COMMISSION ON THE POWERS AND ELECTORAL ARRANGEMENTS OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY FOR WALES

MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS

of the

EVIDENCE OF:

ARTS COUNCIL OF WALES

 held at

Committee Rooms

County Hall, Haverfordwest

on

10 April 2003

LORD RICHARD: Good afternoon. Perhaps you can identify yourself and then give us an introductory statement for five or ten minutes, and then we can follow up the bits that we think are most interesting.

MR TYNDALL: I am Peter Tyndall, Chief Executive of the Arts Council of Wales. I should like to preface my remarks by saying it is very easy to generalise from the particular circumstances in which people find themselves, and I will attempt where possible to resist doing that, unless I think there are areas of general application. When I look across my colleague Assembly-sponsored public bodies, then I think that the experiences that each have had of devolution have been quite separate, and there are reasons for that.

You will know that I joined the Council after a period of some very considerable turbulence, so that the degree and nature of the scrutiny that the Arts Council of Wales had might have been different to colleagues who had a desirably lower profile. I am quite content to have high profiles for the arts in Wales, but having a high profile for the administrative ineptitude of the Arts Council is a different thing entirely – I would say under former management.

It is important to say that our experience is particular from that point of view, and we have gone about things in a particular way in terms of addressing the nature of the relationship with the Welsh Assembly Government and the Culture Committee, which related very much to the position in which we found ourselves when we embarked upon building that relationship.

We saw that partnership was fundamental to re-building a role for the Arts Council, given the damage that had been done to its credibility in the past, and set out on a very definite path towards partnership with the Committee, with the civil servants and with the Minister. That particular route has proved productive for us. Certainly our experience of devolution has been greatly shaped by the fact that budgets grew by 33? per cent over the last financial year and the current one. It is difficult to form a poor impression under those circumstances, as I think you will agree.

The point that I want to kick off with in terms of how things sit is one general point about the nature of the change of scrutiny and the change of relationships. There is an enormous difference for an area like the arts between having three ministers who are predominantly concerned with issues on a larger scale, whereas a subject like the arts can become quite marginalized in that context; whereas in the context of the Assembly, the arts has had a much higher profile, particularly with a culture minister and culture committee. Previously, even with the post-16 committee and the different arrangements, there was a considerably greater focus than there had been previously.

Inevitably, that means that the role of council members, board members, of ASPBs has changed. That is certainly the case with the Arts Council. That change is quite marked. There is an enormous difference between an organisation receiving its budget at the beginning of the year and then being left to essentially discharge its obligations outside of our close partnership with government, and the situation in which we are now. That should not happen.

It was made clear that the issue of greater scrutiny and greater accountability were fundamental to the case that was made for devolution; and I think it is no bad thing at all that Assembly-sponsored public bodies should be accountable to the people whose money is being spent, and that they should also be open to scrutiny to demonstrate that they were discharging their obligations properly.

One of the things that is a missed opportunity in that is that having said that the role has changed fundamentally, there has been very little by way of formal recognition of the change, and formal preparation of the individuals involved. Therefore, in essence, the nature of the relationship with Government changed completely, but the nature of the advice, training and so on given to the individuals concerned on the boards or councils, as in our case, did not. It does seem to me that that was a lost opportunity, and one that could still be grasped. We need to formally re-define the relationship in a much more structured way, and then offer induction training, guidance and so on.

LORD RICHARD: Can you spell that out a bit because I am not sure that I follow it? You say there was a missed opportunity to do what?

MR TYNDALL: To promote training for the board members of ASPBs for interchanging -----

LORD RICHARD: In your particular case, who are you thinking of?

MR TYNDALL: Council members, members of the Arts Council. The role that they are being asked to discharge is one much closer to government. There should have been a protocol or set of guidance to say how ASPB boards would function in the new disposition, and then there should have been opportunities to acquaint the boards with what they were thinking of.

LORD RICHARD: Were they all just left to get on with it?

