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

MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS 
of the
EVIDENCE OF:

CHAIR OF THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE OF THE
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY FOR WALES
CHRISTINE GWYTHER AM

held at

Committee Rooms
County Hall, Haverfordwest

on

Thursday 10 April 2003

LORD RICHARD: Good morning. Thank you very much for coming. We are very grateful. I wonder whether you would be kind enough to introduce yourself for the sake of the transcript? We have your paper, but perhaps you would like to make some introductory remarks, and then we can pursue whatever issues you feel you need to raise.

MS GWYTHER: I am Christine Gwyther, and I am the Assembly Member for Carmarthenshire West and South Pembrokeshire. For the last couple of years I have been Chair of the Economic Development Committee on the Assembly. I know that that is one area that you would like us to talk about.

As a back-bencher, I brought forward a piece of planning legislation, and I think you might want to toss a few ideas round on that as well. My Clerk, John Grimes is here, and I am sure he can come in on any of the technical stuff. John has been with the Committee for a little longer than I have, and he took the Committee through one quite important area of work, which was the policy review on business support. I was not there for the whole of that. It could be that we can do a joint presentation on that.

As far as the core work of the Committee is concerned, we follow fairly exactly the portfolio of the Economic Development Minister, and throughout the time that I have been Chair, there have been three Economic Development Ministers and it has been part of the joy, as Committee Chair, getting to know the different styles of each Minister, and seeing how the Committee has tested that Minister in our scrutiny role. As the Welsh Assembly Government and the Assembly as a whole are moving ever so slightly more apart, the scrutiny role is becoming ever more important as part of our core work.

As far as the psyche of the Committee is concerned, I think it is probably more consensual now than it was when the Committee started, although I was not a member of that right at the start. I was actually the Minister for Agriculture, and we would be in the next room at the same time as the Economic Development Committee was meeting, and sometimes, with the thundering coming through the walls, you felt like throwing a wellie at the wall and saying, "for God’s sake, stop it". Members of the public would actually come in to the Agriculture Committee for a rest from Economic Development. That said rather a lot to me at the time, and it was only when I became a member of the Economic Development Committee that I realised what they had been escaping from.

I think we have become more consensual as the years go by, possibly under the Chair of Val Feld, who was Chair before me. Val’s approach was extremely consensual, and she made an effort to get to know each member of the Committee to find out their strengths and what they had to offer. It is fair to say that she set a tone in her time that I was able to follow, I am glad to say.

I mentioned the review of business support, which had just started when I came on to the Committee. That was quite an important review for the Committee because it tested quite strenuously the thinking that had gone before for many, many years in business support. Business support had not been scrutinised very carefully by anybody in the past; it had just grown organically in Wales, and it was felt that it was time to try and look at it and see where the faults lay, and maybe try and reorganise it completely. Although that reorganisation is still ongoing, I think that was probably the first and most important thing that the Economic Development Committee brought to the economy in Wales – a thorough review of business support.

LORD RICHARD: I am very interested in what you said about the consensual element. You say that to start off with the Committee was not very consensual but now it is much better. The issues have not changed very much, have they?

MS GWYTHER: The issues have not changed, but I think the issues have become broader than they were. Running alongside the Economic Development Committee is a European Affairs Committee on the Assembly. As time has gone by, I think we have become more in tune with matters outside Wales, and I think that the interests of the members of the Economic Development Committee have broadened as we have got to know more about the extent of our own powers, where we could maybe be lobbying Westminster on certain areas, and where we could be lobbying Europe. The whole structural funds scene, as that has evolved, has certainly made the Committee members much, much more knowledgeable than they all were at the start, but I think it has broadened the whole remit of the Committee.

LORD RICHARD: Can you spell out the areas where it would be useful to lobby in London and obviously useful for you to lobby in Brussels?

MS GWYTHER: As far as structural funds are concerned, there is an ongoing lobby for a while for Wales to be able to use operating aids. It is a fairly hefty lobby of the Treasury. That continues. At the very start of the Committee, there was a lot of emphasis on match-funding for Objective 1, and that problem, certainly as it was then, has receded because we have received enough cover from the Treasury to operate Objective 1 quite effectively.

