and gas exploration company, Amerisur Resources, which rose 19.3 per cent over the month from 14.17p to 16.91p to complete a 120 per cent increase since the beginning of November. £100 worth of shares purchased then would now be worth £218.
The St. Mellons-based company has oil and gas interests in South America and its rise in February was fuelled by the news that the Colombian government had authorized exploitation of the company’s Plantanillo field.
It was also a good month for Welsh media company, Boomerang Plus, which rose 16 per cent largely on the basis of positive news during the month about its revenue pipeline of £50m, followed within the last few days by an announcement that it had won a £4m. contract to provide programme content for S4C’s pre-school service, Cyw. Shares in the company rose from 75p to 87p, though this remained below the figure at the start of November when the shares were worth 95p. In the last few days, however, the shares have recorded a further advance.
The other risers during the period were Admiral, which is a healthy 8.2 per cent ahead of its value one month ago and 16.5 per cent ahead of its November valuation. The company reported a rise in pre-tax profits to £216m in 2009 and now insures 1 in 16 of all cars on UK roads. It is also continuing a programme of expansion overseas where it hopes to replicate its success in the UK market.
Pure Wafer, the Swansea chip-maker rose a more modest 2.8 per cent over the month but has made a more substantial gain of roughly 37 per cent in the four month period taking the value of £100 invested up to £137. Wynnstay, the mid-Wales agricultural supplier and retailer has also continued its progress, rising 8.6 per cent over the month to 264p and recording a rise of 17 per cent over four months.
The big casualty of the index has proved to be Enfis, the Swansea University lighting specialist spin–off which has continued its share price decline. The sum of £100 invested in Enfis in November would now be worth only £24.70, last month recording a further 24.6 per cent fall in value. The company experienced a big drop in revenue in 2009 compared with a year earlier but is predicting a strong recovery this year.
Finsbury Food, the Cardiff-based Memory Lane Cakes maker, also fell further in February and its shares at 20.5p are now 21 per cent down on the figure of 26p at the start of November. Decorations and stationery group International Greetings slowed the decline in its share price but their value at 58p is 20 per cent down on the figure when the index was constructed. Technology company IQE also declined during the month by 6 per cent and housebuilder, Redrow, by 3.9 per cent. The £100 invested in the latter’s shares is now worth only £92 but it was able to report during the month a significant reduction in losses from £46.2m to £8.7m for the last six months of 2009, compared with a year earlier and revenue was up from £149.5m to £187.2m as a result of an increase in completions and a rise in house prices. Shares in Welsh Industrial Investment Trust, which some of its major shareholders, have asked to be wound up, were unchanged.
Wales’s other big quoted financial services business, Moneysupermarket..com, saw a decline in its share price of 2.8 per cent in February and at 71.76 it remains 6p down on four months earlier. It managed, however, to announce a return to profit during the period, despite a decline in revenue. As one of Britain’s leading price comparison websites it may be wishing – like Admiral the owner of comparison site Confused.com – that Rural Affairs minister Elin Jones could add a meerkat cull to her badger cull. Both companies have suffered from the success of Alexander the Meerkat, rival site Comparethemarket.com’s annoyingly successful promoter.
So what lessons if any can be learnt this month from the performance of this selection of Welsh shares? The market is clearly excited by Amerisur Resources’ prospects and the opportunities the oil sector will offer with a sustained return to growth in the world economy. Other companies with good news to announce, such as Boomerang Plus and Admiral, have also done well. Other Welsh companies close to the consumer, such as Finsbury Foods and Redrow are clearly still being viewed with a degree of caution as the prospect of a post-election tightening of purse-strings comes closer.
Broadly speaking, the Welsh index is tracking the main UK indices, outperforming Aim as a whole over the month but not quite matching the two main indexes. Without Amerisur Resources, however, the picture would look a lot bleaker.

The full list of companies in the index is: Amerisur Resources, Admiral Insurance, Boomerang Plus, Enfis, Finsbury Food, International Greetings, IQE, Moneysupermarket.com, Pure Wafer, Redrow, Wynnstay, and Welsh Industrial Investment Trust.

A note of clarification. The observations above are personal opinion, they do not represent the views of the IWA and are not a recommendation to deal in any of the shares mentioned. Any reader interested in buying any of these share would be well advised to consult a financial adviser.

Rhys David is a trustee and former development director of the IWA, having spent most of his career working as a journalist with the Financial Times.

Facing Up to Facebook

2010-03-05T08:39:00.000Z

Simon Nurse explores the risks of particpating in the social media

Arguably the critical technology of the early 21st Century is the internet. For dissemination of information nothing in the short history of our modern species can possibly compare. This amazing medium through which we buy, sell, communicate and teach now drives many areas of our life. In the brief 16 year period since the World Wide Web became publicly available, it has collected nearly 2 billion users. Almost a third of humanity is connected digitally.

Alongside commerce, the largest area of growth on the web is social media. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Digg and Myspace all compete in the social networking marketplace. If you want to get ahead, get a profile. However, as new technology is introduced at breakneck speed, societal responses struggle to keep pace and respond to the new possibilities.

These new advantages pose hidden dangers for individuals and organisations alike. Barely a week goes past without some form of white paper warning landing electronically on my desk. The tools appear to split the HR world. For every cry of ‘use them to your advantage’ there will be a counter claim about their production sapping abilities such as rogue employees fuelling a Facebook addiction with hot news about their latest cup of tea and forthcoming plans for ‘must attend’ parties.

All this feeds the neurosis that many management figures - including me I might add – suffer from. We like nothing better to worry about than some insidious way that a freeloading employee may obtain a free ride at our expense.

Whether these concerns are real or just unnecessary management paranoia is a debatable point. However, what is to my mind not debatable, is the great danger posed by social networking tools if their use is not very carefully considered. A terrible and recent example is that of Emma Jones a teacher from Caerphilly based in Abu Dhabi. The 24 year old drank a corrosive substance after a colleague viewed naked images of her uploaded to her Facebook pages. It is believed that she took her own life out of fear of imprisonment.

This is not an isolated incident. In 2008, senior police officer Chris Dreyfus was reprimanded by British transport police and lost the opportunity of a more senior post after background checks revealed gay lifestyle details through his Facebook pages. Early last month, controls over Facebook use by HM prisoners was tightened up after some profiles were used to issue threats and taunts to former - and potentially future - victims of crime.

This weekend Wales online reported a Twitter breach that affected AMs Jonathan Morgan (Cardiff North) and Alun Davies (Mid and West Wales) on Thursday 25th February. A hacker managed to embed a virus within their profiles that broadcast a message to their subscribing public that they were in fact female, 24 and…well, you can guess the rest.

For some truly interesting and less juvenile political material, have a look at the canvassing claims and occasional scandals precipitated through social media tools during the 2008 American presidential campaign. This was the first political campaign partly orchestrated electronically and dubbed ‘Facebook politics’. It makes for fascinating reading.

According to US social media academic Clay Shirky, Facebook effectively “lowers the hurdles” for any type of individual or collective social action, turning normally apathetic individuals into rebels, leaders, voyeurs or antagonists from the comfort of their own armchair. Granted, it’s not all bad news and we should be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. A 2007 Facebook campaign coalesced students into a force to be reckoned with when HSBC decided at short notice to revoke student accounts with penalty free overdrafts. In the face of a growing campaign and dreadful publicity, HSBC were forced into an embarrassing climb-down. Social media therefore, can also result in successful collective action. Personally, I think Twitter is particularly good for broadcasting frequent brief messages to a wide audience without the need to subscribe and the commons offered by Wikipedia and other open source projects has improved easy access to knowledge immeasurably.

Any organisation wishing to commit to the use of social media to disseminate a message or to permit its use on company machines, needs to seriously consider the ramifications of doing so. Multiple web identities can confuse. Some sites may not pass through aggressive firewall settings and social media can expose an organisation to unnecessary risk. These tools mesh the individual’s private and professional lives seamlessly together, potentially laying personal and professional details bare and open to scrutiny, exposing the frailties of both the individual and the tool.

Dragons Den regular Theo Paphitis recently described Facebook as “an orgy of self-indulgence and exhibitionism”, banning it’s use on company machines and likening its negative effects to smoking. Whilst I wouldn’t quite go that far, one would be very wise to remember a piece of advice issued by Barak Obama at the opening of a school in Virginia, “Be careful what you post on Facebook”.

Simon Nurse is Head of Operations with Cardiff’s Capital Coated Steel and Editor of the Industrial Ecology and Sustainable Business website www.iesme.org

Remembering Michael Foot

2010-03-04T10:13:00.000Z

John Osmond offers some reflections on the life of one of Labour’s most loved leaders

During Michael Foot’s extraordinary life, which spanned most of the 20^th Century, he engaged with the full range of global concerns and personalities that afflicted his war-torn period. Yet the reason he is remembered with such warmth and affection by so many people of such widely different persuasions is because of his innate decency, modesty, and wisdom – rare qualities in the political firmament.

As a journalist and writer himself he had a strong affection for others in the trade and it is purely within that context that I ran into him from time to time during the 1970s and 1980s. My most abiding memory is accosting him as he was striding along the promenade at Llandudno, waving his stick, during a lunchtime break at a Welsh Labour conference in the Spring of 1978. He was rehearsing a speech he was about to make that afternoon on devolution, a policy that was rendering the party asunder. “What are you going to say?” I asked. “Hmmm ...” he paused, stopped and stared at me. “I don’t think we fully understand the significance of what we’re trying to achieve. Devolution? Home Rule I’d say!”

The term was a throw-back to the Lloyd George era nearly a century before, and not one calculated to appeal to Labour’s devolution refuseniks – Neil Kinnock, Leo Abse and the rest. But later that day Michael utilised it to some effect, and mobilised a rare moment of genuine enthusiasm for the devolution amongst Labour’s rank and file.

Later that year I found myself sitting alongside him at Labour’s conference in Blackpool. His mood was pessimistic. “I see us being in the wilderness for a very long time,” he said.

In October 1981 I snatched an hour with him at his constituency home in Tredegar for a profile I was putting together for the short-lived magazine Arcade-Wales Fortnightly. We spent much of the time discussing his hero and mentor Aneurin Bevan and the fateful Labour conference of 1957 when Bevan had destroyed the Bevanites and their hopes of nailing unilateral nuclear disarmament to the party’s manifesto.

I suggested that Bevan had deserted the Left at that point, something Michael would not do as the party’s leader he had become the previous November. I was vehemently contradicted. “Certainly, Nye was carried away by his oratory and that did us much damage,” Michael retorted, striding about the room. “But how could he not be? Those phrases .. emotional spasm, naked in the conference chamber and so on. Yes, of course they hurt. But no, he never deserted us.”