MR TYNDALL: Yes. I think a substantial change happened, and it was not particularly – that is a perception but it is my judgment that there is quite a different relationship. Councils and boards are being asked to operate in very different circumstances. That, perhaps, has not been fully grasped.

TED ROWLANDS: The language at the bottom of page 1 and the top of page 2 is interesting. It says that they "have brought focus on to the work of the Council which did not exist previously…." I love the next sentence: "Members of the Council were accustomed to a greater degree of freedom … and are anxious to ensure that the benefit of their expertise is available and utilised." Is that an attempt to define the difference between scrutiny and interference?

MR TYNDALL: I would not attempt to do that.

LORD RICHARD: It depends where you stand.

MR TYNDALL: The purpose of having an arts council or a similar board is surely to bring together people with a perspective different to that of the civil service and the elected assembly; in other words, bring together people of expertise. The question is: what are you asking them to do? I have attempted to define that for the new arrangements by saying that in essence you are asking them to provide policy advice at the point at which policy is formulated; then, when the policy is formulated, you ask them to discharge that policy. It is slightly different to the previous role, where in essence they were able to formulate policy and discharge it.

TED ROWLANDS: Relatively independently.

MR TYNDALL: More independently, yes. It is never entirely independently, but in practice much more independently. You have to define a role for them, and it seems to be that the critical part of that role is if you are asking people to discharge policy and you have them as experts in a field: then it is giving them the opportunity to contribute to the development of that policy. When the policy is formulated, the likelihood is that if that policy then reflects the advice given, it becomes much easier for them to discharge.

TED ROWLANDS: Equally, civil servants and ministers should or should not try to second-guess the Council in that regard.

MR TYNDALL: I think I find it easier to define a desirable set of circumstances. I think that ministers in particular are elected and have accountabilities, and they will want to discharge those responsibilities. I think it is a question of how best to make use of the policy advice that is available to you.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: The White Paper A Voice for Wales talks about partnership with unelected bodies: "In future the Assembly will set the strategic framework for the operation of unelected bodies and hold them to account." You are really saying they did not do that.

MR TYNDALL: No, I am saying that they did it, but that they did not do it in a sufficiently explicit way, and communicate that.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Where did they do it?

MR TYNDALL: Sir, I think we are in danger of coming to two separate areas, so might I attempt to differentiate it? For the Arts Council, the specific strategic policy guidance comes in Create a Future, the culture strategy; so they certainly have done that. It is a strategic policy framework. We set out policy within that context, and we are then scrutinised in respect of our discharge of that policy. You can look at it in the sense that there is a process whereby there is a growth strategic framework that is reflected in our strategic framework; then over time that translates into corporate plans. Then, when budgets and remit letters become known, the actual rate of implementation of that policy is set. I think that that works quite well, to be honest. I do not have any difficulty with that side of it.

What is different is that that is a different function to what happened in the past. Although the framework is there, I do not think that people were sufficiently prepared for the task of carrying it out. We have provided internal training, but I do think that there are common issues that could usefully have been spelled out and picked up across the piece, rather than left to individual organisations to discover what their role was within it. It could usefully be more explicit.

PETER PRICE: I should like to test how far this model is working in practice. There is policy advice; then the Minister, with help from the Committee, makes the policy; and then you have it back to discharge. That is the model. Your comment is that this has worked well thus far. The suggestion in the previous paragraph about members being anxious to ensure that the benefit of their expertise is available and utilised rather suggests that either at the first of those stages or the second the expertise is perhaps not being fully utilised. Is it more a question that the expertise becomes very diluted by other considerations in formulation of the policy, or is it that what you get back is in such a form that there is constant cross-referencing, as you go along in the discharge?

MR TYNDALL: In the first instance, it was not transparent as to how that policy advice would be sought and used. In practice, it was used, and consequently was sought and used, so I think that that will lead to some of the potential anxieties on the policy side.