Whereas at the very start of the Committee – and I was not there then, so this is just received information – it was concentrating on difficulties and problems, I think it is now starting to look at opportunities such as operating aids. I think that that has come about as a natural progression with many of the Committee as politicians.

LORD RICHARD: How do you lobby London? Do you do it as a Committee or do you do it, as Chairman?

MS GWYTHER: We do it through me, as Chair; but also because the Minister sits as part of the Committee. He sits through every Committee meeting – and not every minister does on the Assembly. In our private meetings, I have made it known to the Minister that I would like him there for the whole of every meeting, and he is quite willing to do that; and so was Rhodri Morgan, when he was the minister, as well as First Minister. They thought it was important to keep that very, very strong link with the Committee. The Minister would be there for the whole of any discussion on whatever, and would therefore have the views of every party and every Committee member very clear in his head when he goes into discussions with whoever.

LORD RICHARD: You, as the Chairman, do not write the letter to the Treasury.

MS GWYTHER: I have not written to the Treasury, but I have certainly written to individual ministers in Whitehall. If there is a problem directly affecting Wales, then I would write direct to the Minister in Whitehall, and I would lobby our Economic Development Minister to do the same. As far as I am concerned, while Members of Parliament may see barriers, I certainly do not see barriers in me writing direct to them and lobbying support for anything we think is pertinent to Wales.

PETER PRICE: Can I pick up the possible divergence between two things you were saying, the first about how the Committee has become more consensual on the one hand, and on the other hand the growing importance of the scrutiny role. In so far as you have become more consensual, does that not prejudice your work as a scrutiny body, because your first object of scrutiny is the Minister and the work of the Minister? You have become more consensual and ensured that the Minister is part of the esprit de corps of the Committee; but how can you then take, as it were, a tough line, pressing a Minister who may not want to give you exactly all that information that you may need, including the bad news?

MS GWYTHER: We arrange the meeting with a clear split between scrutiny items and policy-making items. It probably was not always easy at the start to separate those two out, but it is possible to have the Committee members in a fairly tough mode. That goes across all parties, I have to say; even the Labour members can be extremely tough on the Minister. When we are in scrutiny mode we have at least an hour’s session of Minister’s scrutiny at every meeting. Again, that is reasonably unusual, but because in Economic Development things can move so quickly – factories can mushroom up or be closed down in a matter of weeks rather than months or years – the Minister is willing to sit through an hour of scrutiny every fortnight. He produces a written report, which usually runs to seven or eight pages, and the members can ask questions on that report, or scrutinise things not on the report. It really is open session for about an hour in every meeting. I have found that that certainly releases tensions. It teases out maybe some government thinking that they prefer not to at times; but it does ensure that we can go into the next item having felt that we have achieved something; we have tested the Government, and we can then move on to the policy-making part of the meeting.

PETER PRICE: When you are doing this testing, how often during the course of your oral discussion are you saying to the Minister, "we want you to produce a piece of paper for the next meeting which gives us more detail, so that we can really go into this in more depth"? Secondly, how much help do you as the Chair, or the members of the Committee have, in preparing for the kind of questioning that is going to take place, in giving you, as it were, the ammunition to scrutinise?

MS GWYTHER: If I take the last point first, we have the members’ research service. That started as a discrete element about six months ago. Obviously, we can ask them to do work for us as individuals, and that is not happening to a great extent yet; but if there is a large item coming up under the Minister’s report, for instance the last thing was LG and there was going to be some pretty heavy scrutiny on one element of that at the last meeting – the members’ research service – John commissioned some work on that just so that members have a background of what we are going into. Members can use their own party resources as well. They tend to do that, not just through the Assembly, but they will ask corresponding Members of Parliament to provide them with information from Westminster. We get our bullets from a whole range of different boxes, but probably the members’ research service was not around when you took most of your evidence from chairs, and that has been developed. I think that will become more important in the next session.

PETER PRICE: The second point was about research and the first point was more about asking the Minister to put something on paper, and then coming back to it in greater depth.

MS GWYTHER: Yes, we do that reasonably regularly. In fact, at any one meeting there will be at least three pieces of work required of the Minister. We also set them a timetable when we expect it back so that we can then programme that into how we work so that we are not rushed at the end of a term or whatever, and things are not slipped in when we do not have time to deal with them. One thing we are finding all the time is that pressure of time is our biggest problem, and sometimes we have to make decisions on what we can spend time on and scrutinise heavily. So we need to know that the Minister’s reports will come when we want them; otherwise our whole programme gets knocked back, and that is the time to slip bad news in, or whatever. So we are quite clear in our requests to officials, through the Minister, when we want things.

