The Digital Action Plan

Part of 2. Questions to the Leader of the House and Chief Whip (in respect of her policy responsibilities) – in the Senedd at 2:35 pm on 18 April 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:35, 18 April 2018

I'll try and unpick that a little. The health services issue: my colleague the Cabinet Secretary for health and I do collaborate on health service issues, and, indeed, I attend the national informatics management board for the health service, which is NIMBY—always makes me smile, I'm afraid, but it doesn't mean what it normally means in normal parlance; it's the informatics board system. And the whole point of that is to co-ordinate IT progress across the health service, on a once-for-Wales basis, and to ensure that we do have systems that work—well, (a) that we have as few systems as possible, so we have similar systems across all health boards, and that, indeed, they do talk to each other, and that's very much a work in progress. And I'm sure the Cabinet Secretary for health would be happy to update you on exactly where we are with that. But I assure you, we are on top of that, and we have very vigorous conversations about it.

In terms of the Welsh Government itself, there are three aspects to your question, I think. One is the internal business of the Welsh Government, which I've just outlined in terms of the digital action plan, which is about the way the Welsh Government itself works. And the Member may know that we've just come off one of the big headline IT contracts, Atos, and we're moving to a more flexible system. The commission were several years ahead of the Government in this, and it's a different way of working. And that's what I was just outlining, and I'll be reporting on the progress on that plan very shortly. And then there's the work that I do with my colleague the Cabinet Secretary for public services, in local government and in the workforce partnership council, around digital innovation and improvement for the delivery of public services. We have an enormous agenda there, where we liaise with all public services—devolved and non-devolved public services in Wales—to ensure, again, that we have a similar once-for-Wales digitally connected system, where we roll out systems together. And my colleague the Cabinet Secretary for Finance just spoke in his answers about the real success we've had with the Welsh Revenue Authority, which went live earlier this month—and I know he outlined it earlier—with all the online collection and management of the land transaction and landfill taxes all digitally enabled, and with all lawyers and conveyancers, and all the rest of it, all able to log on to that system, and do their transaction digitally.

So, we are very much ahead of that curve. There's a lot more to do, and there's a huge issue about understanding what the future looks like, in terms of the skills agenda as well. But the Welsh Government is very much, I think, on top of that agenda.