The question in a sense relates to a later point. If the Assembly sets up parallel processes to undertake work that might otherwise be undertaken by the Arts Council and does or does not utilise advice in doing that, then that creates a -----

PETER PRICE: That is the bigger problem. It is not that when you are discharging that you have to go back to somebody or that they are day-by-day intervening in your processes; it is much more that something parallel has been created on certain occasions.

MR TYNDALL: We have stayed very close to the Assembly civil service in discharging the policies of the Council, and, consequently, we have sought to avoid potential difficulties in the implementation. That really is a case of working out partnership. It requires an investment of time and resource to make partnership work, and our experience of that has been that it does work under those circumstances. We have enjoyed a productive and creative partnership with the Minister and the civil servants, which has meant that in general we have limited the potential for surprise in either direction. That has tended to enhance rather than diminish the work.

PETER PRICE: The parallel channels point is where a specific grant has been given to a specific organisation without reference to the Arts Council, though it would normally fall within your purview. That is the kind of situation that has arisen – is that right?

MR TYNDALL: I think that is a fair reflection, yes.

PETER PRICE: In terms of the number of occasions this kind of thing ----

MR TYNDALL: Less than you would suspect were you to read the Western Mail, would be a fair comment. I think there is one particular example, which is well known. It is difficult for me, given -----

PETER PRICE: In terms of volume of resource, what are we talking about, as compared with your budget?

MR TYNDALL: Minimal – 250,000 as opposed to 20,000.

LORD RICHARD: What is your budget?

MR TYNDALL: Of the order of £20 million from the Assembly, and a further £15 million or so from the Lottery.

LORD RICHARD: It is 35 million, basically.

TOM JONES: This change from your Council of external expertise into a primary deliverer of policy – and the emphasis on lack of surprises by working closely with civil servants – is this a negative element? Obviously, there are opposition parties within the Assembly, but you are talking about links between the Welsh Assembly Government and yourselves. What are the links there and the opportunity for challenging and using the committee system, for example?

MR TYNDALL: One of the things I have been anxious to do in saying that it is hard to generalise is that the arts has not been a party political subject within the Assembly. By and large, the views of the parties have been similar, and we have not found, for instance, that the Committee holds a distinctly different view to the Minister, as an example. That is why I have wanted to say that thus far – the "thus far" relates to that. It is much easier to operate under a set of circumstances where there is broad unanimity about where the arts should be going. The issues that have been the focus of scrutiny have not been party political issues. They have been issues around whether the resources are evenly distributed around Wales, and AMs from the north of Wales would tend to have similar views about distribution regardless of party.

It is worth saying that the largest share of our capital resources during the Assembly period went to North Wales, so we are probably less subject to some of that scrutiny than others. But then some colleagues from south Wales took the view that that was wrong too. The point is that this scrutiny from the Culture Committee has generally been related to whether we are delivering on an agenda that they agree upon as a group, rather than …

TOM JONES: I notice that you are setting up a national theatre in Wales this year under Wyn Jones. If that fails for whatever reason, who would the public blame? Would it be the Arts Council for setting it up incorrectly, or putting the frameworks in place; or would it have been the Assembly Government which was sold on an idea that you had proposed to them? Where would the scrutiny lie for that? If it works, there is no problem.

MR TYNDALL: Well, as it is going to work, I think you would have to draw your own conclusions about that. It would seem to me that ASPBs, recent experiences suggests, are held to account for their own performance, but that ministers also are asked to account for the performance of the ASPBs they sponsored. In the almost inconceivable event that it should fail, then I would expect the pattern to be similar to what it has been.

TOM JONES: In your document there is a lot made of the recently held review of the Lottery distribution. You make a very powerful case for devolving responsibility from DCMS for Lottery distribution to the Assembly. You highlight some of the confusions that emanate from having some distributors being UK-focused and those being Wales-focused. There is a proposal now to amalgamate two of those bodies. Does that make any difference? Do you expect the Assembly to seek powers for devolving the distribution?