LAURA McALLISTER: Going back to your comment about scrutiny and policy development, you seem to suggest that they are almost discrete fields, and there is an argument to suggest that they are closely linked in many respects. You touch on this in paragraphs 22 and 23 of your paper in the context of the Winning Wales Economic Development Strategy. You seem to be saying that the Committee itself was not necessarily in full agreement, or in any agreement in parts, with the whole matter of the Winning Wales document. This is one area where policy development and scrutiny go hand-in-hand. If the Minister is pursuing a different agenda to that which reflected the priorities of the Subject Committee, then what scope did you have to drag him back to your particular priorities?

Secondly, you say in a relatively uncoded way that you felt members still felt, in the final version, that the report was inadequate. A lot of academics have commented on that as well.

MS GWYTHER: They did. The response that we did get from Government was that they had taken on board some of the suggestions that were made by the Committee, but not all. In fact, I think it was a 50/50 split of suggestions that were taken up and suggestions that definitely were not. It is a fairly personal view of any minister as to how far they should ride on the coat-tails of a Committee, or vice versa. Certainly, the Minister at the time thought that a 50/50 split on what we got and what we did not was reasonable. That is clearly open for discussion.

MR GRIMES: Chris talked about scrutiny; the Minister’s report comes up at the beginning of the meeting normally, and it is the Minister saying, "this is what I have been doing; these are the issues". He takes questions on whatever members want to raise. Further agenda items have degrees of scrutiny and degrees of policy development. We probably have four items per agenda. Something like A Winning Wales was something coming forward from the Government. There were other things which the Committee have been handling. Anything the Committee does is scrutinising what the Government is doing; but the extent of scrutiny varies item to item.

LAURA McALLISTER: There is a sense that if this Economic Development Strategy is not regarded by the Committee as being adequate, it suggests that there is some problem in terms of the role of the Subject Committee inputting to the overall policy direction of the Assembly.

MS GWYTHER: No, I would not totally agree with that. The discussions that we have had on A Winning Wales, when it was first being produced – and I was just coming in to the Committee then and was not Chair so I cannot comment on any behind-the-scenes work that was going on there – it was certainly not the best piece of work that the Government or the Committee have ever done.

LAURA McALLISTER: The quote in front of me says: "At best, this strategy is incomplete; at worst, it is vacuous and adopts a piecemeal approach that will impede progress." That is an academic analysis of it. We can see from the minutes that those kinds of comments, in different vocabulary, were raised at Committee. Is there not a flaw here in terms of this being one of our prime strategies for Wales?

MS GWYTHER: I do not know if there is a flaw in the way the Committee works. I could say there is a flaw in the way that the Government as a whole adopts Committee recommendations, but that is probably not for me to say.

LORD RICHARD: That is the interesting point, though, is it not? It seems to me, speaking as a naïve chap from Westminster, that the idea of having a Minister sitting on a Committee that at one time scrutinises him but then co-operates with producing policy, a difficult concept to grasp. I still do not know quite how it works. Does he come in and say, "look, this is what I want to do", and then you say, "no, this is what we want to do", and then there is a sort of merger? Does it emerge gradually from discussions of the Committee over a period of weeks and months? Does he go away and think about what you say and come back to you? How does it work?

MS GWYTHER: If it is a review that we are leading, then it certainly works. It works fairly organically. Do not forget, it is not just us and the Minister locked in a room; we are going to be taking evidence from other people as well. Obviously, who those people are is down to me. That really does affect the way that we carry on our discussions. To a certain extent, I think it adds weight to the Committee’s conclusions. We cannot just sit around and pontificate because, as you rightly pointed out, academia does that better than we do anyway, and they are going to have some fairly serious things to say if that is all we have done. It is fair to say that when we have got a big policy review on, we do take a lot of time over it, and I think that ministers’ views are changed by the work that we do in Committee. I do not think that A Winning Wales was a perfect piece of work, and I say that as Labour chair with my Labour Minister, who obviously I support politically. Then again, it is not cast in stone, and things that we are talking about I am sure will contribute to A Winning Wales mark II.

