Assembly Diary

This week Welsh Labour’s plans for reform of the quango state in Wales reached a new stage when Orders to incorporate some of the quangos into the Welsh Assembly Government were debated by the National Assembly. I spoke in the debates on the WDA and on ELWA - click to see the speeches.

The unelected quangos – ‘quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations’ – became notorious during the 1980s and early 1990s as the Conservative Government built them up to run more and more areas of life in Wales. Frequently they seemed to be a home for former Conservative Party councillors and ex-MPs who had lost elections. Though there were reforms of the way people were appointed to quangos in the mid-nineties, they were still not representative of ordinary people in Wales. For example, when I checked on who was sitting on their boards eighteen months ago I found there were only two Rhondda people serving on them.

We have set out to democratise things by abolishing a large number of the quangos and making their functions accountable through the Welsh Assembly Government. So the education and training quango ELWA is going. The Welsh Development Agency will be merged with the Assembly’s economic development department and so will the Wales Tourist Board. There are a number of smaller quangos which are also being abolished, including the Welsh Language Board.

In the modern world, it is important that people are seen to be accountable for the things they do in public life. That is harder when decisions are taken by unelected bodies which can only be held accountable by Ministers. If the Assembly Government is responsible, people know where the buck stops and we can make demands for change. That’s why I support the Assembly Government’s plans to reform the quango state – indeed, I called for this to happen before I was elected to the National Assembly as the Rhondda’s Assembly Member in 2003.

ELWA:

Leighton Andrews: ELWa goes to the quango graveyard entirely unlamented by me. I arrived here as the constituency Member for the Pop Factory, I spent the first 18 months here as a member of the Education and Lifelong Learning Committee and I have spent my entire time here as a member of the Audit Committee. I witnessed a shocking abnegation of leadership over the whole situation with regard to the Pop Factory at the beginning. In my time on the Education and Lifelong Learning Committee, I and many others, struggled for a long time to get sense into the national planning and funding system to ensure that there were proper cushioning and dampening measures and, above all, that factors such as deprivation were properly taken into consideration in the new system.

ELWa has recently been engaged in a pathfinder project in Rhondda Cynon Taf, where its consultants managed to produce, in a presentation to sixth-form and college heads in RCT, a series of options. The consultants presented an option for the Rhondda on a slide headed ‘Rhondda Preferred Option’, which would have made most people think that that was the preferred option for the Rhondda. It involved getting rid of sixth forms, centralising all post-16 education at a tertiary learning campus at Porth and several other measures. When you dug into it and protested to ELWa, you found out that this was not the preferred option, I am relieved to say. I have subsequently had an apology from ELWa for that and reassurances from the Minister and the chair of ELWa that the proposals are not the preferred option for the Rhondda, despite its consultants saying that they were. This comes down again to leadership. If the consultants are working for ELWa, they are ELWa’s responsibility and it has a responsibility to consult sensibly with local communities and engage them properly in those processes and not to set off alarm bells. It is ridiculous.

I recognise there are many good people working in ELWa, and I have had many good discussions with them about aspects of its policies, and I think that they will be liberated by the process that we are going through now of abolishing ELWa as a quango. It has been too technocratic. It has needed political leadership and it has needed to operate as though it understands what common sense is from time to time, and that is widely felt within the education and training communities.

I say goodbye to ELWa, but I do not say thank you. I say thank you to those who have worked for the organisation, who, I am sure will, within the Assembly Government, be able to work in a way that will make for a better deal for my constituents and people throughout Wales.

WDA and WTB

Leighton Andrews: I am pleased to support today’s motion, and I do so in a different tone from the tone of my comments on ELWa. The WDA and the WTB have had different histories and have had many achievements to their names in the past, but it is a different reading of history when it comes to the history of ELWa. I was slightly surprised at the tone of today’s amendments. The Minister is being accused of damaging morale in the WDA and the WTB, although not a single reason was advanced as to why this was true, particularly in respect of the WTB.

It is important, in any new structure, as we go forward, that we preserve the best of the WTB and the WDA in respect of their commercial knowledge and nous, but we should never make the mistake in the Assembly, or anywhere else in Wales, of thinking that the WDA itself is the private sector. One of the complaints that I have often received from people in business is that they themselves believed that the WDA believed that it spoke on behalf of the private sector and, to a degree, that it was the private sector, when it patently is not. I spent half of my working life, before coming to the Assembly, in the private sector, and I think that these debates can sometimes get a little out of kilter with reality. I have listened to a debate on the branding issues in Wales recently, and, over the past six months or so, anyone with any degree of knowledge of branding whom I have spoken to has been absolutely emphatic that the brand we are marketing globally is Wales. The WDA—

Alun Cairns: I can only assume from your last comment that you have not spoken to the Secretary of State for Wales.

Leighton Andrews: I have had a conversation with the Secretary of State for Wales, and I have pointed out to him that the brand that we are marketing is Wales. In that regard, I have heard some interesting discussions here, but the WDA brand is simply a business-to-business brand; we are marketing Wales. We are marketing it, and we should be using the full force of our marketing spend, whether across the tourism sector or across inward investment and trade, and this will give us an opportunity to do that. I am glad that we are preserving much of the marketing skill that exists within the WTB and the WDA within the Welsh Assembly Government as we move forward in this process.

However, as a constituency Member, I have had some issues in respect of the WDA. My first meeting with representatives of the WDA after being elected to the Assembly gave me the sense that their approach to the Rhondda—and perhaps this was common across the Valleys—could be summed up in the phrase, ‘Let them commute’. I was not clear that the WDA had much of a vision for the Valleys that was separate from that for south-east Wales as a whole. That is why I am glad that the Minister has been looking at new strategies for the Valleys.

I wondered whether, to some degree, the WDA’s strategy had become overdominated by land development and reclamation rather than by the more business-focused areas of attracting investment, investing in SMEs and so on. So, in those regards, as long as we are protecting the commercial skills and knowledge that currently exist within the WDA and WDB, it makes absolute sense for us to bring these resources together within the Welsh Assembly Government.

It is time that people accepted that that is what is going to happen. It is also time that we focused on ensuring that the opportunities exist for business—in the tourism sector and more widely—to engage with the new structures that are being created, that we focused on getting the business plan for the new operations, and that we ensured that business knows where to go when it needs advice.