Later Foot recalled two quotations that underlined what he meant. The first was what Bevan said to Jennie Lee when she was contemplating joining the ILP breakaway from Labour in 1929. She would, Bevan said, become “pure but impotent”.

The same message was delivered 30 years later to Foot himself when Bevan was in hospital waiting for the operation on the cancer that killed him. Nothing, said, Bevan, could be achieved outside the party: “never underestimate the passion for unity and don’t forget it’s the decent instinct of people who want to do something.” Foot used that quotation himself in his speech to the Parliamentary Labour Party after he was elected as leader.

The profile I wrote was headlined ‘Purity versus potency’. But on the cover of the magazine we had a photograph of Michael outside his Tredegar terraced house in a typical worried pose, with his hand straying across his lips. The strap line, in red on the black and white photo, was ‘Foot Fudges Forward’.

I sent a copy of the magazine to Michael, with a note apologising for this heading. Typically, he wrote back in a short scrawl across Commons-headed paper: “Thanks for the article. Headline OK. Michael”.

· John Osmond is Director of the IWA.

Cultural Apartheid Blocks Renewal in the Valleys

2010-03-03T10:07:00.005Z

John Osmond is persuaded that we need a new approach to community development in the most impoverished parts of Wales

In an impassioned address last night Duncan Forbes, Chief Executive of the Bryn Afon Community Housing Association in Torfaen, said we needed to completely rethink our approach to improving our most impoverished housing estates across Wales. Speaking at Cardiff University’s Regeneration Institute he said most of the agencies trying to bring about change operated within a ‘command and control’ mindset, but this only resulted in a complete failure to connect with the people they were trying to help. “What we need is distributed leadership, where power is shared with the people who don’t currently have it,” he said. However, this wasn't the present approach of the public sector and it wasn't clear that puboic sector leaders had the necessary skills. "The result is that public sector leaders are unable togenerate trust within the community they serve," said Forbes.

Duncan Forbes is worth listening to for at least three reasons. He has had more than 30 years of experience at the sharp end of regeneration endeavours from inner-city London to the Welsh Valleys. Secondly, he is right to say that whatever we’re doing with regeneration policy in Wales it is not working. Only last week the Assembly’s cross-party Public Accounts Committee published a scathing report on the Welsh Government’s flagship Communities First programme, condemning a “chronic and long-lasting failure” to provide leadership and value for money. It followed a report from the Wales Audit Office that of the £214m spent on the programme between 2001 and 2009, £140 million had gone on partnerships, mainly to employ staff and run projects.

The third reason why Duncan Forbes is worth listening to is that at a time of pending pubic spending cuts his prescription for change would not entail any extra spending. What is needed he says is a shift in focus and attitude on the part of those engaged in policies and programmes directed at the least well-off in society, especially families on sink estates who for generations have been without work, living on benefits, and often with children living in severe poverty. In Wales we have the worst statistics under these headings than anywhere in the United Kingdom.

Speaking to a mixed audience of practitioners, civil servants and academics last night Forbes argued that we need to devise approaches which were geared to persuading people to change their behaviour, whether it be lifestyles or attitudes to education and work. He said this could not be achieved by the traditional way of relying on public services to “cure” problems. “The people we’re trying to reach must be treated with respect and seen as equal partners in delivering improvement,” he said.

He argued that this would involve as big a culture shift amongst those working to deliver regeneration policies as among the supposed beneficiaries. As things stood there was a 'cultural apartheid' separating the two groups. There was a widespread view, for instance, that tenants on were dangerous. But middle-class people living comfortable lives simply had no idea of the circumstances and financial pressures facing the less well off.

"At Bryn Afon we don't talk about empowerment of the communities we're engaging with and trying to help," he said. "That would be a step too far. We talk about community engagement. If and when we are able to devolve decisions to small groups of tenants to run their own estates that might be empowerment. But we're not there yet."

Over 30 years Forbes said he had been involved in scheme after scheme – Priority Estates Investment; Estates Challenge Renewal Fund; Housing Action Areas; Estates Action Programme; City Challenge; Housing Renewal Areas; New Deal for Communities; and now Communities First. All had failed to get to the root of the issue he was describing, which was about changing the balance of power relationships in community regeneration. It was time to think about a radically different approach.

· John Osmond is Director of the IWA.

Happiness and Confidence on St David's Day

2010-03-02T09:05:00.002Z

Government is going to measure our happiness. Geraint Talfan Davies says it will make for an even busier St. David’s Day.

In the run up to the 1st of March Welsh organisations scramble to book St. David’s Day for their big event or the publishing of good news – so much so that some are now even avoiding the competition and going for other dates. Who said St. David’s Day was going unobserved?

It was this morning that the Welsh Government announced it was going to follow the Kingdom of Bhutan and measure our happiness and well-being – conveying the subliminal message so beloved of the cartoonist Gren that ‘happiness is knowing you are Welsh’. It was also the morning when BBC Wales, one of the arch-celebrants of our blossoming national festival, published the results of its latest opinion poll, showing that 56% of us are now in favour of law-making powers for the Assembly.

Who knows whether these things are connected? Are Welsh people now happier in their own skin and, therefore, more likely to assert their right to greater responsibility? The BBC Wales poll says that 63% of those aged between 25 and 34 are in favour of law-making powers, but only 48% of those over 65. Does this mean that our pensioners are gloomier than the young? No reason why they shouldn’t be. When I read recently that Britain’s public finances would not be properly sorted out until 2032, it did not cheer me up. I will be 89 then and probably not in the best shape to enjoy the newly recovered prosperity. I certainly won’t be contributing much at that stage to Wales’s happiness rating.

I am, of course, all for adopting progressive measures, and pretty convinced by recent statistical arguments that more equal societies are happier, but I am not clear why the Kingdom of Bhutan is so successful in the index of Gross National Happiness, or why Jamaica and Puerto Rico score so well on the Happy Planet Index.

It could just be the weather. Scores registered on a beach in Jamaica and at a bus stop in Blaenau Ffestiniog are likely to differ. Bhutan has characteristics of both, so we would need to know whether the clipboard brigade was out during its balmy spring months or during its monsoon. But beware, there are also some drawbacks to life in Bhutan. A complete ban on television was lifted only in 1999. The Dragon King thinks this has contributed to general happiness, but I think he should not jump to conclusions. His own vote may be skewed by the fact that he has four wives - not something that we will ever see in Wales, even under the raciest ‘legislative competence order’.

The population may, of course, have been cheered up by their own constitutional changes. The Dragon King is a good deal keener on reform than anyone in the Republic of Islwyn. No need for LCOs in Bhutan – they got fully a fledged written constitution on the 15th day of the fifth month of the Male Earth Rat Year – or 2008 to you and me.

This soft stuff is all very well, but we shouldn’t forget some of the hard figures. Jamaica may be smiling, but its per capita GDP is $4,100 against Wales’s $24,000. Getting down to Jamaican levels isn’t going to get anyone elected here any time soon.
Rhodri Morgan’s forecasts of a Wales basking in a new climate may make us happier without government lifting a finger, but that doesn’t fill a manifesto.

We should appoint a Minister of National Rejoicing, with a Deputy Minister in charging of developing knowledge-based, high-level carnival skills. That way St. David’s Day would get another shot in the arm, and it might even force us to declare a St. David’s Week so that we can fit everything in.

Geraint Talfan Davies is Chairman of the IWA

Federalism Could Keep Devolution Simple

2010-03-01T15:55:00.000Z

John Osmond listens to a history lesson from Wales’s leading lawyer

On a St David’s Day in which a BBC poll showed a 21 per cent lead for those supporting “full law-making powers” for the National Assembly (56 per cent in favour and 35 per cent against), it was noteworthy that Wales’s leading lawyer, the Rt Hon Lord Justice Thomas, came out, if obliquely, for a federal solution to the UK’s over-complex devolved structures. Delivering the annual Wales Governance Centre’s lecture in the Senedd’s newly refurbished Pierhead Building in Cardiff Bay, Lord Thomas argued that the public were entitled “to have some understanding about who is accountable for decisions being made.” However, this was made extremely difficult by the over-complexity of the UK’s devolution arrangements. As he put it, “Devolution is exceptionally complicated in the United Kingdom and Wales has the most complicated part of the settlement.” He said we needed a more principled and simple approach and pointed to the 1920 Speaker’s Conference as offering a way forward.

The Conference, under the chairmanship of the Speaker of the House of Commons, James Lowther, was established in 1919 largely as a response to Irish agitation for Home Rule. It followed hard on the heels of the first Speaker’s Conference in 1917 which had achieved agreement between the parties on universal male suffrage and partial female suffrage. In 1919 federalists hoped that the second Speaker’s Conference on devolution could achieve a similar consensus under the auspices of a coalition government under which party divisions seemed, for a time, in abeyance.

Unfortunately for the Conference, however, the Prime Minister Lloyd George decided, during the course of its sittings, to deal separately with Ireland, and a Government of Ireland Bill was introduced into Parliament. As a result the Speaker’s Conference decided to remove Ireland from its agenda and concentrate solely on Wales, Scotland, Ulster and England. As a result the main dynamic behind its deliberations was removed and its report, when it appeared in 1920, was easily sidelined.

Nonetheless, it is worth recording on four of the matters on which the Conference, made up of 32 members, 16 from each of the Houses of Parliament were able to agree:

· The division of powers.

· The division of financial powers.

· The territorial organisation of the judiciary.

· The areas in which devolved legislatures should be established.

On this last point the crucial agreement was that the principle of nationality should be fundamental and so the Conference decided that England should not be divided. In short, therefore, the Conference opted for a British federation , made up of England, Scotland, Ulster and Wales.

Equally crucially, however, and another explanation why the Speaker’s Conference led nowhere, was that it failed to agree on whether the devolved legislatures should be directly elected. Suggesting that the territories should be represented by Grand Committees of their MPs meeting in Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast, and London Speaker Lowther explained:

“The more I considered the proposal of one supreme and four independent legislatures, the less I liked it. The confusions that might arise, the multiplicity of elections, the novelty of five prime Ministers and Cabinets of probably divergent views, the enormous expense of building four new sets of Parliamentary buildings and Government offices and providing all the paraphernalia of administrations, frightened by economical soul.”

Of course, nearly a century later Speaker Lowther’s “frightened” vision has come to pass, but without the simpler and more transparent arrangements that a federal constitution would provide.