LORD RICHARD: It is still "them and us".

MS GWYTHER: Yes, and I think that probably has to prevail.

LORD RICHARD: If you want a parliament, then that is inevitable.

MS GWYTHER: Yes.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: In your two years as Chairman, how many reports – you used the phrase "own initiative" – "well, we were making the running" is what you implied just now. How many of these have you done?

MS GWYTHER: There has been only one major one, and that is a review of energy in Wales. We have -----

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Where you were, so to speak, in the driving seat. You were not reacting to what the Government was thinking and doing.

MS GWYTHER: That is right, but we have also done a smaller report on broadband, and that was off our own bat. One thing that the other chairs might not have been able to tell you because it was still in the thinking process is that we have left a legacy document for the next Committee, and we have -----

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: A sort of last will and testament of your Committee?

MS GWYTHER: We thought we would bury it in a little tin box in the garden! Part of that legacy document is what we think they need to do as big pieces of policy work. Probably our biggest one – and this was totally consensual – and I think when it got down to it, even the Minister was in agreement – that we needed to adopt a strong science policy for Wales. That has formed the biggest part of our legacy document. We have talked about what core business needs to be beefed up and all that sort of thing.

In my two years, we have done an energy review, and that has taken a huge amount of time and organisation; we have done broadband, and that is it. We did renewables and energy efficiency, so it has been quite a big body of work.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Are they long documents, and would we be able to see a copy of them, if they are not too long?

MS GWYTHER: They are not too long. The broadband one we have got here, but we do not have the energy reports.

MR GRIMES: They are glossy reports of about 40 pages.

MS GWYTHER: We have gone out to consultation on both of them, and taken those consultees’ recommendations on board when we came to make our final recommendations.

PAUL VALERIO: Your Committee is responsible for two of the major quangos, WTB and WDA. How do you organise the programme for scrutiny of their performance?

MS GWYTHER: Both of those bodies have to come to us at least twice-yearly and be scrutinised on their performance. They do that to varying degrees. If we are talking hard scrutiny, I think we are getting harder on both of those bodies than maybe we were at the start. I think that is again because members are getting to know the intricacies of both organisations pretty well, and as local members we have a bigger body of casework to influence any scrutiny that we can bring to bear. It is fair to say that one of them is better at producing hard figures than the other, and our approach to that -----

PAUL VALERIO: Which is which?

MS GWYTHER: WDA is better than WTB. That might surprise you, Ted – I do not know. Again, we are continually making representations to the Wales Tourist Board, but also to the Minister, that they have to sharpen their act when they are responding to us as a Committee. It is fair to say that when we started the Assembly, the Wales Tourist Board was still more interested in what Members of Parliament thought of them than what AMs thought of them. That really is not just me being paranoid, because I happen to have a good relationship because I live in a county with a big tourism product; but certainly for a lot of members, they found that they were not getting the answers that MPs had grown to expect. There was certainly a culture change in that quango that had to be adopted. In all fairness, they are better than they were.

PAUL VALERIO: Do they use those opportunities to try and persuade you and your Committee regarding their policy development, for example the Tourist Board guest houses regulations and this sort of thing?

MS GWYTHER: Yes.

PAUL VALERIO: Do they find that that is an effective way of promoting -----

MS GWYTHER: They will try every way, including private briefings and that sort of thing. But I do think that members of the Committee are quite aware when somebody is on a charm offensive. It is not difficult, if they are ASPBs because we know the budget constraints at any one time, when there is going to be a charm offensive coming. They are probably a lot more transparent because of that than they used to be.

PAUL VALERIO: You say you meet each of them twice a year.

MS GWYTHER: It tends to be more than that. If there is a particular policy change that is happening, such as the statutory registration -----

PAUL VALERIO: With the constraints on Committees, it is very difficult to move from that. Does that inhibit you? Do you feel that the structure of your Committees inhibits you from getting into a closer dialogue with them because of not being able to fit them in?

MS GWYTHER: We have the option – maybe three further Committee meetings in the schedule. There could be a three-week period where we have a Committee meeting every week. We can also commission them to come in and give us informal briefings if it is something non-contentious that does not have to be held in public. Certainly, if it was something like statutory registration, we would make sure that that discussion was held in public. But if it is just showing us the latest TV adverts, that can be done after hours. We would not waste Committee time on that sort of glossy presentational stuff.

