The next item is the motion to note the annual report on the Assembly Commission’s official languages scheme for 2017-18. I call on a member of the Commission, Adam Price.

Motion NDM6774 Elin Jones

To propose that the National Assembly for Wales, in accordance with paragraph 8(8) of Schedule 2 of the Government of Wales Act 2006:

Notes the Annual Compliance Report on the Assembly Commission’s Official Languages Scheme, laid before the National Assembly for Wales on 11 July 2018.

Motion moved.

Thank you, Llywydd. It gives me great pleasure to present this annual report on the Assembly Commission’s official languages scheme for the fifth Assembly.

The Commission has set the aim of being an institution that’s known for providing excellent bilingual services that are innovative, and to be a body that’s an example for other bodies in Wales and beyond. It’s good, therefore, to present this report on progress on this ambition.

First, I will address the themes that have been set for the period of the scheme. We have set five themes to structure our work, with the aim of achieving our ambition of becoming a truly bilingual institution that looks for every opportunity to facilitate and promote the use of the Welsh language.

The first theme relates to recruitment, and, as we committed to achieving by this summer, we have adopted a new approach to recruitment. Now, the Commission will set specific Welsh language skills levels for every post that we will advertise. This will mean that a basic level of Welsh language skills will be part of the job description for any role that does not require a higher level of skills. For posts that require a higher level of Welsh language skills, we have introduced a matrix that defines those levels from one to five.

This is a clear statement, Llywydd, of our ambition to support the workforce of our national Parliament to take ownership of the Welsh language, without exception, to confirm its position and status as a language that belongs to all citizens of Wales, and to take practical steps to enable all of our staff to serve the people of Wales in both our languages.

The second theme is language skills, and, again, a series of targets have been set to be delivered by the summer of 2018. Over the past year, the language skills team has worked on developing a Welsh language skills training programme that is available to all, from new learners to fluent Welsh speakers. Over the summer, we will trial more intensive training, and staff and Members have had an opportunity to be part of the residential provision of the Cymraeg Gwaith project under the auspices of the National Centre for Learning Welsh.

In terms of language planning, which is the third theme, all services have been updating their language schemes with the support of the official languages ​​team. As well as ensuring that our workforce has the appropriate level of Welsh language skills, it is crucial too, of course, that we do plan in a meaningful way to provide opportunities for all our staff to use their Welsh language skills, at whatever level, in their day-to-day work. In reviewing our service language plans, we have seen language domains developing within the institution, with teams working internally through the medium of Welsh, but providing external services bilingually. These domains are something that we will be eager to develop further over the next year.

The fourth theme relates to Assembly proceedings. Work in this area has focused on supporting Members and facilitating bilingual working.

The fifth theme is the broadest in terms of the work done over the year. The targets here are relatively simple, generally speaking, but, together, they will make a major contribution to changing the image and ethos of our institution to reflect the bilingual nation that we serve. Badges and lanyards are now being used and distributed by default, and many Commission staff use the 'iaith gwaith' badge on their e-mails too. As you would expect, our work on language technology has continued, including some work that has led to a very exciting project for the Table Office and Record of Proceedings teams.

To move on to the service levels within the scheme, we have information on how we’ve maintained the standards that have been set. For the first time this year, the annual report includes statistics on many elements of the services that we provide. During the process of drafting the scheme, the Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee told us that data of this kind would be useful in assisting Members to monitor our performance in certain areas. We have set this out in the annual report and I look forward to working further with the committee on this work in the near future. I have to turn around 180 degrees to see you. This data will form a baseline to measure our performance over coming years and to target training for staff. We will also do everything within our ability to ensure that more bilingual information, including evidence and legislation, is available to Assembly Members as they take part in proceedings and prepare for those proceedings.

Finally, I’ll move on to monitoring and compliance. In the report, we report on the complaints and the feedback that we’ve received and the steps that have been taken and any further steps that we will take to deal with any problems and to ensure that we are fully compliant, in the spirit of transparency and providing assurance to the people of Wales that this institution is one that takes linguistic equality seriously in word and deed. Once again, these details will assist you to hold the Assembly Commission to account for our activities in supporting you and the people of Wales to work and to engage with us as an institution in your official language of choice, and therefore improve our bilingual services further for the future. Thank you.