MR TYNDALL: My take on what is happening at the moment is that it is being more centralised into London, thus creating a super distributor - that is not a phrase I originated. It is intended to be a step down the road towards a greater centralisation.

TED ROWLANDS: Is the Arts Council formally calling for powers for Lottery distribution to be devolved?

MR TYNDALL: That was our response to the review, and it remains our view that -----

LAURA McALLISTER: Has the Minister taken that forward in any shape or form?

MR TYNDALL: Yes.

LAURA McALLISTER: Where are we at with it?

MR TYNDALL: I cannot speak on behalf of the Minister, but I know that the Welsh Assembly Government was making a view. I do not want to talk about to what extent they were seeking devolution. I do not believe they were seeking, for instance, the division of the Lottery fund.

TED ROWLANDS: They are not seeking a Lottery Barnett formula type -----

MR TYNDALL: I think they are. That is a big issue for us, I have to say. The English-based distributors – the New Opportunities Fund and the Community Fund benefit from additional funding for Wales in respect of issues pertaining to needs, and particularly deprivation -----

TED ROWLANDS: We get more than Barnett at the moment in that, do we?

MR TYNDALL: No. You could argue that, but the view is that there should be a similar distribution in respect of arts and sports, both of which contribute equally to regeneration and so on – but that is not the case.

LORD RICHARD: How is it done at the moment? Does London say, "look here, you are entitled to X per cent"?

MR TYNDALL: Yes, absolutely. We get a fixed percentage.

LORD RICHARD: Is that known in public?

MR TYNDALL: Yes, it is.

LORD RICHARD: What is it?

MR TYNDALL: I am sorry, I am not going to say because I cannot remember sufficiently accurately. Perhaps we can arrange for it to be written into -----

LAURA McALLISTER: Are there not disputes about that percentage?

MR TYNDALL: There are, yes. The Assembly have been arguing that the percentage for Wales, particularly in respect of the Welsh-based distributors, should be higher.

LORD RICHARD: In your paper, you say that the Lottery is driven by UK-Government priorities. What were you thinking of there?

MR TYNDALL: It is easier to find examples outside of the arts, and I will for a moment, and then I will return. For example, the New Opportunities Fund has had a series of programme that are UK-wide and which reflect UK-Government proposals. It moderates their impact in Wales, in the sense that it works with Welsh partners; but the programmes are programmes that are devised outside of Wales, and they might not be the same priorities that a Welsh government would choose.

In the case of the arts, it is more subtle in some ways. We do not get an enormous input into how we allocate individual grants. That is not the issue. But there are issues around standardisation, around wanting to have a single public – the funding now has to be top-sliced to create a single body to publicise the Lottery. In our judgment, that will struggle to reflect the issues of Wales, not least language but also the nuances.

There are also issues around the press, to standardise application forms and so on so that in doing so the standardisation will tend inevitably towards the larger distributors. There is just a sense that there is a tension there. The clear preference to have a single distributor – certainly the case has been made in respect of arts and sports that the advantage that we offer at the moment is that the two programmes run alongside each other. The Lottery grant is often one-off funding, and consequently, if you take the example of a large capital project, such as the theatre in Newport or Wrexham, or some of the other stuff we are involved in, Lottery funding is an ideal source of capital for those, but it is not an ideal source of the revenue with which to run them.

TOM JONES: So the lottery funds that you distribute you are accountable for to the DCMS.

MR TYNDALL: Yes, we are, but that is not clear because -----

TOM JONES: If somebody would scrutinise that distribution, would it be a Member of Parliament as opposed to an Assembly Member?

MR TYNDALL: I cannot answer that question with any degree of certainty. I have asked for clarification and it has not been forthcoming. For information, when the scrutiny was undertaken of the failure of the Centre for Visual Arts in Cardiff, which the Arts Council had provided in the past a substantial lottery grant to, that scrutiny was undertaken by the Audit Committee of the Assembly. In retrospect, I would sooner have been there than at the Public Accounts Committee; but I am not persuaded that the constitutional detail had been thought through, and I do not really know the answer to that question – I wish I did.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: What is the reason that you prefer to be before the Assembly Committee rather than the Westminster one?