TOM JONES: Can you tell us a bit more about the history of the statutory registration scheme and whether there are any powers and responsibilities issues for the Commission emanating from that very long debate with a fairly negative result at the end?

MS GWYTHER: I would not say it was negative, Tom. It certainly has been lengthy. The Wales Tourist Board have been looking at this for the past three years. I have known that more from informal briefings and because I live in this patch, and people have been talking about it.

I do not know at what stage they knew that it required primary legislation to enact statutory registration. I cannot tell you. Certainly, as a Committee, I think we were not told that; it just filtered through maybe a year ago or something like that – a bit less maybe.

MR GRIMES: It is probably less than that. We have had a full discussion on it recently, and it really came out of that discussion.

TOM JONES: Obviously, the headlines in the press, after your discussion, were negative, in the sense that you seemed to be talking about it for some time, only to find eventually that the power was not with you. Put that to one side: how will you take that forward in the future? Are you pressing ministers in Whitehall?

MS GWYTHER: There is a discussion, minister to minister, on that at the moment. I do not think we have written directly. On this occasion, we have done it through the Government.

TOM JONES: Is the expectation that your Minister will persuade the Westminster Minister to make a change; or are you asking for further transfer of powers to enable you to consider the registration again for Wales?

MS GWYTHER: The pressure is on the Minister to persuade the Westminster Minister to transfer just enough to enact that particular thing. This is all taking place at the same time as the British Tourist Authority is becoming slightly more devolved as well, with a discrete Welsh budget. It is all happening at the right time for one to influence the other. Although, clearly, the conversation should have been had at least 12-18 months ago between governments, as to whether we actually had that power, I do not think it is too late. Certainly, having the discussions in Committee has forced the arm of the Government to push that through.

TOM JONES: You mentioned the British Tourist Authority, a non-devolved body. How do you, as a Committee, consider your role in scrutinising or asking such a UK body to come before you to give evidence?

MS GWYTHER: We just wrote and asked them, and they have been twice. We feel it is appropriate to ask anybody, if we think they can contribute. They have come twice, with no arm-twisting.

TED ROWLANDS: Did your Business Support review, Christine, show that the Assembly had sufficient powers to deliver, or that it needed more powers?

MS GWYTHER: Certainly so far as the business support review is concerned, we had adequate powers. There were clearly administrative cul-de-sacs that business support had gone up in the past, and the main avenue for putting all that right was to put it in the hands of the Welsh Development Agency, which belongs to us. Certainly, our powers were more than adequate, and would have been even before devolution because the main problem was that the whole gamut of business support had not been given to one organisation to sort out. So even pre-devolution we could have sorted it out. Certainly, post devolution, because they were trying to put the spotlight on business support, this had to be the first thing that the Economic Development Committee sorted out.

TED ROWLANDS: You may recall that in A Voice for Wales, the original document upon which the whole devolution process was put to the people, there were some very strong paragraphs, 2.5-2.12, on what was called "a new economic powerhouse". From your perception and position, do you think there is an economic powerhouse in place?

MS GWYTHER: There are certain things that the Assembly has brought that simply were not there with the Welsh Office – not the WDA and not the WTB – clearly they were there and operating before. But there was not the sort of business partnership then that there is now. There is the Business Partnership Council, which meets every 8-12 weeks, very regularly, and that has representatives from the CBI, from Chamber Wales, from small businesses – meeting in a very, very frank way with ministers and with members of the Economic Development Committee and others who have a particular interest in economic development. That partnership council is able to call on any minister to come along and give evidence to them: for instance if they have a problem with transport, they can insist that Sue Essex comes. That is something that the Assembly has brought that could not have been there before.

MR GRIMES: There is also an economic research advisory panel, which came out of the Committee’s business support review, which is a very significant body that co-ordinates and promotes research.

TED ROWLANDS: So the sum total of your experience to date is that there is not the need for any additional powers for the Assembly to fulfil the economic objectives that are laid down.

MS GWYTHER: No, certainly not as far as the economic development objectives are concerned. I do not think so.

TED ROWLANDS: You mentioned that you had been lobbying on operating aids. Tell us a bit about that.