I call on the Chair of the Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee to speak—Bethan Sayed.

Thank you, Llywydd, I’d like to welcome the publication of the OLS annual report for 2017-18. Evidently, it’s very helpful that the report is being published as early as possible. I’d like to congratulate the Commission and the staff of the Assembly for achieving the commitment to publish the report by July following the financial year to which it relates.

Although we do welcome that, it does cause some difficulties for us as a committee. The first chance the Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee had to consider the report was at our meeting this morning. This was too late for us to be able to have considered advice about its content and has not allowed time for us to consider whether we wanted to scrutinise the Commission on its content, let alone actually conduct any additional scrutiny. Ideally, the committee would wish to have seen the report in good time to consider its content, and conduct scrutiny if it thought that was necessary, and then feed the outcome of that scrutiny through to this debate today.

I have spoken to Adam Price and I do understand that there are some practical issues with publishing the report much earlier in the year. We certainly wouldn’t want to hold up the publication in future. Nevertheless, I would ask that the Commission makes every effort in future years to publish the report early enough to allow the committee to properly consider it, and, if necessary, to conduct scrutiny before the Plenary debate. If that means that the Plenary debate needs to be held in the early autumn rather than on the last day of the summer term, then I think that’s a price worth paying for effective scrutiny.

Turning to the content of the report itself, I do have a number of points to make and questions for the Commissioner. Firstly, when the current scheme was drawn up, an equality impact assessment was prepared. I note that the working group established to work on theme 1, namely recruitment, checks regularly that the tasks arising from the EIA are in fact being carried out. However, could the Commissioner ensure that a revised EIA, which shows clearly the progress made on these tasks is now published?

There is not a great deal of information in the report on the new recruitment process and the language skills level information collected. Perhaps the Commissioner could expand on that. For instance, the new courtesy level certificate that will be given to everyone assessed at this level will only last for two years. Why two years? An explanation of the thinking behind this would be helpful for us as a committee. More generally, more information in this area and, in future years, more data—more data again, sorry—on the numbers recruited at each level would be very useful for us.

The report says that the Assembly Commission expects those organisations and bodies that are subject to language standards or schemes to comply with their own schemes in submitting information to the Assembly. However, the report refers to subordinate legislation, which is often presented in English only. I wonder if the Commissioner could comment further on that and what steps are being taken to ensure that the Welsh Government, I assume, complies with its responsibilities in this area.

On a similar point, I note that 23 per cent of papers submitted by the Welsh Government to Assembly committees are in English only. What steps is the Commission taking to raise this issue with the Welsh Government? Also, on the Welsh Government’s compliance, there is currently no information on the extent to which Assembly Members receive replies in Welsh to written Assembly questions. In fairness, that’s an issue for the Assembly to address in the first instance, but is there any evidence of the Government replying in English to questions in Welsh?

Twenty per cent of contributions in Plenary debates by Members are made in Welsh. However, just 8 per cent of contributions in committee are made in Welsh. Can the Commissioner offer any explanation for that disparity and whether any work is being done to encourage greater use of Welsh in committees? In my personal opinion, one of the main problems is, sometimes, we ask questions in Welsh and people take off their headsets and then expect, sometimes, that the supplementary questions are going to be asked in English, and that interrupts the flow of those asking the questions. So, maybe more information for those giving evidence before committees that there is an expectation—or perhaps they can keep the headsets on during the committee meetings.

Finally, I note that there are examples of complaints that have arisen about non-compliance with the scheme, and you’ve already referred to this, Adam. However, there are no data to give us a sense of the scale of the complaints. It would be helpful if, in future, data are included on the number of complaints received so that comparisons can be made from year to year. This would also allow any increase or decrease, as well as any trends about the type of complaints, to be monitored more effectively.