This is what Mr Justice Thomas was alluding to in his St David’s Day lecture, although he refrained from spelling put the political message in such stark terms. Yet he did go on to discuss some other attributes that we should be pursuing in placing the National Assembly on a sounder footing. These, he said, were capacity, competence and confidence.

Lord Thomas had no doubt that Wales now had the legal capacity to take a further step towards full legislative powers. As for competence and confidence, we should seek to emulate Slovenia, that small Balkan country of just 2 million people next door to Italy which, he said, had “a vibrant and mature government system”. It had operated within a comparable timescale to Wales’s devolution experience, achieving its independence in 1991. In 2004 it had joined the European Union and successfully held the Presidency of the European Union in 2008. Now, there’s a thought.

· John Osmond is Director of the IWA.

Unexploded Bomb Under Devolution

2010-02-25T17:53:00.005Z

John Osmond on how he caught up with the potentially biggest devolution story since 1999

Sometimes it takes a while to catch up on the really important news. I confess to having missed the most significant development in Welsh (and maybe even British) politics over the past few months, which was hidden away in the Western Mail’s business pages on 12 February. In a report by the paper’s Business Editor Siôn Barry that should have been splashed across page 1, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne committed to establishing an independent commission to consider a new needs-based formula funding model for the UK “as soon as a new Government is elected”. This would replace the present population-based Barnett formula, which Osborne acknowledged works to Wales’s disadvantage.

If there is a Conservative government following the general election assumed to be on 6 May, and if Osborne sticks to this commitment – perhaps pretty big “ifs” but far from impossible – then this promises the most radical shake-up in the devolution story since the National Assembly, the Scottish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly were created at the end of the 1990s.

Attention was drawn to this at a meeting organised by the IWA in Cardiff this week, called to discuss the issues facing the Welsh Government's Independent Commission on funding the National Assembly, chaired by Gerald Holtham. A questioner from the floor referred to the Western Mail report and wondered why it had been buried. The Western Mail’s Chief Reporter, Martin Shipton who was sitting on the panel at the meeting, explained that he had been on holiday in Spain when the story appeared, but would ensure more attention was paid to its contents in the weeks leading up to the general election.

The importance of George Osborne's commitment to replace the Barnett formula with one based on needs can be seen from the findings of a study undertaken by the Holtham Commission that was pubished last December. This provided an analysis of how a needs-based formula would work, based on Whitehall’s current needs-based distribution of funds to the English regions. If applied to the devolved administrations it would give Scotland £105 per head of population compared with a UK average of £100, Northern Ireland £120 and Wales £114.5. Pretty innocuous you might think, until you compare that with the present allocation: Scotland gets £120, Northern Ireland £124, and Wales £112. It would mean Wales would get an extra £400 million, on top of its £16 billion block, but Scotland would lose a massive £3 billion from its £28 billion.

These are the figures which explain Labour’s reluctance to interfere with the Barnett formula. With the SNP breathing down the neck of many of its Labour MPs the last thing they want is to provide them with the heavy ammunition that a threat to Scottish funding on this scale would mean.

However, with only one Scottish Westminster seat and no hope of gaining more than two or three more in May, the Tories have comparatively little to lose – which presumably explains George Osborne’s willingness to consider changing the funding formula.

For the record, this is what Osborne told the Western Mail: “My initial look at the formula suggests that Wales might well be missing out under the Barnett arrangements. I think it is in Wales’s interest that we have that needs-based assessment, which is independently done … My view is that you want to move on it pretty quickly, as soon as a new Government is elected.”

· John Osmond is Director of the IWA.

Challenge for Policymakers on the Economy

2010-02-22T11:40:00.000Z

Geraint Talfan Davies discovers a gulf between business and government at the IWA’s inaugural National Economy Conference

If the IWA’s first National Economy Conference held last Friday achieved anything, it was to underline the gulf in thinking that exists between the worlds of business and the Welsh Government. On this showing the good relations between government and business, said to have been forged during the recent Welsh economic summits, may well be only skin deep. The government’s current review of economic development has a lot to do to persuade business that policymakers here are up to the challenge that Wales faces.

It wasn’t just the torrent of depressing statistics - Wales now the lowest UK region in terms of Gross Value Added per head, 10^th out of 12 for research and development expenditure, the lowest for private equity and venture capital investment, as well as for overall competitiveness – it was more the unanimous conviction that the government has yet to deliver a coherent strategy and, more importantly, a delivery plan that business finds convincing.

Nigel Roberts, chair of Cardiff-based Paramount, told the conference that business was disillusioned with the Assembly, that initiatives took forever, that there was a state of “paralysis”, and that “dealing with the Assembly is like punching a sponge”.

The conference had drawn a wide range of top-flight speakers, including the new First Minister, Carwyn Jones, to give Welsh, UK and world perspectives on the economic challenges that face us.

Gerald Holtham, one of the UK’s top investment managers and chair of the Holtham Commission that is examining the Barnett formula and other Assembly funding options, warned us that although growth over the next year could turn out to be better than forecast, we were in for 8-9 years of tight fiscal policy, with those at the bottom of the skills ladder sure to be the hardest hit.

The only silver lining that Holtham could see was the fall in the value of the pound which would help Welsh manufacturing. But since a later speaker, Professor Robert Huggins of the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, reminded us that Wales is also at the bottom of the export league table, with only 2.16 per cent of Welsh companies exporting, this might not make a huge difference to the overall situation in Wales.

Concentrating on competitiveness, Huggins reminded us that the low R&D expenditure by business in Wales meant that Wales was more dependent on R&D in the higher education sector than any other UK region. But he also pointed out that the whole of the UK is unbalanced in this regard: only the southeast England ‘super-region’ scores above the UK average for competitiveness, a factor that, he thought might account for the fact that the UK has dropped from 7^th to 12^th in world competitiveness rankings in recent years. The concentration model is not working for the UK, he said.

Within Wales, Cardiff is the only city whose competitiveness is above the UK average. It ranks 12^th, against Newport at 30^th and Swansea at 38^th. Merthyr and Blaenau Gwent are at the very bottom of the pile – 405^th and 407^th out of all UK local authority areas. In the Welsh context Huggins believed that it would make more sense to concentrate resources in regions that are strong – notably the Cardiff-based city-region – a call echoed by several people through the day, but one which runs counter to current political orthodoxy in the Assembly itself.

But the root cause of business frustration may have been identified by Dr. Stevie Upton, the IWA’s own Research Officer. This, she thought, was the information deficit: the fact that, following the absorption of the WDA into the civil service, it is almost impossible now to tell where the money spent on economic development in Wales actually goes. This is all the more important in the light of Upton’s other finding that Wales is spending more per head on economic development than any other UK region - £107 per head, £10 per head more than the north east of England, and £30 more than Scotland. She has been seeking out this information over recent months at the request of the IWA’s recently formed Economy and Finance Study Group.

There is no little irony in the fact that the abolition of the greatest of the Welsh quangos, allegedly in the interest of accountability, has resulted in reduced accountability: no annual reports, no reporting of spend by detailed programme, no external evaluation of the effectiveness of individual programmes. The Welsh Government’s ‘Flexible Support for Business’ scheme, which telescoped several other programmes, was a particular target of criticism throughout the day, because of the way it rolls up so many different programme spends under one heading.

Upton was able to point to figures which, on the face of it, suggest that while the Yorkshire RDA is spending 19 percent of its budget on enterprise, Wales is spending only 9 per cent - a comparison that the Assembly’s Enterprise and Learning Committee might like to explore.

What the conference audience found most worrying was that this now stands in stark contrast to the situation in Scotland and England. Upton was able to point to an illuminating report, commissioned by the UK Government from PricewaterhouseCoopers, that examined the effectiveness of each of the English RDAs in considerable detail. There has been no comparable external evaluation of the economic development spending and programmes of the Welsh Government. Everyone, including the Assembly’s own scrutiny committees, are in the dark.

The suggestion that this might be an endemic problem was raised from the floor of the conference by Ian Courtney, part of a three man task and finish group, charged by the Welsh Government itself with investigating the commercialisation of intellectual property in Wales. He revealed that, despite being a government-sponsored group, they had had so much difficulty getting information from government departments that they had to threaten the government with the Freedom of Information Act.

Apart from the lack of external evaluation, Upton detected evidence of risk aversion in the absence of any demanding performance indicators, allied to a too frequent shift to new initiatives, with little innovative thinking and policies too dependent on a changing politics with each Assembly term.

Professor David Blackaby, from Swansea University, made a big plea for improving skills of Welsh workers and managers – a call that struck a chord with a large number. He reminded us that the problem of inadequate skills was apparent at several levels. He pointed out that among the 30 top OECD countries, the UK had the lowest proportion of managers with degrees. He questioned whether education was currently fit for purpose, which led to some debate about whether university education should be vocationally focused or not. More encouragingly, David Stevens, Chief Operating Officer for Admiral Insurance plc, Wales only FTSE 100 company, said they had built the business largely on home grown talent.

When it came to the question of what to do, Chris Rowlands, the Welsh businessman who last year produced a report on finance for business for No 10, was clear that there was a financing gap to be filled – for investments of between £2m and £10m – that would not be covered by normal debt finance or by private equity and venture capital companies. He accused private equity of being lazy, having concentrated for so many years on the easy pickings of leveraged buy-outs.

There would have to be a major intervention to fill this financing gap. It would need scale – a fund of funds - and a strong risk management function, but would have to be a regionally distributed fund. He did not think there would be any problem of lack of demand from business in Wales, but it would need people on the ground to search out and create opportunities. However it would have to be done on a commercial basis, not by government. It was clear that he would not be averse to a new Welsh banking institution and pointed to plans for Scottish Investment Bank. Could we see a Bank of Wales re-emerge, as many of us have been urging?

There were those who thought that government should not be in the business ‘picking winners’ and should stick to ‘educating people, keeping them healthy and moving them around’. Not unnaturally, this was not the view of speakers who were in government: the First Minister, Carwyn Jones, the UK Trade Minister and former Chairman of Standard Chartered Bank, Lord (Mervyn) Davies.

Lord Davies, who is also Chair of the Council of Bangor University, threw away his prepared text and, once he had excoriated the banks for not learning the lessons of the recent crisis, delivered an impassioned plea for Wales and the UK to concentrate on the industries of the future: IT, mobile technology, medicine and life sciences, education (where the UK has 20 per cent of the world market for students) and the creative industries.

Infrastructure was another priority, and Government faced a huge challenge to find the £450 billion that would be needed for infrastructure investment over the next 15 years: investment in energy security, universal broadband, high speed rail, roads and water.