MS GWYTHER: We would not require any additional powers. Member States, as you know, can instigate operating aids in any part of its state; and so it is a very straightforward lobbying exercise to the Treasury: "Can we have this in parts of Objective 1, please?" We would not need any extra powers. What we need is for the Treasury to use their discretion. As we go along, I am sure that there will be more and more examples of where we do not just need to ask for extra powers, but where we have to examine a bit more closely our links with Westminster and how we can be using the power they have already got.

TED ROWLANDS: Can you give us an illustration of the operating aid that the Committee has identified would be useful in developing economic policy?

MS GWYTHER: John may have to come in on this, because a lot of this happened when I was not there. We have been talking loosely about operating aids in particular areas of Objective 1.

TED ROWLANDS: What kind of aids?

MR GRIMES: I am not sure that the Committee has specific proposals, but areas where there are businesses that at the moment can only support capital investment, and they need money to tide them over the period of the foot-and-mouth crisis – the ability to help the business over a short period where there was a sound business plan, to enable it to see through difficult periods – perhaps to encourage support through training, research and development, and that kind of thing - not looking for capital investment, but it needs money to tide it over a period.

TED ROWLANDS: How far has the Committee been scrutinising the effectiveness of the rolling-out of the Objective 1 programme? It is a central piece of economic development. How closely are you scrutinising what is happening on the ground, or whether Objective 1 is or is not delivering what was expected of it?

MS GWYTHER: We have a structural funds report once a quarter. That comes from WEFFO. They come before us. We also have the chairs of each partnership, whether it is Objective 1, 2 or 3.

TED ROWLANDS: At strategic level?

MS GWYTHER: Yes, at PMC level – who will come and give us an overview of how each structural fund is behaving. That gives us the chance to scrutinise WEFFO. John Clarke, the Chief Executive, comes once a quarter, and also the Minister -----

TED ROWLANDS: What has been your verdict?

MS GWYTHER: Proliferation of partnerships and probably not engaging with the private sector as successfully as it could have done.

TED ROWLANDS: Having come to that thought, have you managed through the Minister, or as a result of Committee pressure, to effect change in the way in which Objective 1 is being delivered?

MS GWYTHER: Certainly as far as the non-engagement with the private sector. We have hammered home that point on several occasions. It is fair to say that has been right from the start of the programme, when I was not on the Committee anyway. That has resulted in a private sector unit being set up in WAFFO to talk directly to business. Whether that would have happened anyway, without Committee pressure, I have no way of knowing, but it was certainly a problem that was flagged up quite coherently by the Committee in the very early days.

TED ROWLANDS: To build this economic powerhouse, you had the merger of three quangos into one. From your scrutiny, has it meant anything seriously different?

MS GWYTHER: I think it has. I think it is working much, much better than most people thought. People are always nostalgic about things -----

TED ROWLANDS: I am over the Land Authority because I created -----

MS GWYTHER: ----- entities that have gone before. As far as the Land Authority is concerned, I get to talk to officials who are now within the Welsh Development Agency, who are very pleased that they now have a direct effect by the work that they do on economic regeneration, in a more targeted way maybe than they had before.

TED ROWLANDS: And because they have got the Land Authority under the one roof, they can exercise complementary powers, can they?

MS GWYTHER: That is right. You have said it so much more coherently than me.

PETER PRICE: I would like to take up the issue of capacity a little further. Let us take the example of the Economic Development Strategy of A Winning Wales. I take the comment in the annual report as a basis for pressing you a little about the capacity side of it. You say that the members felt that the report was inadequate because it lacked detailed policies, resources and realistic targets. That is a fundamental criticism, and suggests that we start with a base document coming from your Committee being seriously inadequate. The people who produced that base document are civil servants who back the Minister. It raises a question mark about the capacity of the Civil Service to produce the necessary policies in a very, very key area. Then you go on and say about 50 per cent only of what your Committee recommended was incorporated.

I am going to invite you to look objectively at the nature of what the Committee suggested and whether those ideas had been, as it were, worked up into a form which would have relatively easily been taken on board by the Minister and slotted in; or whether they were disparate and raw ideas that had not really been worked out, that an inadequately backed Civil Service could easily take on board and incorporate? Are we really dealing with not a political refusal, shall we say, or an obtuseness, but a capacity problem lying at the heart of the whole thing?