I’d like to finish by thanking all the staff of the Assembly who help us to work in a genuinely bilingual environment, whether that be the translators translating my remarks today or those who help us with written translation services. But I’d also like to thank those staff, Welsh and non-Welsh speakers alike, who recognise the importance of this place being seen as an exemplar of a bilingual institution and who, through their work, allow us to work in our language of choice and who ensure that services are provided to allow the public to interact with us in their language of choice.

Thank you very much, Llywydd. I am more than content to note this report and even to welcome it. Over the past year, it seems to me that this place has started to feel slightly different; the Record has improved and I’m pleased to see that some of our security staff have started to welcome me in Welsh. They’ve probably seen my lanyard; I hope that's the only reason. I also feel that I have benefited from the language improvement classes as well as the Welsh history lessons that came free of charge, which I wasn’t expecting. But it’s also been a pleasure to see that there are more people now wearing these lanyards and more Welsh learners using the Welsh language here in the Chamber. There’s a strong message conveyed there too, because I’ve noticed that some, at least, have come from areas of Wales where there aren’t many Welsh speakers. There are many people who perhaps haven’t crossed the bridge to understanding how important the Welsh language is the length and breadth of Wales, and to see some Members from the Valleys, for example, standing up and speaking Welsh perhaps for the first time, that sends a clear and important message, I think.

I'm pleased that you made reference to the culture committee in the report, and, although I'm happy to see a baseline in terms of Assembly advertisements and business, it's still disappointing that the report is full of sentences in terms of 'an increase in learners' or 'several courses' or 'groups of learners', without providing specific figures. It's going to be impossible to see next year the scale of any success there. I'm sure there will be success, but it'll be difficult to identify that success, and in terms of individual skills too.

I know it's difficult to say who has made progress, because there's a question of confidentiality involved there, but I particularly feel that it would be useful to understand how many Members' support staff have taken up the offer and what sort of problems they've encountered in terms of taking up the offer, given their patterns of work. I'm not making excuses for them, of course, but we all know as Members how difficult it is to find time during the week for us to have some help with the Welsh language, and the same is true for our staff too.

So, as a Commission, we've had a staff survey quite recently, and that includes Member support staff. Was there any information that emerged there on how many people were aware of the pages on the website about the scheme, about help with translation, for example? Do we know how many hits the language scheme pages have had? It wasn't clear to me in the general staff survey what our staff thought about the scheme.

In terms of the Commission, of course we are looking at a flexible workforce now, and I understand that the capacity to provide services within teams, rather than asking for unrealistic levels of skills of all individuals, is important. But, in response to the debate, I wonder whether you could say a little more specifically about where you've looked for ideas before creating this language skills framework and who has oversight of the process of deciding on fluency levels? Because the investment and resourcing board is no more, of course.

Just turning to the Government papers, which Bethan Sayed referred to already—is it clear, in terms of subordinate legislation, whether that problem emerges from the UK Government or the Government here? Because if the Government here is—well, both of them, actually. Anyone now who is subject to standards shouldn't be looking for excuses for not complying with those standards. Of course, everyone can excuse the odd slip here and there, but to have something that's apparently more systematic than that—then there are questions to be asked of the Government here and perhaps the Government in Westminster. I'd like to know how you're going to face and deal with that.

I'm going to check my answerphone message, certainly. That's something I need to do, because, if we've received a complaint about that, I'll need to sort that out.

Just to conclude, Llywydd, I agree with the point about both languages being broadcast simultaneously, particularly as someone who is still learning. Subtitles are far better. We heard this morning in committee about S4C and what they're currently doing in terms of their subtitling system, and I know that the Commission has been in contact with them. Just to give you an example, I was listening in the cafe earlier, or trying to listen, to Simon Thomas's question—and I'm talking here about the internal system, not an external system, and for someone like me who is looking for opportunities to pick up new vocabulary, it was disappointing not to be able to listen to Simon, because he often uses words that are new to me. Therefore, if people outwith the institution have the same experience—[Interruption.] [Laughter.] They're words new to you, apparently, as well. Okay, that's fine. If there is something that we could do in future on that, for someone like me, it would be a major step forward I think. Thank you.