MR TYNDALL: The Westminster Committee, it seems to me, is operated in a very, very adversarial way traditionally. In the past, there was some prospect with the Assembly Committee of getting a better understanding of the issues.

TED ROWLANDS: In the light of Mr Tyndall’s remarks about Wrexham and Newport, I should declare an interest. I chair a group that has just made a substantial application for the development stage of the building of a theatre in Merthyr. My apologies for not saying so earlier.

MR TYNDALL: I think the point can be missed. There is a superficial attraction to the notion that you standardise everything into a single Lottery distributor, and that cuts down bureaucracy, and people know who to appoint to. The fact of the matter is that arts organisations are used to applying to arts councils for funding, and in that sense the fact that they can apply and not worry about the source of funds is a considerable advantage; and the fact that you do not have two different policies governing two pieces of funding that need to operate together is very helpful.

PAUL VALERIO: How do you compare with your corresponding partners in Scotland? Do they have any advantages with the Scottish Parliament having primary legislation?

MR TYNDALL: I do not think so, to be honest. I think their experience of devolution has probably been less positive than ours because of the relatively reduced focus on the arts of an assembly with broader – a parliament with broader powers than the Assembly. That may not be the sole reason.

LORD RICHARD: Can you spell that out a bit? You are saying that if they got more powers then -----

MR TYNDALL: The powers do not make any difference. Sorry, but that is why I say I do not want to generalise from the arts here. It is not my view that if the Assembly had more powers that Wales would be worse off, or that the arts would be worse off. I am just saying that I do not think the arts are particularly affected by the issue of powers, in so far as the Assembly have such powers as they need in respect of the arts, because primary legislation impinges very little. I have mentioned the couple of instances where it does, but responsibility for the Lottery is not in any event devolved to Scotland.

TED ROWLANDS: I did not quite understand the Licensing Bill issue. I thought that there had been some consultation on the Licensing Bill. You say that it has a significance in relation to Welsh culture. If it was a non-devolved area, concentration tended to focus on England. Can you explain the background to that situation?

MR TYNDALL: It is a similar issue as with the Lottery. The Assembly Government was slow to be consulted on this. They were eventually consulted. The consultation, in terms of direct outreach from the civil servants responsible for the Bill to organisations – they went to English-based bodies and treated them as though they were UK-based. So I spoke to our colleagues in the Arts Council of England, but they did not speak to us.

TED ROWLANDS: What is the nature of those provisions of the Licensing Bill which impacted upon the Welsh Arts Council scene as opposed to the English Arts Council scene?

MR TYNDALL: They are not necessarily the ones that did not, but they might have had a different weight, particularly the impact on village halls. There is a very strong tradition of the small festival in Wales, of the Eisteddfod, so that is a particularly important aspect to Wales. The original proposals could have severely curtailed the capacity of that sector to continue to operate.

LORD RICHARD: That has been amended though.

MR TYNDALL: It has been amended quite considerably since, yes – perhaps not entirely; there are still a few community groups. We have founded an enormous amount of small-scale activity by community-based organisations in the arts, and some of that would involve, for instance, having a drinks licence; or it might involve promoting the two-in-a-bar rule in terms of music and so on. All of those things potentially had an impact. All of those things potentially had an impact. It is not an impact specific to Wales, but it is an impact that would have been regarded as more important in the context of -----

TED ROWLANDS: What was the nature of the provision that was going to lead to such bad effects?

LORD RICHARD: the number of people in clubs who could sing, and that sort of thing. It had a tremendous effect upon pub singing and getting a singing licence.