MS GWYTHER: I think that is a very fair assessment. What we are also dealing with is Committees – it is the rights and responsibilities argument, is it not? Our Committee has the right to put forward proposals; is it our responsibility to cost those proposals, or determine whether there is capacity to work them up? It is certainly the view, I would say, of most of the Committee members, because they do not have to carry the can, and as opposition members it is likely that they never will. They would say that they have the rights, but, you know, who cares about the responsibilities; that is down to the Minister!

Probably in an evolving Assembly, there will be less of the creation of wish lists, which you can ever after punish the Minister with, and a more grown-up approach to policy-making. That was probably a bit subjective, but there we are!

MR GRIMES: The Committee was unhappy about the document, but my feeling was that it really wanted a different kind of document. The Government has produced what it considers the strategy should be, and the Committee thinks the strategy should be different, that the strategy should set out policies, resources and realistic targets – almost a route map from where we are now to where we have to go. The Government took a different view and produced a different sort of document; so I am not sure there would be scope for the Committee to come up with an alternative.

PETER PRICE: How would you characterise the government approach, then? What is the alternative to the policy, resources and realistic targets?

MR GRIMES: I think there was a view on the Committee that said, "at the moment, we have GDP X, and GDP Y at the end" and so on, and then charted through it.

PETER PRICE: What is the alternative approach to characterise the Government document?

MR GRIMES: The Government has identified policies that move in the direction that it feels appropriate, but it has not costed them; it is not a detailed shopping list.

LAURA McALLISTER: With respect, that is not really a strategy, is it, as is commonly known? That is an aspirational wish-list of direction for economic development. I think most people would probably agree with that. A strategy requires hard data and monitoring and evaluation performance targets and so on, and quantifiable information every step of the way.

MR GRIMES: If you take that view, which is what the Committee did, you come to that conclusion. I think you have to ask the Government whether it takes that view.

PETER PRICE: Do you think that the Government produced the kind of document that they did because somebody said at the outset, "We do not want the sort of thing the Committee wanted" or that they lacked the investment to be able to make economic forecasts as to what was a realistic target, and to work back from that to the detailed measures necessary; and that therefore that a more disparate list of various policies that were knocking about were cobbled together in one piece of paper?

MS GWYTHER: Yes.

PETER PRICE: And that is what the Civil Service was capable of delivering.

MS GWYTHER: Mike German once memorably said, "I don’t know much about the economy in Wales", and everybody laughed and loved it; but it was an honest answer in fact. I think that before the set-up of the Economic Research Advisory Panel, which only came up after A Winning Wales was published, it was very difficult for civil servants to draw together all the various strands and documents that you would need to produce any meaningful strategy, as Laura said. They were not developing policy on the hoof – I think that would be unfair to say; but they were certainly up against it in terms of time constraints. They knew that they had to bring something out pretty quickly. At the time, it probably did not help that the Minister was just about changing; the partnership government was either on the cusp or had just come off it; and there was, I think, probably too much happening for anybody to take a real grasp of the situation.

PETER PRICE: If I can just press you a little further about the nature of the weakness, we should now be saying, what would you, from your experience and considerable inside knowledge, do to remedy? Are we talking in relation to this capacity problem within the Civil Service about an issue where you see it as being inadequate numbers, or at the top levels inadequate quality; or are they structured in some way that you are not getting the maximum out of the Civil Service? Where do you see the remedy as being found?

MS GWYTHER: The remedy has started, with the Economic Research Advisory Panel. That is buying in experience that they just did not have within the Civil Service in Wales – understanding that there might be gaps there and not being frightened of there being gaps. If we cannot fill them through the Civil Service, then we will just buy the expertise, even if it is only for six months or a year; it really does not matter, but just buy it while we need to draw up whatever policy we are talking about.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: It is a question of accountability. If you look at section 57 of the Government of Wales Act, it is quite clear that the sub-committees will affect the composition of the Assembly, and have the Minister, or what the members call the Secretary, on it.

MS GWYTHER: Yes.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: How on earth, given that, can you have a report, A Winning for Wales produced by a Minister who is a member of the Committee, only 50 per cent of which the Committee agrees with? He had a majority, did he not, on the Committee?