He also thought it essential to develop long-term strategies that went beyond the five-year political cycle. This argument also applied to Wales, and he urged the Welsh Government to copy Gordon Brown, by bringing business people like himself into government. Carwyn Jones, the First Minister, wasn’t present at this point to respond.

Later, however, Carwyn Jones picked upon on the criticisms of poor delivery and stressed that the last thing he wanted was for government to become ‘a strategy factory’. Asked whether stood by the ‘clear red water’ message of his predecessor, he said it was important that the government believed in reducing inequality, but that did not mean Wales was shut for business.

As for the recent case of health service reform where no redundancies appear to have ensued, he acknowledged that “this cannot go on for ever” and that “voluntary redundancies would have to come”. Faced with criticism of the Flexible Support for Business (FS4B) scheme, he took the line that while this was new to him, if that was the perception he would take it on board. His barrister’s training means that he has little fear of a critical audience, but there were signs that he was in listening mode, and that this honest exchange of views with business at the start of his tenure may have been timely.

· Geraint Talfan Davies is Chair of the IWA.

Taking the Assembly Forward

2010-02-22T09:56:00.001Z

John Osmond speculates on what might emerge from the re-entry into frontline Welsh politics of two leading personalities

Two figures who look set to be significant players in the National Assembly following next year’s elections made important steps in their political comeback over the weekend. On Saturday Labour picked Mark Drakeford to succeed Rhodri Morgan as their candidate to fight Cardiff West next year. And less than a mile away and only a few hours later Ron Davies, former Secretary of State for Wales and Labour AM for Caerphilly during the Assembly’s first term, received two standing ovations when he was a guest speaker at Plaid Cymru’s Spring conference.

Plaid’s invitation to Ron Davies, currently an Independent councillor in Caerphilly, to speak at their conference was another step in a remarkable journey that now seems likely to include his standing under the party’s banner in the constituency in May 2011. Less than a month ago he announced that he was winding up Forward Wales, the party that he and another former Labour MP and AM for Wrexham John Marek founded following the 2003 elections. At the same time Davies said he would be supporting his erstwhile opponent in Caerphilly, council leader Lindsay Whittle, as Plaid’s candidate in the forthcoming Westminster general election.

On Saturday Ron Davies told Plaid that he had attempted over many years to persuade the Welsh Labour Party that it needed to reform itself in response to devolution, to become a more autonomous institution separated from the English Labour Party and responsible for its own organisation and policy-making. “You can’t take the devolution genie out of the bottle and expect things to be the same, “ he said.

“I thought we might see Labour and Plaid come together as a fusion at the left of centre of Welsh politics along the lines of the Social Democratic Labour Party in Northern Ireland,” he said. “But it was not to be. Labour’s attitude to devolution is grudging, reluctant, and only responds under force. It is not in the DNA of the Labour Party to be interested in what it has created and to take devolution forward.

“Ten years on from the creation of the Assembly the big issues still remained to be settled, in particular devolving full law-making powers and achieving a fair funding formula. Every step of the way is a political arm wrestle,” Davies said. “It now falls to Plaid to carry the National Assembly forward.”

If anyone can prove him wrong it will be Mark Drakeford, who first attempted to get elected for Cardiff Central in 1999, but lost to the Liberal Democrat’s Jenny Randerson. As a key political adviser to Rhodri Morgan over the past ten years, he has been the main inspiration behind the ideas that have most distinguished Welsh from New Labour. Dubbed as ‘Clear Red Water’, after a speech crafted by Drakeford and delivered by Rhodri Morgan in Swansea ahead of the 2003 election, this has thus far emerged as devolution’s most distinctive philosophical approach to service delivery. In an article in the Winter 2006-07 edition of the IWA’s journal Agenda Drakeford described six principles underpinning the approach, which he described as “progressive universalism.” These included the beliefs that the delivery and receipt of pubic services should be regarded as a collaborative rather than quasi-commercial transaction, and that equality of outcomes than that equality of opportunity should be the objective in public service provision.

If the outcome of the next Assembly election is another coalition between Labour and Plaid, and if as now seems likely, Ron Davies and Mark Drakeford emerge as leading figures in the government that results, it will be fascinating to see what emerges in the mix.

John Osmond is Director of the IWA.

Tackling Welsh Economic Competitiveness

2010-02-18T12:32:00.000Z

On the eve of the IWA’s inaugural national economy conference, Robert Huggins and Stevie Upton argue that a lack of policy-making capacity is holding our private sector back

Despite more than a decade of political autonomy and a substantial economic development budget, boosted by European funding, the competitiveness and economic performance of Wales continues to plummet. Economic development spending by the Welsh Government has been consistently higher than that of the English and Scottish regional development agencies. Yet on a wide range of measures Wales remains at the bottom of the competitiveness rankings. Economic development spend in Wales for 2009/10 is estimated to amount to approximately £107 per person, compared to £97 in North East England, £76 in Scotland, and £61 in Yorkshire (see table below).

Economic Development Spend Per Capita Across the UK

Regional Development Agency	Approximate Spend per Capita 2009-10 (£)
Welsh Government Department for Economy and Transport	107
One North East	97
Scottish Enterprise / Highlands and Islands	76
Yorkshire Forward	61
North West Development Agency	58
Advantage West Midlands	55
London Development Agency	50
East Midlands Development Agency	36
South West Regional Development Agency	30
East of England Development Agency	24
South East England Development Agency	20

Sources: Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, Scottish Enterprise, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Department for the Economy and Transport

The intractability of Wales’s economic performance in the face of prolonged investment raises questions about the approach followed by the Welsh Government. Unfortunately, it leads us to conclude that we do not have the sophisticated policymaking capacity needed to effectively develop our economy. The danger for the Assembly as a whole is that this weakness in such a key area could undermine its case for further powers.

Worryingly, the high levels of economic development spending in Wales are not matched by clear lines of public accountability, making any assessment of real progress virtually impossible. At the time of the 2005 quango reforms, the Welsh Government claimed that the mergers would enhance accountability. In reality, society’s capacity for effective scrutiny has actually been much reduced. Unlike regional development agencies in England and Scotland, the business plans and evaluations of the Welsh Government’s Department for Economy and Transport are not made publicly available.

Also, the reduced detail of published departmental budgets in recent years, coupled with the channeling of funding through a small number of opaquely named programmes – such as ‘Flexible Support for Business’, which now accounts for 40% of the economic development budget – makes scrutinising progress even more difficult.

To our minds, there is a clear lack of strategic direction in the distribution of economic development spending. For example, eighteen months after the publication of the revised Wales Spatial Plan, the promised delivery framework for national priorities is still to be unveiled. It is hard to see how priorities can be coordinated, let alone monies spent, without such medium- to long-term planning at the national level.

The Government is currently preparing an Economic Renewal Programme to rebuild Wales in a post recession environment. This represents a significant opportunity to put in place the strategies and interventions to convert Wales to a more high-performing knowledge-based economy. As part of the process of preparing the Programme, the Government is seeking to undertake substantial consultation with the business community. While this is a worthy and necessary task, one wonders what our policymakers will really learn:

· Small businesses believe there is too much red-tape?

· Failing businesses in mature industries think access to public sector funding will change their fortunes?

· Fast growing businesses believe there to be a lack of suitable office or industrial premises?

· start-up companies require better access to financial capital?

· All companies think they pay too much in property rates?

These are undoubtedly key issues for many companies in Wales, but in a sense they are the well-trodden day-to-day operational factors which government needs to address on an on-going basis. They do not to any great extent relate to the strategic vision for the Welsh economy that we so badly require. The role of business managers is to ensure the future competitiveness of their company, and it is right they lobby government as best they can to achieve this aim. However, the role of the Welsh Government is to ensure the future competitiveness of the Welsh economy as a whole, and this requires hard-nosed policymaking that may not always align with the wishes of all businesses.

The Government considers that Wales should seek to specialise in those areas of the economy where it has some potential competitive advantage. We would agree with this intention, but would also point out that as well as providing additional support for these areas, it may also mean no longer supporting some areas of the economy. Although the business voice must be heard, an effective Economic Renewal Programme will require the Assembly Government to formulate a vision of how our economy should look in future, and the strategy for achieving this.

Although many good businesses have been lost in the current recession, the overall global impact of the recession has been to accelerate the flushing out of many companies that are no longer competitive in their chosen markets and industries. The impact of the recession in Wales highlights the invidious position economic policymakers often find themselves in – the requirement for short-term policies to retain jobs (such as the introduction in Wales of the ReAct and ProAct initiatives), as opposed to the long-term policies required to improve future prosperity.

However, these short and long-term requirements are not necessarily incompatible. How is it that the small US state of Rhode Island (a population of approximately 1 million) is able to develop a coherent innovation strategy for building its Green Economy (for those interested, a web search for A Roadmap for Advancing the Green Economy in Rhode Island will take you to the document), whilst Wales appears to be incapable of creating a coherent innovation strategy of any kind?

We consider that gaps in the economic expertise of the Welsh Assembly have made the need for some form of autonomous body/agency, with the necessary capacity we mention, essential if Wales is to move forward. Whilst the Welsh Development Agency undoubtedly had its faults, its arm’s-length status set policy creation and implementation at some remove from the capriciousness of politics.

At the current rate we are in danger of ending up with an Economic Renewal Programme that lacks innovation precisely where it is needed. Given the lack of strategic thinking it’s not difficult to understand why Wales has such a difficult job attracting private sector investment and capital.

· Robert Huggins is Professor of Management and Policy and at the Cardiff School of Management, UWIC, and is director of the Centre for International Competitiveness. Dr Stevie Upton is Research Officer at the Institute of Welsh Affairs. This is an extract based upon their address to the Institute of Welsh Affairs’ National Economic Conference, being held tomorrow Friday 19 February, at the Parc Hotel, Cardiff. Places are still available at the conference. To book contact Clare Johnson on 029 2066 0820, email wales@iwa.org.uk, or click on the Events button on this website.

Devolution’s Triumph

2010-02-17T11:49:00.001Z

John Osmond probes behind the headlines given a provocative article analysing devolution by the Welsh Government’s former Permanent Secretary

Predictably the media latched on to just one throwaway line in this week’s analysis of the progress and future of devolution by the former Permanent Secretary Sir Jon Shortridge. Writing in the March issue of the normally little noticed trade magazine Public Money and Management, he declared, “It can be argued that one of the reasons Wales is so relatively poor is that it has been governed from England for too long.”

