This week, it’s the Welsh government reversing its policy on who superintends the Wales Millennium Centre. Next week could it be tourism? Both of these sectors of Welsh life were gobbled up by the civil service, as part of Labour’s seemingly ideology-driven bid to get its hands around the necks of anything significant in Wales.
But the civil service handling of both areas seems to have been a disaster. For the WMC, the auditor general has formally declared it so after a careful investigation.
And for tourism, that’s the word from the industry, as honed through the mouth of former Conservative AM Lisa Francis.
In both cases, the same minister was involved. Alun Pugh is a nice, open guy, who deserved better than to be lumbered with some of the Labour government’s most ideological and unacceptable policies – he was also supposed to have done away with the Welsh Language Board, but a major revolt ensured its survival, partly because the gap of only four years between elections gave insufficient time for the changes to be implemented.
Mr Pugh was culture and heritage minister; and it’s his successor who has started on the dismantling.
Yesterday, he announced he was minded to accept the auditor-general’s view that the project should in future by looked after by the arts council. The council immediately expressed their restrained delight: the WMC was, they said, “unique in that it is the only arts body funded direct by the Assembly government rather than by the arts council”.
And now there’s some form of restoration of the Wales Tourist Board. The poor financial year last year – because of all the rain – has given extra urgency to the complaint in a report written for the Wales Tourism Alliance that “the current tourism structures and partnership arrangements are acting as a significant barrier to Wales achieving its tourism potential”.
The WTA collects together the operators. But it is a voluntary body which has influence (if any) purely on the sufferance of the minister. You are asking, therefore, for a lot of the lap-dog relationship such as existed between our Tony (Blair) and the departed president.
Something more robust is needed. When Alun Ffred has completed the de-integration of the WMC from the civil service, and has finished taking a shot across the bows of Trinity Mirror (over abolishing the company’s Welsh-based division in Cardiff and combining it with the North West division, run from Liverpool), perhaps he might like to take up cudgels on behalf of the tourism industry.
Ministers are meant to be leaders of an issue – not the men who order who the brush is to be wielded on the shop-floor.
After the auditor-general’s findings on the behaviour and abilities of the civil service with regard to the WMC, one would hope that all thoughts of asked them to run private and artistic enterprises in Wales will have come to an end.
By all means up-rate the civil service. But that probably demands a civil service that it united with the local government service, for the more open and enterprise-favouring attitudes which that would bring – rather than serving legally as no more than a branch of England and No 10.
And it also probably means the end of any direct link through the interference-prone Labour Party possessing seats in the Welsh cabinet.
Comments
