Seeing through the Senedd

You can see through it, but how much can you see on the other side?
(Pic : tripadvisor.co.uk)

The ongoing discussion and debate over of transparency and openness within both the Welsh Government and National Assembly shows no signs of abating.

• The Conspiracy at the heart of Welsh Government
• Cesspool on the Taff

There has, of course, been one minor victory. The First Minister announced on Tuesday that publication of ministerial decision reports would be resumed after being shown up by the Welsh Lib Dems, who promptly decided to publish the reports themselves via FoI requests. Carwyn Jones admitted the Welsh Government got it wrong, so fair play to him.

There's also the IWA's summit and report on the state of the Welsh media, which I'll return to next week.

Elsewhere, Cardiff Bay lobbyist Daran Hill and Prof. Laura McAllister contributed to an episode of BBC's Wales' The Wales Report last week – which included something approaching a car-crash performance from the Leader of the House, Jane Hutt (Lab, Vale of Glamorgan). You can still watch it on iPlayer here until the beginning of December – it starts about 8 minutes in.

Daran Hill described the Fourth Assembly as :

"....the most closed and the least transparent one that I've seen....The Welsh Government and the National Assembly are too self-satisfied and too smug in terms of what they perceive as openness and transparency; they can go a lot, lot further."

In turn, Prof. McAllister said :

"It's a pretty immature cultural form of scrutiny that we have at the moment, and in my opinion that's because we haven't really got to grips with the need to have proper forensic and strategic critiques of everything we do post-devolution. The Assembly....simply doesn't have the in-built culture of proper, robust scrutiny of everything that it does."

They were joined by another lobbyist, Alexander Phillips, who penned an article for Click on Wales last week outlining five ways to improve transparency at the Assembly - having criticised the fact there was a lot of complaining, but little in the way of proposals to improve matters :

• Business Committee meetings should be held in public, at the moment only minutes are produced.
• There should be a presumption in favour of tabling urgent questions, and any denial of an urgent question should be justified by the Llywydd.
• Ministers should give full answers to written questions; they're notorious for giving one or two word answers.
• Committee chairs should be elected or removed by the whole Assembly, not appointed by political parties – something raised by backbench AMs and an issue I covered last time.
• Committee agendas should be published at least a week in advance (they're usually published 4-5 days before the meeting).

I would add to that :

• Until the Assembly expands, the number of Welsh Government ministers should be capped at around 8 to ensure a minimum number of government backbenchers.
• Major public appointments to Assembly or Welsh Government sponsored bodies should be approved by the National Assembly as a whole, or at the very least a Public Appointments Committee chaired by an opposition party member - all held in public.
• Although the Welsh Government publishes information relating to spending over a certain amount, it could be published in a more user-friendly manner - perhaps similarly to AMs expenses.
• There should be a presumption in favour of the affirmative procedure to pass regulations (Assembly votes to approve regulations). Using the negative procedure (regulations come in automatically unless the Assembly disagrees) should be thoroughly justified.
• Assembly Commission and Standards Committee meetings should be held in public. You can understand individual standards hearings and those meetings relating to draft reports (for all committees) being held in private, but other routine meetings are held privately without explanation.
• The Petitions Committee should explain why and how they've decided to close a petition.
• All Committees should publish their forward work programmes (some do, some don't) and ideally there would be some sort of timetable for the publication of committee reports.
• Rules relating to Cross-Party Groups should be more rigorously enforced. Despite changes brought in over the last few years, some CPGs are clearly struggling to meet the new requirements. Those that can't meet them effectively without good reason should be disbanded.
• A They Work For You style site where you can see individual AMs contributions/speeches, written questions, voting records, interests and – ideally – a record of their surgeries, external visits etc. Although most of this information is available on the Assembly website in various guises, Cardiff's Cllr. Sam Knight's (Lab, Cathays) Your Senedd is the closest thing we have to TWFY.

One thing I would criticise is that nobody has yet explained what they mean by "openness and transparency" and what they want as a result.

The Welsh Government's definition - where they have to consider the potential for political embarrassment in addition to their "commitment" to openness - is clearly going to be different to lobbyists, AMs and other public policy professionals who need access to as much information as possible to do their jobs effectively.

I would define it as, amongst other things :

• Ministerial decisions should be made "on the record" and fully justified.
• Decisions relating to the functions of the Assembly should be made in public and on the record.
• Evidence leading to those decisions above should be published in full, and be publicly accessible at any time and at no cost.
• Government ministers and AMs should be accessible to the media, and ministers in particular should consider media engagement one of the most important parts of their role (I don't mean bloggers before you get over-excited).
• Honesty and frankness - not drowning statements in buzzwords and management speak (Translation for the Nation).

There will be instances where it may, stress may, be appropriate to redact or withhold information for reasons of national security for instance or to protect personal information. I've never bought the "commercial sensitivity" excuse, but if there's some sort of non-disclosure agreement on certain deals its existence should be made public.

I've said before that if a public body receives too many freedom of information requests – even the vexatious ones - they're probably not as "open and transparent" as they think they are.

Truth is often stranger than fiction.
(Pic : scarfolk.blogspot.com)

It shouldn't stop with our institutions either, our political parties could do a lot, lot more. I suspect many of the issues surrounding openness and transparency within the National Assembly and Welsh Government are a direct result of the culture within the parties themselves. Needless to say that extends to the oxymoronic "independent parties" in local government too.

Any party that has its sights set on forming a government and running the country shouldn't themselves be run like a private members club. All members should be equal and all members should have the opportunity to choose candidates, make policy and elect officers – not just those who turn up at meetings, conferences or hustings.

The results of internal elections should be published, and I'd even go as far as suggesting standardising some aspects of how political parties are run and organised - like internal elections. The fact we're less than six months away from Assembly and PCC elections and still don't know who's standing for the main parties in many seats is ludicrous.

The other problem is the self-policing in the Senedd chamber, which requires a cultural shift and can't be mandated through guidelines and standing orders. It might be helped by an increase in the number of AMs, but that's not guaranteed.

Shutting down critical discourse – even when it's friendly or constructive - doesn't help anyone. There's a case for party loyalty on serious matters and ideology, but I'd much rather have AMs - of any colour - who have the gumption not to believe the sun shines from their leaders' backsides and actually thinks about policies and issues for themselves. That's what we pay them to do and what we should expect them to do - particularly backbenchers.

All this comes as it was revealed on Monday that Welsh Labour have blocked BBC Wales and ITV Wales from proceeding with behind-the-scenes documentaries on the National Assembly and Welsh Government prior to the 2016 National Assembly Election.

It was a golden opportunity to improve public understanding of devolved politics, having been compared to the successful BBC documentary Inside the Commons. I can't think of any better reason to allow cameras inside the Senedd and Cathays Park, and it's a million times more important than James Bond and S4C dramas. It might even go some way towards confirming the existence of Gwyn Price.

Ironically, blocking the cameras has perhaps given us all an idea of how devolved politics really works, and begs the question : what are they hiding?