If this had been backed up by some analysis and a few statistics it might have been interesting. However, the sentence merely trailed a plea for a much better financial settlement for Wales. The inevitable headlines, about a British civil servant apparently arguing the case for an independent Wales, merely served to drive attention away from the main thrust of the article. This takes a cool look at Wales experience of devolution over the past decade, at the extremely poor hand we were dealt in terms of the constitutional architecture that was handed to us in 1999, but nevertheless how remarkably well we have done.

As Sir Jon puts it, “Despite its difficult birth, the Assembly in many ways has been a triumph – not least because it has been able largely to surmount the problems caused by its original design and deliver some real and important benefits for Wales.” It might be judged that all this is somewhat self-serving since for during practically the whole of the devolution period as the man leading the Welsh civil service Sir Jon was at the helm.

Nonetheless, he has a good story to tell and one that is little acknowledged at a time when, along with the rest of the political world so much of Welsh politics and governance has been discredited by a few bad eggs at Westminster. Sir Jon lists five main areas of success for devolution in Wales:

The Welsh budget has been more effectively spent than previously. This is because it has been subjected to close scrutiny by 60 elected members and the four political parties. As a result it reflects the needs of Wales much better than under the old system in which budget outcomes were determined by the closed, behind-the-scenes dialogue between the Secretary of State for Wales, his two junior Ministers, and a handful off officials. As Sir John puts it, “This is a huge improvement and one which more than justifies the constitutional change that Welsh devolution represents.
Political and administrative decision making has also improved This is simply because the decision-makers are subjected to much more scrutiny than ever they were in the past. Moreover, because they are closer to the people they serve Welsh politicians are not exposed to a wide range of informed views and advice. “It is certainly not the case that civil servants are the monopoly providers of advice to Ministers.”
The Welsh Government has gained a reputation for good quality administration and sound financial management. Sir Jon cites its record in making subsidy payments to farmers as amongst the best in the EU. Major capital projects, for example the Senedd building, have been delivered on time and on budget (compare Scotland). Legislation has been well prepared and there have been very few challenges to decisions in the courts. All this is extremely I important for Sir Jon since, as he says, “I was very clear from the outset that, given the very narrow majority in favour of devolution, the fledgling Assembly might well not have survived the kind of scandals that have afflicted Whitehall in recent years.”
With the constraints imposed by its lack of primary powers the Welsh Government has embarked on a series of innovative reforms. These include free acess to services, either for all or for particular groups, to public transport, precriptions, hospital parking, and swimming. This is just not a matter of free handouts butpart of a wider strategy of improving thehealth of the nation, rather than merely tackling ill health. The Government has also taken itsown line on education by abandoning much of the testing regime it inherited, introducing the Welsh Baccalaureate, and the radical policy of learning through play in the Foundation phase up to age 7. The Welsh Government has also been willing to confront difficult issues in ways that the UK Government has often avoided, for example with the unpopular decision to cull badgers in carefully defined circumstances.
The National Assembly itself, despite having many relatively inexperienced politicians, has successfully operated through coalition arrangements.

All these achievements give Sir Jon the confidence to predict that in time Wales will be granted full parliamentary powers on the Scottish model. However, he is doubtful that this will be achievement in the timetable set by the present One Wales coalition Government between Labour and Plaid – that is, at or before the May 2011 election. Reading between the lines of the article, there is a definite impression that, if he were still in charge at Cathays Park, Sir Jon would be advising First Minister Carwyn Jones that he should first sort out the Welsh Government’s funding arrangements and get the better financial deal it deserves from Whitehall.

John Osmond is Director of the IWA.

Greenwash Threatens Sustainable Endurance

2010-02-16T10:58:00.000Z

Simon Nurse says definitions of sustainability are gaining a viral circularity

I’m not sure if there has ever been a more widely used yet cloudy concept than ‘sustainability’. It has an ethereal existence, strangely intangible, but increasingly woven into the fabric of our rapidly changing society. If it were a metal it would be ‘Unobtainium’: difficult to find and near impossible to refine.

You might wonder what has drawn my ire to the sustainability concept. Consider for a moment what it means to you. Can you adequately define sustainability? If so, what form does it take? Are there different forms of sustainability? Do they compete for space? When placed under close scrutiny the subject offers far more questions than it answers. Yet it embeds itself within almost all public policy documents and has become a stated requirement for many contracts with local government, as the following example perfectly illustrates.

A colleague working for a Welsh owned engineering company based in the Midlands is tendering for work with a local council. He recently attended a week long workshop offered by the council to prepare contractors for the tendering process. In essence, this is a good idea designed to stimulate industrial activity and keep investment local. The council trainer stressed the importance of ‘sustainability’, an essential component of the process, requiring the completion of a complicated and weighty vendor assessment questionnaire. Failure to complete the paperwork to less than complete satisfaction results in the vendor falling at the first hurdle. Previously I’d suggested that he ask the council for clarification of ‘sustainability’ and its application to the service on offer. The council trainer, caught in the headlights of an unexpected, yet obvious question, was embarrassingly unable to define it.

I checked for a definition of sustainability on the Welsh Government website and couldn’t find one In fairness, it might be there. It’s a big site and the detail may be buried. However, I did find a definition of sustainable development which, I was informed , entails::

“…enhancing the economic, social and environmental wellbeing of people and communities, achieving a better quality of life for our own and future generations:

Ø In ways which promote social justice and equality of opportunity; and

Ø In ways which enhance the natural and cultural environment and respect it’s limits - using only our fair share of the earth’s resources and sustaining our cultural legacy.

Sustainable development is the process by which we reach the goal of sustainability’.

Thus we go full circle. Starting with a look at ‘sustainability’, we are led to ‘sustainable development’, before being returned to ‘sustainability’. Not that I wish to single out the Welsh Government for lack of clarity as the sustainable development statement is quite detailed. Nonetheless, indistinct use of the sustainability concept is spreading through public and business life like a virus that’s found a willing and welcome host.

The simple definition of sustainability is the ‘capacity to endure’ a trait efficiently displayed by Japanese knotweed, jingoism, malaria, the beano and BBC repeats of Dad’s Army. I’d recommend shying away from using that one.

Clarification and context is incredibly important as ‘sustainable’ approaches are fast becoming a de-facto requirement of working with local government and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) savvy big industry. Organisations lacking the intellectual capital to deal with this issue, including many SMEs, are destined to lose out to PR and ‘greenwash’, demeaning the concept and moving us away from what it is purportedly – I think – trying to do. I presume this is to ensure financially viable goods and services are supplied on a consistent basis, while making positive contributions towards an improved environment and society.

Simon Nurse is Head of Operations with Cardiff’s Capital Coated Steel and Editor of the Industrial Ecology and Sustainable Business website www.iesme.org

Surviving the Recession

2010-02-15T11:57:00.002Z

John Osmond provides a curtain raiser for this week’s IWA inaugural economy conference on making Wales business friendly

The other day I caught a glimpse of how the uneven impact of the recession is affecting neighbouring communities in south Wales. I was making one of my biannual trips to my local jewellers in Penarth, to have a battery fitted to my watch, and got into a conversation with the owner. “How are things going?” I enquired. “You know, with the recession and all that.”

“Well its pretty good here,” he responded. “Holding up pretty well. But in Canton it’s completely different. In fact I closed down our store there at the end of last week.” He went on to explain that while his electronic point of sale (EPOS) system was recording an average £46 spend for every paying customer in Penarth, in Canton it had only been £13. In fact in Canton he was paying out more in his pawn business than taking in as a retailer. And on top of that, he had fewer overheads in Penarth. “I would have had to have a throughput of five times the number of customers through my Canton store to make it as successful as the one in Penarth,” my jeweler said.

In fact Penarth continues to sustain two jewelers shops and despite the presence of Tesco and a recently added Sainsbury, plus the usual rash of charity shops, the town centre is relatively prosperous. Penarth is, of course a large town by Welsh standards, with a population of around 25,000, with about 8,000 having degrees (according to the 2001 census as reported by Wikipedia). On the other hand Canton, on the western side of Cardiff, is less well off. It has a population of around 13,000 and is one of the most ethnically diverse of the capital’s suburbs, with a significant Asian population.

When it comes to surviving the recession the devil is in the detail. At the heart of the challenge is simply making Wales more business friendly which, as it happens, is the theme of the IWA’s inaugural national economy conference, being held at the Parc Hotel in Cardiff this coming Friday.

A high point of the conference will be a discussion between Brian Morgan, Professor of Economics at UWIC and the First Minister Carwyn Jones on the theme ‘Business and Government – Can they do more for each other?’ The First Minister provided a taster in his interview with Andrew Marr on his BBC 1 Sunday programme yesterday, when he acknowledged that the private sector in Wales was too small:

“We have to do more to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit that does exist in Wales. We have to say to people that devolved government works in Wales. We need to make sure that people feel that business can work in Wales as well. Where people have got ideas we have to build their confidence that they can develop those ideas and have the access to capital they need in order to do it. That’s got to be the next stage for us.”

At our conference on Friday Lord Mervyn Davies, the UK Minister for Trade, Investment and Small Businesses and Gerald Holtham, Chair of the Independent Commission on Financing and Funding for Wales will be assessing the challenges we face in getting out of the recession. Chris Rowlands, former Director of the 3i Group and author of the No 10 commissioned study on Venture Capital in the UK will be talking about business access to investment.

And Nigel Roberts, Managing Director of Paramount, David Stevens, Chief Operating Officer with Admiral Insurance, and Graham Morgan, Director of the South Wales Chamber of Commerce will be discussing how we can make Wales more business friendly from the ground up. Altogether, one not to miss. More details can be found on this website. Just click on the Events button.

John Osmond is Director of the IWA.

Waking Up To Science

2010-02-12T10:07:00.000Z

John Tucker says the Welsh Government’s appointment of a Chief Scientific Advisor is just one indication of a welcome new engagement

Aberafan born Professor John Harris, of Imperial College London, will take up his new post of Chief Scientific Advisor to the Welsh Government at the beginning of May. This landmark appointment, announced earlier this month and widely welcomed by the Welsh academic community, is the culmination of five years of debate and pressure, much of it orchestrated by the IWA.

Professor Harries holds the Chair in Earth Observation at the Imperial's Department of Physics and will continue to focus around 20 per cent of his time on his academic role in London. A renowned atmospheric physicist, he is particularly known for leading the team that produced the first direct observational evidence of an increase in the Earth's greenhouse effect between 1970 and 1997. Published in 2001 in the journal Nature, this research provided fundamental evidence that significant rises in the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide were responsible for warming the Earth by trapping more of the sun's heat in the atmosphere.