MR TYNDALL: But getting licences to hold events in village halls, to have events in churches – to serve alcohol, to have singing in pubs. There were a whole series of things which were caught by the licensing provisions. It was intended to simplify it, and probably did simplify it, but it made it very costly and difficult in other ways.

TOM JONES: You go on to talk more about that in no.6 where you say: "London-based consultations habitually fail to take account of the Welsh and other devolved perspectives." If it is habitual, are there more examples you can give us? Do you sometimes get caught between wanting to give evidence direct to a London-based, i.e., non-devolved government body, or do you put any weight on the Assembly to be asked to provide evidence? How does the system work? Do you go direct or do you go through the Assembly?

MR TYNDALL: We do both, and usually in partnership with the Assembly because we have generally found that the views -----

TOM JONES: The impression you give is that it seems to be against the grain, i.e., that the initiative was for something that started in London, and all you are able to do is respond, fill in the Wales details or fill in the concerns for Wales, rather than instigating changes from a Wales-based need.

MR TYNDALL: You can feel a bit like a habitual nuisance in these processes, when you are constantly saying, "what about the Welsh language?"

On the issue of the ongoing discussions about the development of the Lottery and how it is to be managed and so on, DCMS habitually speaks to the Atrium Group, which is the body of UK-wide distributors and English-based distributors. We get minutes of the meetings but do not get invitations.

LORD RICHARD: You are not on this group, are you?

MR TYNDALL: No.

LORD RICHARD: Why is that?

TED ROWLANDS: Are your Scottish counterparts on the group?

MR TYNDALL: No, nor the Northern Ireland counterparts. It is a source of concern. It is easy for DCMS to speak to somebody who is across the road in the Arts Council of England; but it is more difficult for them to have the same kind of discussions - and remember that they see them in the course of their daily work because they are the sponsorship body for the Arts Council of England. Consequently, it is the easiest thing in the world to move on to UK-based issues in those conversations. It is inadvertent exclusion: I would not for a moment suggest that anyone has sought to exclude a Welsh, Scottish or Northern Ireland point of view; that is not what happens. It is the fact that they do not by reflex necessarily include it.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Questions 12 and 13 were about the implication of devolution in relation to costs. You say there are many more civil servants and much more cost, much more answerability and new policy areas being opened up. Then at the end you have a very Delphic phrase of what you think of all this. I would like you to spell out, for the uninitiated and uninformed mind, what you mean by this Delphic conclusion in answer to those two questions.

MR TYNDALL: It relates to the early points about the issue of policy advice and accountability. There is a huge pressure of work put on ASPBs in attempting to respond to the huge number of Assembly questions that come through. I have not brought the figures with me today, but we can quantify them if need be. It is often quite complex, generally with very short reply times. You can find yourself with the Culture Committee and a plenary session on the same day with a huge number of written questions coming in. It is quite proper that we should be accounted for what we do, but it is not a cost-free activity; the people who do that work for us at the expense of what we pay them to do. Similarly, in developing policy advice, if you talk with the Welsh National Theatre, it is wonderful to be able to do things like that. However, we have got a cap on our operating costs, and our ability to undertake these development tasks is usually hampered by that fact. There has been a disparity introduced between the two elements of public administration, and it hinders effectiveness and capacity.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: At what point does democratic accountability become trumped by bureaucratic efficiency? I am trying to put in layman’s terms, but less elegantly, what you were trying to say to us.

MR TYNDALL: We have not properly paid for this part of devolution. It has not been costed. There is cost out there. Local government sometimes has a budget line, does it not, of the cost of democracy? It is right that democracy should have a cost. It has not been paid, in my judgment, thus far. There has been no proportional difference in what pressures come on the civil service, and what pressures -----

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: What is the remedy, then?

TED ROWLANDS: May I supplement that question by asking this. Have you had the experience that other quangos have had, that there has been a deliberate squeeze on the administrative costs of the organisation, and at the same time more demands made on the administration?

