Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Education – in the Senedd at 1:47 pm on 19 September 2018.
Thank you very much. I have a copy of a report that demonstrates that you do have an internal working group of senior civil servants that has been established, as you said, and that was back in the summer of 2016. The report recommends that the Welsh Government civil service should commit to becoming a bilingual organisation, with Welsh and English as official administrative languages by 2036. As part of that, your civil servants have come to the conclusion that a level of what is called courtesy Welsh or basic Welsh should be a requirement for all posts within the Welsh Government as a starting point. Now, we’re in agreement up until that point. There are a number of organisations, including the Assembly Commission, South Wales Police and Carmarthenshire council, that have introduced a courtesy model that is similar, which would require bilingual skills—at a very fundamental level, or a basic level, such as enunciating Welsh words correctly and giving simple greetings such as 'bore da', 'prynhawn da', 'hwyl fawr' and so on and so forth. But, last month, in a letter to me, the Permanent Secretary said that the Welsh Government has no plans to introduce a very basic courtesy level of this kind and to make it mandatory. So, a year and a half since your expert panel recommended that, why hasn’t the Welsh Government been able to commit to implementing these fundamental measures and isn’t it about time that the Government led by example?