The debate over the need for a scientific advisor started at the beginning of 2006 when the Welsh Government’s consultation document on a Science Policy for Wales met with disappointment and controversy. The Economic Development and Transport Committee, chaired by Christine Gwyther, had already raised the interest of the scientific community in a science policy in July 2005, when she initiated a consultation including a programme of meetings with representatives of learned societies.

However, the Government’s consultation document was not well received by the scientific community. Some thought it was simply embarrassing. Sir John Cadogan criticised sharply the policy in the pages of the IWA’s journal Agenda. A longstanding dissatisfaction with the state of science in Wales resulted in the idea of a Chief Scientific Advisor becoming the symbol of a cause.

In September 2007, at an IWA science meeting held in the Swansea City Museum, First Minister Rhodri Morgan announced that a pathfinder post would be created to examine the case for a science advisor. This task fell to Professor Chris Pollock of the Aberystwyth Grassland Research Institute (IBERS). During the course of his investigation, which lasted the best part of a year, Professor Pollock addressed a further meeting of the scientific community also organised by the IWA, this time at Swansea University.

Much of the debate, developed at more IWA conferences and in the pages of its journal, focused on the following issues:

· A need for someone in government with a knowledge of contemporary science.

· Poor funding levels for University science.

· Lack of scientific research centres in Wales.

· Need to revitalise interest in science and technology in schools and for greater public engagement more widely.

· The invisibility of science in the history and culture of Wales and the need for more organisations to represent science.

The debate has led to action on many of these issues. For example, the Royal Society of Chemistry have mobilised support for a cross-party Assembly Group. Computer scientists have created a British Computer Society in Wales. A new Learned Society for Wales is to be founded to represent and support excellence in the intellectual life of Wales. There are many initiatives to stimulate science in schools. The scientific heritage of Wales is being investigated by historians and scientists across the universities of Wales and at the National Museum. Wales is waking up to science.

Despite these developments our new Scientific Advisor will face some testing times in keeping a focus on science, as a more stringent funding regime kicks in. For instance, only a few days after the announcement of his appointment, IBERS announced that it needs to lose up to 70 full time equivalent posts to close a funding deficit expected to reach £2.4 million by the end of the 2011-12 financial year. IBERS is no ordinary institute. Set up by the University of Wales as the Institute of Grassland Research, taken over by a research council which wanted to move it, and later merged with Aberystwyth University, it is a rare example of a big serious research institute in Wales. Let us hope it has now found a formidable champion with the appointment of Professor John Harries.

· John V Tucker is Head of the School of Physical Sciences at Swansea University, an IWA Trustee and Chair of the IWA’s Swansea Bay Branch.

Re-Balancing the Welsh Curriculum

2010-02-11T13:28:00.000Z

John Osmond reports on a crusade being waged by Education Minister Leighton Andrews to give vocational studies parity of esteem with the academic

A rebalancing of the 14-19 curriculum in Wales to give greater prominence and esteem to vocational qualifications was forecast yesterday by Education Minister Leighton Andrews in a keynote address to an IWA conference on Learning Pathways. The Minister coupled this pledge with a forecast that there would have to be greater co-operating between schools and further education colleges to make it happen.

As he put it to the conference, held at the Welsh Joint Education Committee’s new headquarters in Llandaff:

“It is likely that we will have to narrow the range of academic choices if we are to broaden the vocational agenda, maintain Key Skills and support strategic subjects. We have a clear direction from the First Minister to eliminate unnecessary institutional competition. I do not believe that the current structure of post-16 provision is sustainable as it is currently constituted. I welcome the mergers that have taken place within the FE sector, and I expect that more will happen.”

The Minister reiterated his determination, outlined earlier this year, that more education investment should reach the front-line of schools and colleges, with the implication that the role of local authorities is being held up to scrutiny. The wide range of funding levels between pupils in Wales and across local authorities is being subject to a review by outside consultants that he has already announced.

But the main focus of his speech yesterday was a wider range of vocational subjects being offered to pupils as a result of Learning and Skills (Wales) measure passed by the National Assembly last year:

“The Measure secures learner access to a more flexible curriculum that will both better meet their needs, and equip them for high skilled employment or further and higher education. Learners can now choose from a minimum number of courses at Key Stage 4, including vocational options. By 2012 all year 10 pupils will be able to choose their course of study from a local curriculum comprising a minimum of 30 Level 2 course choices. This curriculum must also include a minimum of five vocational course choices, thereby ensuring that there is a real choice of vocational options for learners.

“The entitlement for Key Stage 4 is being introduced incrementally towards 2012 but I am pleased that 91% of schools met their specified minimum course requirement for September 2009. The minimum course requirement for Post-16 will be rolled out from September 2011….

… In terms of the 14-19 agenda, we want to ensure a wider choice between vocational and academic routes. But I do not want that choice to dilute quality. So if we are to be honest with ourselves, we have to recognise that that broader strategic choice, to open up vocational options alongside the academic, may require us to limit subject choice if we are to ensure strategic subjects are taught and key skills learned.

“And for individuals, having more choice means sometimes difficult decisions for young people. Support from a Learning Coach, together with impartial careers advice and guidance, will help young people make the choices that will give them the best chance of success in the future, and help them realise the choices they have made.”

In all of this the Minister stressed that a key need was to persuade society as a whole of the value of the vocational educational route, calling in aide the words of Raymond Williams, in his Culture and Society, written 50 years ago:

Many highly educated people have, in fact, been so driven in on their reading….that they fail to notice that there are other forms of skilled, intelligent, creative activity: not only the cognate forms of theatre, concert, and picture-gallery; but a whole range of general skills, from gardening, metalwork and carpentry, to active politics. The contempt for so many of these activities, which is always latent in the highly literate, is a mark of the observers’ limits, not those of the activities themselves.

· John Osmond is Director of the IWA.

Historic Vote Triggers Referendum

2010-02-09T18:17:00.002Z

John Osmond reports on today’s Senedd debate that kick started moves to holding a referendum on increasing the National Assembly’s law making powers

In an historic vote in the National Assembly this afternoon Members voted Yes without opposition in favour of the so-called ‘trigger’ motion, setting in train moves towards holding a referendum on more powers, probably in the Autumn. The vote was 53 of the 60 Members in favour with no one against. The Presiding Officer did not vote and other members were absent from the chamber, in the main due to ill health. The fact that Members from all four parties and from all parts of Wales voted in favour of holding a referendum on transforming the National Assembly into a Parliament with law making powers marks a substantial change compared with the politics of Wales in the late 1990s.

Until the weekend there were doubts whether the Conservatives or even the Liberal Democrats would support the motion, because of fears that a referendum might be held on the same day as next year’s Assembly election. This, they thought would work to their disadvantage in the election campaign. However, their worries on that score seem to have been assuaged by private assurances from First Minister Carwyn Jones.

In the 1997 referendum the Conservatives led the campaign for a No vote on establishing the Assembly in the first place. Now the party, at least in the Assembly, has swung firmly behind extending the existing powers of the Assembly, producing a consensus that increases the chances of a Yes vote being achieved whenever the referendum is held.

Today’s vote now goes to the Secretary of State for Wales, Peter Hain, to respond - First Minister Carwyn Jones has to notify him of the Assembly's wishes within 14 days by letter. Under the 2006 Government of Wales Act Hain then has 12o days - or until 9 June - before laying a draft order for a referendum before both Houses of the Westminster Parliament seeking assent to the National Assembly’s request for a referendum. Alternatively he has to respond to the National Assembly itself explaining why he is minded not to do so.

The complicating factor is that 120 days takes us beyond the likely date of the forthcoming UK General Election, widely predicted to be held on 6 May. If an order is not laid before that date it will fall to the incoming Westminster government to deal with the National Assembly’s request.

Hain’s position is politically highly sensitive. He has made no secret of his strongly held view that this Autumn would be too soon to hold the referendum. Privately, he believes the Welsh people need to experience a number of years of a Conservative government at Westminster before they can be easily persuaded to agree with more powers being handed down to Cardiff Bay. He may be tempted to delay responding until after the general election. By then, of course, he might be out of office and it could be up to a Conservative Secretary of State to make a decision.

These and other factors could have a significant impact on the timing of a referendum. If there is a minority government at Westminster or a hung Parliament, with no party in overall control, then the prospects for a further general election within a year or even months, as happened in 1974, could get in the way of the Autumn date for the Welsh referendum which is broadly favoured in Cardiff Bay.

Immediately following the vote in the Senedd Peter Hain issued the following Press release, emphasising that his mind was focused on the forthcoming general election:

"Carwyn and I have been working very closely together over the past two months to make progress on this issue. I fully support the First Minister's approach and now look forward to receiving his letter so I can begin the necessary preparatory work to take this forward. In the meantime, as Carwyn and I have said jointly, we both agree that the priority in the coming months will be the General Election, the outcome which will be so important for Wales. We must secure economic recovery for Wales, not choke it off with hasty cuts to Government spending.”

Part of the “necessary preparatory work” will be asking the Electoral Commission to produce ground rules for the referendum, in particular devising a comprehensible but balanced question that will be put in it. The Commission have already indicated that this work will probably involve polling and research with focus groups. All this could be used by Hain as reasons for delaying a response until beyond the general election.

In today’s Senedd debate Cardiff North’s Conservative AM Jonathan Morgan explained most succinctly why his constituents and, indeed his party, had changed their mind on devolution. In the 1997 referendum he said they had voted overwhelmingly against the National Assembly. Yet at a Women’s Institute meeting he attended in Cardiff only two years later he recalled a sense of outrage that the National Assembly had fewer powers than either the Scottish Parliament or the Northern Ireland Assembly. This, he inferred, might be the best way to frame the argument for a Yes vote in the forthcoming referendum.

The only note of disagreement in the debate was between some Plaid and Conservative Members. Plaid Cymru Conwy AM Gareth Jones suggested that what the referendum would in practice be about, moving from Part 3 to Part 4 powers under the 2006 Act, was merely an administrative tidying up exercise. The principle of allowing the National Assembly to pass primary legislation had already been conceded by the 2006 Act. South Wales Central Plaid AM Leanne Wood, questioned whether a referendum was really necessary for so small a change.

However, South Wales Central Conservative AM David Melding took them to task. He stressed the symbolic importance of the National Assembly acquiring full primary powers over its areas of competence without having to go cap in hand to Westminster for permission to legislate, via legislative competence orders. This he said would be a major change, one that would have profound consequences for the constitution of the UK as a whole, and would probably be the last referendum on a change to the operation of the National Assembly for at least a generation.