MR TYNDALL: Hugely more demands made of the administration, yes, and greater demands in other ways, for example to be decentralised, which is fine. We have offices in Carmarthen and in Colwyn Bay, and we have decentralised part of those, and decision-making across Wales. All of those are highly desirable things, but unless you resource them, they do not work and you end up trying to do a job without the resources to do it well.

TED ROWLANDS: Would the Government have said there was slack in the system anyway, and all they want you to do is do more for the same? There is constant demand in every organisation.

MR TYNDALL: I hear that, and I am sure they would say that.

LORD RICHARD: I am sure you have heard it often.

MR TYNDALL: I have heard it before, indeed, yes. It strikes me that the same arguments apply to the civil service, and they accepted them in one case and not on the other. I have to say that I think that is a disparity.

TED ROWLANDS: Did they increase their own administration?

MR TYNDALL: Yes, substantially, but properly because they were doing things in Wales that had previously been done elsewhere. But if you are going to do the same across the piece, then you have to fund it.

PETER PRICE: Can I try and establish the scale of this problem and disparity? Just how much has staff time and resource, the demand for information, policy advice and so on – the cost of democracy, as you put it – increased, and what is that in relation to your staff resource? I can imagine that it is a proportion of most people’s time, not that they are exclusively devoted to this; but can you in some way give an impression of quantification?

MR TYNDALL: You need to separate the two in terms of the straightforward responding to routine queries and so on. I would have said that we would have somewhere between two and three whole-time equivalent posts. It is one person’s job to distribute the questions around the organisations, and then you have to calculate how much of other people’s time is taken up in answering. That is out of an establishment of 80.5, so a substantial chunk of resource proportionally.

In terms of policy advice, I have never attempted to quantify it, but we operate on the basis that we would have probably – our senior development officers would spend quite a bit of their time offering policy advice, and you could say that probably there are eight of those, and perhaps they would spend 40 per cent of their time or something of that order offering policy advice.

The cost of decentralisation is difficult to say, but in my judgment the cost of doing it well, as opposed to within existing resources – it is not just posts; it has to do with IT infrastructure and so on. The IT alone would come to an additional – just in terms of paying for improved links between the offices so that all can access them – upgrading that would cost something of the order of £30,000 per annum. Then to decentralise the structure, you would probably need of the order of about another six posts.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: That is very little compared to 35.8 million.

MR TYNDALL: Indeed, yes.

TED ROWLANDS: You could keep a theatre in Ceredigion open.

MR TYNDALL: I think the point to make is that the budgets are run separately, and I understand why. We are capped on one and have rounded growth on another, and if you are expected to develop a greatly increased activity on the one hand with the same resource on the other, I think it is predictable.

PETER PRICE: To what extent is there this cap? Is it on staff posts; is it the administrative budget; is it expressed then, as I understand it, in absolute terms, not as a percentage of the total budget?

MR TYNDALL: No, it is a cash limit.

PETER PRICE: Of what percentage has that increased in the last two to four years?

MR TYNDALL: The increase for the current financial year was zero, and from that – sorry, that is not entirely true. An element of the payments was funded, but we had to find the NI contributions, increased pension contributions and increased IT costs, so we had a cut this year. Last year we had a large restructuring and an increase of £50,000 in cash to accommodate decentralisation and to revise structure. It had been essentially capped the previous year.

LORD RICHARD: But you got your extra 33 per cent.

MR TYNDALL: On activity, which is wonderful. Any organisation that has an increase in activity of that scale needs to have some capacity in order to realise it.

PETER PRICE: Is any of the money for the activity used by, for example, out-sourcing the administrative support for that activity, plus administrative costs may be in one way or another carried in some fashion?

MR TYNDALL: Not necessarily administrative but we would use consultancy to develop new projects for instance, where we might otherwise do them in-house. It is development work. We are not allowed to fund administration.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: But if you have more money to spend, you will get better people to work for you.

MR TYNDALL: Yes.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Long-term, not overnight.

LORD RICHARD: Thank you very much for coming, Mr Tyndall.