Hopes that the Assembly would lead the battle against the ITV news service entering on a long-running death spasm seem to be false.
The Assembly last term set up what became an exceedingly effective broadcasting committee which did great work ensuring that Wales gets its rightful treatment in a hideously London-biased news media.
In its report, the committee recommended that a permanent communications committee be established, dealing with broadcasting and “related cultural and creative industries” – including newspapers, one would hope.
But today the Assembly business committee – which meets in private – turned down that recommendation. This means that characters such as Michael Grade, boss of ITV, can lie back in the assurance that Wales will no longer be the bother that he feared when he was interviewed by the committee, cut up into slices, and placed in a frying pan ready for roasting.
Because the business committee was apparently worried about the reaction from AMs concerned about the threat to ITV, no final decision will be made until next week, after party groups have had a chance to debate the issue.
But one of the political parties said the committee’s preferred wish was clear – no new committee. The main reason was pressure on the time of an assembly with only 60 members – it has often been argued that the body needs 80 AMs to work effectively.
ITV will think otherwise; they will just breathe a sigh of relief that they have seem to have got committee chairman Alun Davies (Labour, mid and west) out of their hair. The job would now be handed to the communities and culture committee.
Yet, as we know only too well, these committees are ineffective in providing real scrutiny of either ministerial activities, or of live political issues. The committees are instead appallingly overburdened with the minutiae-rubbish of batting legislative balls back and fore to Westminster, with both Cardiff and London second-guessing each other.
They are very poor substitutes for the committees which existed in the first and second assemblies.
If the committees cannot perform, it is up to the political parties to fill the gap.
Unfortunately, broadcasting is only one of the areas in which the political parties have fallen short. And so has much of civic society in Wales. While the Irish and the Scots poured evidence into Ofcom to give the evidence on which its Second Public Second Public Service Broadcasting Review (published last week) was based – which provides the justification for today’s announcement of cuts by ITV in jobs and broadcast hours in Wales – not a single Welsh political party stirred a finger of its own accord.
The NUJ and TUC gave strong evidence – and Ofcom’s Wales advisory committee called for the establishment of a separate Wales-only franchise, of which surely more anon – but almost everyone else was silent.
The current Ofcom reveals the folly of relying solely on politicians. Wales itself needs to awaken.