Other AMs warned that despite the consensus in the chamber there was no such consensus outside in their constituencies across Wales. They would need to work hard, co-operating in a cross-party campaign, to get the arguments across to the people of Wales on how they would benefit in bread and butter terms by voting Yes in a referendum to increase the Assembly’s legislative powers.

· John Osmond is Director of the IWA.

Half-Way House to Electoral Reform

2010-02-09T10:20:00.000Z

Annabelle Harle assesses the impact of the Alternative Vote had it been operating in Wales in 2005 and the way it would influence the Welsh result in the forthcoming general election

Today the Westminster Parliament will decide whether to allow a referendum to be held on the Alternative Vote electoral system to replace first-past-the-post. This is not something that electoral reformers are much excited about. None of the British groups campaigning for a change in the voting system cite AV as their system of choice. To most of us in Wales, the only person we know who favours the Alternative Vote (AV) is the Secretary of State, Peter Hain. However, AV has been chosen by the Government to star in a late amendment to the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill, currently going through Parliament, with the promise of a referendum early in the next Parliament to decide whether it should be adopted for electing members of the House of Commons.

Of all the possible changes to the electoral system, AV would be the simplest to make, and would definitely improve the ‘voter experience’. Under AV, as under First Past the Post, the country is divided into constituencies, each of which elects one MP. The difference is that on the ballot paper, instead of marking an X next to the name of the candidate you want to win, you mark 1 next to your favourite candidate, 2 next to your second favourite, and so on.

At the count, the first stage is to add up the first preferences for each candidate. If a candidate has a more than 50 per cent votes they are elected straight away. If no candidate has a majority of the vote, the lowest-placed candidate is eliminated and that person’s votes are looked at again to see which candidate each of their supporters marked as their second choice. These second preferences are added to the votes for the remaining candidates. If someone has a majority now, they are elected. If not, the bottom remaining candidate is out of the running, and the process repeats until someone does have a majority of the vote.

In general, AV would have the effect of hindering the Conservatives in Wales more than in England because of the presence of Plaid Cymru as a left-wing party. Conversely, and in England especially, AV can equally help the Conservatives, since UKIP and BNP are the largest ‘minor’ parties and their transfers will go Tory. Had the 2005 election been run under AV, it is likely that Preseli Pembrokeshire and Clwyd West would have remained Labour.

The effect would probably be weaker in the forthcoming general election in Wales. There would be fewer people determined to keep the Conservatives out, and it’s plausible that Liberal Democrat preferences in Wales would skew more to the Conservatives. Also, the Conservatives are probably going to win more seats with clear margins (as they did in Monmouth in 2005). Given the size of swing to the Conservatives in Wales that people are talking about, AV might save some far-end Labour seats particularly where there is a Plaid vote (possibly the Vale of Clwyd and Delyn) but perhaps also help the Liberal Democrats against Labour in Newport and Swansea. It might also save Montgomeryshire for the Liberal Democrats.

Under first-past-the-post MPs often only have the support of a minority of the people actually voting in their constituencies. In the 2005 General Election, 220 MPs had the vote of more than 50 per cent of those voting, but 426 did not. Sadly, none at all received the vote of a majority of their constituents. This means that most MPs cannot claim to speak for the majority of their constituents, and sometimes even those who do vote in a constituency end up with an MP most of them do not support or like.

The main improvement under AV is that this doesn’t happen because at least 50 per cent of voters have registered some degree of support for the MP elected. This is a real benefit and has the potential to improve social cohesion and community relations. So, for this reason AV is probably worth taking, but only as a halfway house on the road to radical reform.

Groups such as Vote for a Change, which have been at the forefront of the recent campaign argue that the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system is the only way to secure truly fair representation. At the time of writing, Power 2010’s website shows the introduction of a proportional system of voting as the most popular change to be pressed on candidates at the election. The Jenkins Commission recommended AV+, a variation which contains an “element of proportionality” not dissimilar to the one we know in Wales. AV on its own is not a proportional system and Electoral Reform Society projections have shown that it can work out to be less proportional than FPTP across the UK.

It could be argued, therefore, that although there is a definite dividend for the individual as voter, there is a democratic deficit when it comes to counting up the numbers of MPs and seeing which party forms the Government.

Even before the duckhouse summer, campaigns were up and running to secure a change in the electoral system. First-Past-the-Post is so demonstrably unfair that there will always be campaigns against it, just as there will always be those who claim it is simple and transparent and leads to strong government and is therefore unassailable.

The promise of change was there in the manifesto on which Labour came to power in 1997. Jenkins reported, but the issue was shelved. A desire to push the potentially outgoing government for change before the chance disappeared with the removal van leaving Downing Street began to make itself felt early in 2009. Then came the summer of sleaze, and the need to shake up the system became an imperative, highlighted by the strange outcome of the European elections which were nothing if not a kick at the status quo.

Britain has a democratically elected government, but its legitimacy is strained when turnout falls. Electors see no benefit in voting, do not see their vote reflected in Parliament and are unimpressed by the conduct of the occupants of the green upholstery of the gravy train. To persuade the elector to take up once more the stake in society that less than a hundred years ago some citizens were ready to die for, we have to render the system relevant once more.

· Annabelle Harle is Head of Office with the Electoral Reform Society Wales.

Tackling Child Poverty and School Performance

2010-02-08T12:38:00.003Z

John Osmond finds a new determination amongst Welsh Ministers to tackle a blight on Welsh society

A milestone will be reached this coming Thursday if, as expected, the Welsh Government’s Children and Families Measure finally reaches the statute book. This contains a raft of proposals but among them is a far reaching legal requirement for all public bodies in Wales to specify how their expenditure and actions will work to reduce child poverty.

This means that every local authority, health authority and public bodies ranging from the Countryside Council for Wales to National Museum Wales and the National Library will have to provide evidence in their annual reports to the Welsh Government how their policies and budgets are having an impact.

As the Minister for Children Huw Lewis put it, at a conference organised by the Wales Women’s National Coalition in Llandudno Junction at the end of last week, “We will have a legal requirement for the whole of the public sector in Wales to put children in poverty at the head of the queue.

“There are going to be interesting times ahead in how this will be interpreted. But I shall be looking to see evidence of changes of resource allocation in response to this legislation.”

Child poverty is climbing higher in the Welsh political agenda with the release of a Save the Children report earlier this month showing that Wales is the worst performing part of the UK. The report, Measuring Severe Child Poverty in the UK, revealed that 15 per cent (or 96,000) Welsh children are living in severe poverty in Wales, compared with just 9 per cent in Scotland, 10 per cent in Northern Ireland and 13 per cent in England.

Commenting on the report Huw Lewis said progress on tackling child poverty has stalled in every part of the UK apart from Scotland and acknowledged that we have to do more in Wales. “What we have been doing has not been as vigorous or as comprehensive as it might have been,” he said. “We need a more integrated and wrapped around approach in which particular families are targeted.

“We need to have a clearer focus on extricating families from poverty rather a more generalised ameliorating approach.”

He said the Welsh Government has just 18 months before the May 2011 election to demonstrate that it was getting a firmer grip on the issue. “You can take it that my appointment as Minister for Children is a signal from the First Minister that this is being taken very seriously. I have a roaming brief across government and we will be seeking a co-ordinated approach.”

Huw Lewis will be launching the Welsh Government’s new Child Poverty Strategy in early March. It is likely that this will concentrate on actions that schools and local authorities can take in working closely with problem families in an effort to drive up the school performance of disadvantaged children.

A number of recent reports have already drawn attention to examples of good practice, including Estyn’s Tackling child poverty and disadvantage in schools, published in January, and a Department of Social Justice report, Tackling Child Poverty: Guidance for Communities First Partnerships, published last October. The challenge is to roll out the relatively isolated examples of good practice highlighted in these reports more widely across Wales. A problem with many schools is that their major focus is on getting good examination results among better performing pupils, leaving the bottom 10 to 20 per cent to languish. However, as the Estyn report underlines, improving the education attainment of the lesser performing and generally more disadvantaged children has the impact of improving the whole of a school’s performance.

· John Osmond is Director of the IWA.

News Contest For ITV Wales

2010-02-08T11:21:00.000Z

Geraint Talfan Davies says there may be more than meets the eye in the bids to supply news of Wales to the ITV1 channel

One of the key words in Ofcom’s recent review of public service broadcasting was ‘contestability’ – that is, introducing some element of competition into the distribution of public money for programmes. The concept has now gone live, with the competition for a contract to be the first ‘independently financed news consortium’ (IFNC –another Ofcom concept) to provide a news service for ITV in Wales.

Judging by last week’s beauty parade in a packed room at the Wales Millennium Centre Centre, contestability looks like passing its first test. In Wales the competition has produced three bidders - Tinopolis, Taliesin News, and UTV. This is - one more than the number of bidders for similar contracts in Scotland and the north east of England. And Richard Hooper, chair of the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport selection panel, told the meeting that the three bids were of “high quality and very different”.

However, on the day similarities were more obvious than differences, since unlike applications for commercial radio licences, the details of the proposals are not in the public domain. Commercial confidentiality was cited as the reason for this coyness. Yet the rush to get the whole selection process done before the end of March, and the disruption of a General Election, probably has more to do with it. Conservative spokesmen are opposed to IFNCs.

In their seven-minute presentations all three bidders committed to taking on the existing news staff of ITV Wales, to making their news material freely available for re-versioning by others, and to providing ambitious websites as well as to encouraging ‘citizen journalism’ – the last of which mixes the estimable value of participation with inestimable value of being free. The beauty parade was not without its coating of cliché – promotional videos with driving music, big headlines and promises of “fresh and innovative approaches”. Who would offer ‘stale and boring’ approaches?

Not surprisingly, Tinopolis, the Llanelli-based production company, made much of the fact that it was the only Welsh company bidding, and that it would launch an online service, Wales 24, taking material from reporters and citizens right across Wales. Its presentation also flagged that one of its subsidiaries is the producer of the BBC’s Question Time. Winning this bid would add another significant income stream to its many high volume programme strands in Wales – for S4C - and elsewhere in the UK.

Clive Jones, Chair of Taliesin News, emphasised the busload of Welsh partners in Taliesin’s consortium, carefully masking the fact that the bid is being made by ITN – the other ‘partners’ are not joint owners. (ITN is clearly concerned that any fragmentation of news provision beyond the ITV companies themselves, throughout the nations and regions of the UK, could undermine its own capacity for comprehensive coverage of the UK, with some impact on its own business model.) Taliesin’s reporters would be ‘embedded’ in the newsrooms of the three partner newspaper companies – the South Wales Evening Post, the South Wales Argus, and Tindle Newspapers, owners of several weekly newspapers. It would also deploy a fund to train citizen journalists – a concept beginning to sound strangely like the newspaper ‘stringers’ of old.

