6. Will the Leader of the House establish a digital support and challenge board to act as a catalyst for innovation across the public sector? OAQ52378

I always welcome the Member’s help and support on the digital transformation agenda. We are reviewing progress on the use of digital and data in public service delivery to ensure we maximise these. I am very interested in the both the Reid review’s recommendations and your suggestion for the challenge board. I'd very much like to meet with you to discuss how we could take that forward. 

Thank you for that response, Cabinet Secretary. There's been much discussion, as ever, here today on the digital infrastructure, but there's far too little attention in my view on how we use that infrastructure to transform the way we design and deliver public services. It's clear that this is a challenging agenda for all Governments, and the evidence that the Public Accounts Committee and the Economy, Infrastructure and Skills Committee have taken shows that there's a particular challenge in both central and local government to get the wherewithal to allow them to be intelligent clients. I was just wondering about the suggestion of gathering people from the outside world who are desperate for progress on this agenda to come together to help—not as some kind of standing committee to receive presentations and papers, but to act as critical friends for officials and Ministers to help them understand this complex environment to bring about the change that we so desperately and quickly need.

Yes, I welcome the suggestion. I'm taking a paper to Cabinet in the autumn on public sector digital service transformation, which will bring together the wide range of activities already under way and focus on the next steps. So, it's a perfect opportunity to get that kind of challenge into that process to make sure that we have the best information to skill up our people in order to make that transformation happen. So, I very much welcome the suggestion and I hope we can take it forward.

Cabinet Secretary, can I support Lee Waters's call and remind you that, under the UK's digital strategy, they do have a digital skills partnership, which brings together public, private and third sector organisations to tackle the digital skills gap in a co-ordinated and coherent way? Do you not agree that we should be focusing on a cross-sector approach to spark innovation across the public, private and third sectors in Wales, because there are real promising benefits when we all work together?

Yes, I absolutely agree with that. I chair the cross-Government group, which pulls together various bits of the Welsh Government, and I've been collaborating with my colleague the Cabinet Secretary for health on taking forward the health digitalisation agenda, which is a very important part of this. There are several aspects to it, as various Members highlight. There is the skills aspect, there's the technology and hardware aspect, the infrastructure aspect, but there's also the service transformation and life transformation aspect. We don't have all the good ideas for that, so I absolutely do welcome a wealth of ideas from across the piece for how we can make sure that we ride the wave rather than being overwhelmed by it.