Thank you for this important report. I was pleased to see that the Assembly Commission was providing bilingual papers to committees on the whole, but, as Suzy and Bethan have mentioned, I was concerned to see that the Government has presented information in English only 174 times. The report also states that 25 per cent of documents laid—as we’ve just been discussing, the explanatory memoranda and subordinate legislation—were not laid bilingually, and these are documents that the Government itself produces. So, we do need to convey a clear message to the Government today to ensure that the Government does comply with the language standards that have been imposed upon them in their dealings with the Assembly. I call on the Government to collaborate with the Commission to ensure that they do improve their performance and don’t hamper the will of this Assembly.

This year’s report includes data, but it is initial data, and the report also states that reports in ensuing years will include data in a way that will enable the comparison of the situation over a number of years, and this is very important, of course. It would also be beneficial, I think, to have a full audit of the Assembly staff for us to know how many people have bilingual skills, in which departments, and so on and so forth. This is crucial in order to plan the workforce of the future and also to use our current workforce more effectively. I’m pleased to see that there is a note that there is an intention to do that.

I’m also very pleased to see these language domains developing within the Assembly, which are teams of people who work mainly through the medium of Welsh, and I hope to see these develop. The teams include a combination of fluent speakers and Welsh learners, and language planners do note, generally speaking, that creating language domains within the workplace where the minority language is used for administration and internal communication is crucially important in safeguarding and developing a language. Creating a language skills audit would encourage the creation of further Welsh language domains, and I look forward to see that developed.

Just one thing in conclusion: as you know, I choose to use my first language, the Welsh language, on virtually all occasions in the Assembly and I’m very pleased that I’m able to do that. One barrier to that is the fact that research briefings for committee work are prepared in English and that occasionally means a delay of a day or two before the Welsh language version is available. One way of starting to overcome that problem would be to encourage those who do have bilingual skills within the Research Service to draft their briefings in Welsh initially. I’m sure they would be translated to English very swiftly if that were the case. For me, this is one sign of real bilingualism, namely that documents are drafted in Welsh and very little of that seems to be happening at the moment, from my experience, at least. In addition to moving in that direction, perhaps including a specific indicator to show progress in that area may be important.

So, I do look forward to seeing the fruit of this labour developing and to seeing further general improvements by next year’s report. Thank you.

Adam Price to reply to the debate.

Thank you, Llywydd. There are so many interesting comments and questions and I’m very grateful for those, but it won’t be possible for me to respond to them all in the next two minutes, so please forgive me for that. But, I will certainly ensure that you will get a reply. In terms of the lack of time for scrutiny, well, to a certain extent, I’m to blame for that. I’m not going to blame little Ilar for that. We had timetabled this for the last day for a reason, and so—. But I do look forward to scrutiny by the committee in due course, and we will be looking at the arrangements for next year. In terms of the EQIA, it is a live document, and as the steps that we take are delivered, we will be updating that in due course, but I’ll provide more information to you on that. The new recruitment system has only been in place since the start of this week, so there will be more information next year. In terms of the two-year certificate, the working group is of the opinion that there would be a need to refine the courtesy skills periodically. So, that’s the reason for the two-year timeframe. In terms of having quantitative figures in terms of skills and learners and the full audit that Siân Gwenllian referred to, I think that would be of benefit. So, I do hope that we will enrich the annual reports with more quantitative information in the future, and we can also look at the number of hits on the page on the scheme and so forth and look at how that works. I do intend to write to the BBC about subtitling along the lines that Suzy Davies did suggest, and in terms of the research briefings, I think Siân’s suggestion is a very constructive one and we will look into that and we will report back to you. Forgive me, but I have run out of time. It will be possible for us to write to everyone and copy everyone in with fuller answers.FootnoteLink

Information further to Plenary

The proposal is to note the annual report. Does any Member object? The motion is therefore agreed in accordance with Standing Order 12.36.

Motion agreed in accordance with Standing Order 12.36.