UTV, Northern Ireland’s ITV company, and owner of two Swansea radio stations, in a noticeably harder-edged presentation, did not hold back from stressing that its news programme for Ulster is the best performing in the whole of the ITV system, with an audience share of 34 per cent, more than twice the share of the current ITV Wales programme. UTV’s managing director, Michael Wilson, said, rather pointedly, that their programme for Wales would be ‘solid news’ from beginning to end, and we would not being seeing “celebrity interviews after 12 minutes”.

On the money front Clive Jones, for Taliesin, hoped that eventually the service could be self-sustaining. But Ron Jones, Executive Chairman of Tinopolis, disagreed and thought that some element of public funding would be needed in Wales for the foreseeable future. He said there had to be protection against market failure. Michael Wilson, for UTV, wanted the IFNC in Wales to be able to retain any advertising revenue arising from the Welsh news slot, something ITV is strenuously resisting. “It’s time ITV gave something back,” he said. UTV was also the only one to mention that it would be keen to extend into other programmes if ITV could be persuaded to release more slots in the schedule.

The absence of detail behind the PR presentations, however understandable given the tight timescale, is a major flaw in the process since we have no detailed statements about:

i) the approach of all three parties to the desirable nature of news coverage in Wales;

ii) he precise level of resource to be deployed;

iii) the extent of specialist coverage; or

iv) the ways in which this deployment of public money would strengthen the news infrastructure beyond the winners own programme and related online site.

On the last point the answer may be more obviously implicit in the breadth of the Taliesin consortium, although one of the merits of the IFNC proposal is that, as intended, it creates an open rather than closed system. All kinds of permutations could develop over time regardless of what bidders say at this moment.

Another long term implication is already apparent, which may become more significant than anything else: namely that this may be a first skirmish in a battle for the ITV franchise in Wales, when the current ITV licences come to an end in 2014. For the first time the Digital Economy Bill gives Ofcom the ability to create single licences for Scotland and England. One already exists for Northern Ireland. Although Wales is not specifically mentioned in the bill, a licence for the whole of England might imply a licence for Wales by default. In that situation it is not difficult to foresee a tussle between Tinopolis and UTV for the Welsh licence.

All in all Wales has a clear interest in ensuring that the IFNC concept is not derailed.

· Geraint Talfan Davies is Chair of the IWA.

Citizen Journalism

2010-02-06T14:08:00.000Z

Heulyn Davies reports on a IWA debate about the increasing impact of the Welsh blogosphere

As the expanding Welsh blogosphere becomes ever more prominent, will it in fact supplement or even supplant traditional journalism in Wales in the near future? This was a question explored at a meeting this week of the IWA’s Cardiff and Valleys branch. More than fifty people met to hear a panel discussion featuring some of Wales’ leading bloggers – Peter Black AM (peterblack.blogspot.com), Lee Waters (Editor, thisismytruth.org), Alistair Milburn (effective-communication.co.uk/blogs) and Bethan Darwin (superwoman.org.uk) – and chaired by IWA Chair Geraint Talfan Davies (iwa.org.uk/blog).

Whilst the diverse background of our panellists – broadcasting, newspapers, politics and the law - ensured varied perspectives on the issues raised during the discussion, there was a general agreement that the Welsh blogosphere is currently proving to be both vibrant and informative – although possibly too male dominated.

Motives behind blogging ranged from the journalistic to the cathartic and even the confessional, but panellists agreed that blogs appear to play an increasingly important role as a forum of public debate with knock-on consequences for the media and politics in Wales. Discussion centred on the importance of blogging as a communication tool – especially in the context of political discourse – and we were soon reminded of its power in having already claimed its first Welsh political scalp.

Panellists commented that blogs often have a loyal and committed following – and a captive audience – but breaking out of small niches to find a wider audience remains a particular challenge.

It was agreed that the traditional media and journalism have entered a period of declining dominance in terms of news, politics and the provision of facts to public debate – and that this will continue unless new business models are developed. The hegemony of conventional journalism as the gatekeeper of news is threatened not just by new technology and commercial and community competitors but, potentially, also by the audience it serves.

This led our panellists to discuss the emergence of citizen journalism and its role in reporting local events. They acknowledged the difficulty of ascertaining the accuracy or even veracity of such reporting, especially when bloggers are pursuing causes. But they also acknowledged that this was also a problem in professional media where there is increasing and worrying trend simply to use or recycle press releases as copy.

Nonetheless, the panel welcomed the concept of citizen journalism as it directly challenges the media’s monopoly on what constitutes news and how it is reported. It was argued that this monopoly has finally been undermined by the opportunity for anyone with a laptop and the nous for a story to raise issues that the media often ignore – and even in some instances, set the news agenda in what has become a very short news cycle.

It was heartening to hear that our panellists (which included a politician and lawyer) do not feel too circumspect when blogging. Nonetheless, in the ensuing discussion the potential pitfalls inherent in this almost exclusively voluntary and part-time activity were clear for all to see.

The session concluded with a look to the future. The panel foresaw:

· A continuing media deficit in Wales - evidenced by the fact that nearly 90 per cent of daily newspaper readers in Wales are reading papers with no Welsh content.

· The spectre of state intervention.

· The potential for micro publications (possibly using the successful template of the Papurau Bro) and

· The advent of US style Clogs - Community Blogs.

· The development of hybrid media with a more systenmatic interaction between the professional journbalists and citizen journalists.

It is commonly asserted that the internet ‘changes everything’. But the general consensus was that nothing fundamentally changes the rules of the game, it just changes the way the game is played. And in a country like Wales, with its obvious deficit in terms of media plurality and news provision, this at the very least raises some interesting (and some might say worrying) questions.

· Heulyn Davies is a Committee member of the IWA’s Cardiff and Valleys Branch.

Welsh Shares Stay In Touch

2010-02-04T11:06:00.005Z

The Welsh share portfolio has stayed ahead of its purchase price three months ago but only just, Rhys David reports.
January, as investors will know, has been a month of retrenchment in the UK stock markets. After the ebullient end of year rally which saw the main FTSE index recover from its mid year lows to reach more than 5500, shares have fallen back again by roughly five per cent as worries continue over the world economy. In Britain there is the uncertainty over the outcome of the general election, and continuing fears about the size of the debt burden the UK is now carrying and the measures that will be needed to bring it back under control. Sentiment was not helped by the very modest growth in the UK economy in the last quarter of 2009, a 0.1 per cent increase barely justifying claims that Britain had at last moved out of recession.
Over the month the Welsh share portfolio we have been tracking since November 2009 did well, therefore, to suffer only a modest fall, the total value of the 12 nominal shares dropping only £8 from their end January figure and at £1,215 staying – just – above the original £1,200 cost.
Within this overall picture, however, there were once again wide variations in the performance of the 12 shares drawn from across a range of business sectors, including finance, high technology, retail, construction and manufacturing. Seven of the twelve shares recorded a drop in value with only five – Finsbury Foods, Pure Wafer, IQE, Redrow, and Wynnstay - posting an increase.
Finsbury has made some senior management changes in recent months and announced plans to trim staff numbers, and this together with its announcement that it is trading in line with expectations seems to have satisfied the market. Meanwhile, IQE’s share price has responded, albeit modestly, to an upbeat statement from its chief executive who sees a rapid recovery from the downturn as a result of rising demand for internet phones, solar power cells and low-energy lighting. Earnings in the second half of 2009 are forecast to be four times up on the first half. The other technology company in the index, Pure Wafer has seen a 33 per cent rise in the month in its share price but this is from a very low base of only 3.75p at the end of December. The share price currently is in the middle of the range at which the company has traded over the past year – a low of 2p and a high of 8.5p.
Over the three months as a whole since the index was created the big winner remains the Cardiff-based oil and gas exploration company, Amerisur Resources, which is now worth 83 per cent more than at the start of November even though its shares did retreat by just over 5.5 per cent in January. The biggest company in the index, Admiral Insurance, is proving one of the most reliable with its shares reporting a 3 per cent decline in January but still 8 per cent higher at £11.40 than three months ago when they stood at £10.59. The other big company share in the index, Redrow, is also proving one of the more stable with its share price very close to the figure last November after a 3.6 per cent increase over the month.
The big loser during January was again Enfis, the lighting specialists, which dropped a further 11.6 per cent, taking its share price down to only a third of its value at the start of November. Any investor who had bought £100 of share in the company then would now be looking at £33. Less than one year ago Enfis shares were valued at 100p. Boomerang Plus, the Cardiff media business, has also disappointed, losing 16.6 per cent of its value in the past month and 20 per cent overall since the start of November. Its shares at 75p are now well below the high of 124 in 2009. The one time Welsh business favourite, International Greetings, is also suffering. Its shares declined by 16.6 per cent in January, and are now 18 per cent down over three months at 60p.
So what lessons if any can be learnt from the performance of the shares in the index over the past three months? Firstly, it is still difficult to say whether or not investments in a selection of Welsh companies will outperform or underperform the UK economy as a whole, though the Welsh index as a whole is showing slightly smaller growth than the UK indexes with which it is being compared.
The volatility of technology companies is highlighted, however, and only the brave investor would choose to risk money in this sector. Indeed, if Wales’s oil explorer, Amerisur Resources had not performed very well, the index would by now be heavily under water. As might be expected, the biggest companies in the index, Redrow, Admiral, Wynnstay and Moneysupermarket.com have proved to be the safest havens, even though two of these did record small drops in share prices over the three months.
Interestingly, the second best performer over the three months was the Welsh Industrial Investment Trust, which brings together a package of different companies, suggesting there is indeed safety in numbers in troubled times.
The full list of companies in the index is: Amerisur Resources, Admiral Insurance, Boomerang Plus, Enfis, Finsbury Food, International Greetings, IQE, Moneysupermarket.com, Pure Wafer, Redrow, Wynnstay, and Welsh Industrial Investment Trust.
A note of clarification. The observations above are personal opinion, they do not represent the views of the IWA and are not a recommendation to deal in any of the shares mentioned. Any reader interested in buying any of these share would be well advised to consult a financial adviser.
Rhys David is a trustee of the IWA and its development director from 2002-2008. He is a former journalist with the Financial Times and now writes on a variety of economic and business topics.