MS GWYTHER: Technically.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: But he had a majority - Labour/Lib-Dem positions. It does not seem to be proper accountability. You talk about civil servants producing the report; it is the Minister’s report.

MS GWYTHER: Of course, absolutely.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: And to shovel off the blame for a bad report to the civil servants does not seem to me in strict constitutional terms, quite right.

MS GWYTHER: I am not shuffling off the blame to anybody. You asked me for an opinion of where the problem lay. The problem lay in capacity, rushing it through – and the capacity is clearly not within the Civil Service, but the Minister carries the can – of course. When they sit in Committee – I had to do this, as a minister, secretary then, when there was a GM seeds listing problem. The Committee clearly did not want it listed, but every available legal advice told me I had to list it. It was a very difficult political decision. Those difficult decisions happen every fortnight, I am sure, when ministers sit in Committees as part of that Committee and discussions might be going on which they might know cannot be delivered in the end.

LORD RICHARD: So what do they do?

MS GWYTHER: What I think they should do -----

TED ROWLANDS: What did you do when you were a Minister?

MS GWYTHER: I tried to fight my corner in Committee.

LORD RICHARD: What do your Ministers do to you, not what you would do? Do they take up the discussion ahead and say, "we cannot do it" or do they run and keep quiet and then give you a broadside later on?

MS GWYTHER: Oh, no, never; they would not dare to do that. They keep relatively quiet, and I think should at earlier points in the discussion say "this is not going to work; let’s not go up this alley, where we are all going to have huge political pain, with headlines in the Western Mail or Daily Post; let’s discuss this in a slightly more grown-up way."

TED ROWLANDS: You have wandered into the personal, because you have had two years as a Minister at the rough end of it.

MS GWYTHER: Eighteen months.

TED ROWLANDS: Then basically, pre-coalition days as well.

MS GWYTHER: Yes.

TED ROWLANDS: Then back-bencher to Chairperson.

MS GWYTHER: Yes.

TED ROWLANDS: Reflecting on those four years, would say anything to the Commission about what we should be thinking about for the next four years, or what you and the Assembly should be thinking about for the next four years?

MS GWYTHER: I was operating as part of a minority government, and that is always going to be extremely difficult. This coalition theory could not have been easy either, and I am sure that the Lib-Dems will have told you exactly the same thing. It is not easy at all.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Which is easier?

MS GWYTHER: Majority government is easier, and that is the only answer I can give you to that.

PETER PRICE: It is going to happen on 1 May!

MS GWYTHER: I have got my rosette out in the car!

TED ROWLANDS: Members of the Commission have been asking you repeatedly whether you would stay with this dual role where the Minister stays with the Committee.

MS GWYTHER: Yes, I would.

LORD RICHARD: Is that because you think you can influence the Minister more these days, or do you think you would be more knowledgeable about government policy, or both?

MS GWYTHER: Both. There is nothing wrong in having both. Certainly, as a member of the Agriculture Committee when I was also Secretary on there – although, obviously, I tried to influence the way that they were thinking, because Wales is such a small country – we have only got the powers that we do have – for government and the Assembly as a whole we have to continually test our boundaries, and you can only do that if you really do work hand-in-hand with government, whoever scrutinises at the time.

TED ROWLANDS: Is there any power you yearn for?

MS GWYTHER: No.

LAURA McALLISTER: Do you think there should be more AMs having the experience of the two sides of work? Is there an argument for increasing the overall number from sixty?

MS GWYTHER: When I first went on, I thought that eighty would have been perfect, to have two from each constituency. I do not know how many regional AMs you have talked to, but I think that it is difficult for regional AMs to operate effectively in the constituencies within their region because of the geography of Wales. I think they probably spend more time in their car than they do with constituents, and I do not see that as being an effective way to run Wales. If I had my time all over again, I would have eighty, two for each constituency. I think we need to follow the same constituencies as parliament, otherwise people just get so confused, they do not know where they are.

LAURA McALLISTER: Elected by what method?

MS GWYTHER: First past the post.

LAURA McALLISTER: So no PR.

MS GWYTHER: No.

LORD RICHARD: Thank you very much indeed. That was very useful.

MS GWYTHER: Thank you very much; that was very enjoyable. We will give you the broadband report and send you the other one.