What I think about Wales.
Patrick Hannan Memorial Lecture, April 30, 2013
What do I think about Wales?
My apologies for putting it so bluntly.
I hope that Patrick Hannan, whose outstanding achievements as
a journalist and life-member of the awkward squad this lecture
honours, would have approved the question’s directness, though
not perhaps its elegance.
It’s certainly true that if your trade, like mine and like Patrick’s,
is analysis and public comment, this is the kind question you get
asked. What DO you think about Welsh politics, the economy,
the language question? The Silk Commission? The state of
Welsh Rugby? The Severn Barrage? The tax on plastic bags?
Local Government in Anglesey?
Sometimes the question comes in a more formal manner.
As when I was asked three years ago by the Deputy First
Minister Ieuan Wyn Jones to review Wales’ policies towards the
creative industries. I will say something about Wales and its
creative economy later in this talk. I will also get to the internet,
education, politics and the economy.
My assessment is that of the immigrant: of one of the 20 per
cent of people living in Wales who weren’t born here.
I grew up in industrial East Lancashire. My grandparents
worked in cotton mills and coal mines. My father worked all his
life for a brewery. My mother had a tripe shop. I must have been
aged six or seven when our family first went to Wales: by
steam train from Burnley to Colwyn Bay.
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It was our first family holiday beyond the Costa del Sol of its
day: the Blackpool sea front. It was also our first taste of the
plastic modernity of the Holiday Camp: Vorin Hall, Colwyn
Bay: 1957 or was it 58?
I thought about Vorin Hall when we walked our dog a few
weekends ago out from Barry Bay across the site of the old
Butlins Holiday Camp. I suppose it will be the hands of Cadw
before long, an ancient monument with a mobile visitor
soundtrack. Wakey, wakey! Good morning campers!
I still have a photograph from this Colwyn Bay holiday. It
shows a short, fair-haired boy wearing over his head and
shoulders and reaching down to his ankles a brown cardboard
box. On his head is a hat made from stiff paper, with a bit of
wire sticking out of the top.
Yes, you guessed correctly, that’s me dressed up as a television
set at the Vorin Hall Fancy Dress competition. We had our first
telly a few years earlier, in the wake of the Queen’s coronation.
You can see the picture on the Radio Wales website. The Sheikh
and the pirate alongside me are my brothers.
So that’s where my media career started. In Colwyn Bay.
We must have liked it because we came back. Pwhelli and Rhyl.
Vast estuarial beaches! Castles! A real mountain! An
incomprehensible tongue. Horizons sang.
One summer, we got as far as the balmy shores of
Pembrokeshire, where they had jelly fish and where our family
posed beneath the great stones of Pentre Ifan, the neolithic
burial chamber.
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Pembrokeshire! It was as exotic to me as the olive groves of
Tuscany.
As a teenager, I did voluntary work with Down’s Syndrome
people and this involved residential summer holidays in North
Wales. I was there when the Beatles released their first single
on the Apple label, with Paul McCartney’s Hey Jude on the Aside and John Lennon’s Revolution on the B. That dates the
memory quite precisely: August 30, 1968. At over seven
minutes Hey Jude, was the longest single in British pop music
history. It was, however, the B-side that I liked best. You say
you want a revolution, we-ell you know, we all wanna change
the world.
From this platform of ironic evangelism, anything looked
possible.
I fell briefly in love, with the raven-haired and slightly severe
Bethan, who wore a pin brooch with three deep green enamelled
triangles, the emblem, she explained, of Plaid Cymru, a political
cabal to which admission was not open to the likes of me; and
which therefore, by definition, demanded thorough exploration.
In receipt of my inquiries, Bethan promptly suggested, I thought
in a rather bureaucratic manner, that I transfer my personal
affections to her best friend Dilys, but she had got me started.
Soon, I was championing in my school debating society the
political claims of all non-English nations, whilst drawing the
sharpest of distinctions between the benign version of
nationalism embraced by the exploited and the unattractive
imperial form deployed by the bossy English or the genocidal
Adolf Hitler, to whose defeat my father had given seven,
unbroken years of military service.
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In the mind of a Burnley teenager, with experience of
international affairs acquired through extensive travel in Colwyn
Bay, Prestatyn and St Davids, the answer to most issues in the
world was by now increasingly self-evident, from Prices and
Incomes Policy to the Cold War. Among the abundant sources
of inspiration, I particularly recall: Small is Beautiful, E. F.
Schumacher’s book, subtitled: Economics as if People Mattered.
More ironic evangelism with a direct line into Wales.
But if this was a love affair between myself and Wales, it was,
I’m sorry to say, followed by a long period of benign neglect.
I went to university, discovered journalism and worked first in
Yorkshire, and then all over the world, most memorably in New
York, where I was the Financial Times New York
Correspondent when Ronald Reagan displaced Jimmy Carter.
I loved this job, but during the summer of 1981 we drove from
New York to Los Angeles through Virginia, Tennessee, Texas
and Arizona.
As we travelled, cutting from one music station into another, the
skimpy news summaries were astonishingly dominated by news
from home.
Charles was marrying Diana. So what – where shall we camp
tonight?
Brixton is in flames. What? Brixton? Brixton in London? Who
can tell me more?
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When my boss asked whether I would like to move from New
York to Washington, I said that I wanted to be back in Britain.
What on earth was Margaret Thatcher up to?
I got back just in time for the Falklands War. In my new job, I
sometimes visited Wales, usually to witness some downward
twist in the fate of the coal or the steel industry or to understand
what was really going on in the miners’ strike.
Then other jobs and other journeys took me to the end of the
century.
As we approached the new Millennium, my perspective again
shifted towards Wales for family reasons. My wife’s parents, in
semi-retirement from Ministry in a London Baptist Church, had
found themselves a home in the hills near Llanwrda in
Carmarthenshire.
Here was a wondrous place to think, talk and write about the
promised politics of the Blair era for our new, centre left think
tank, Demos. Here we would reconcile the optimism,
authenticity and fairness of communitarianism - the intrinsic
beauty of the Small - with the ambition and determination to do
well in the Big; the globalised economy which lay before us
following the Thatcher and Reagan years.
In these circumstances, devolution for Wales, if the people of
Wales wanted it, would be a no-brainer.
Then, in one of those serendipities that change lives, a job came
up at the Cardiff University Journalism School, which gave me
the chance to think and write about journalism, re-balance work
and family and pursue a freelance life in print and broadcasting.
One of these freelance projects, with my friends at the TV
production company Presentable here in Cardiff, was a
documentary for Channel 4, called Enter The Dragon. Its
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argument was that England had a whole lot to learn from Wales,
not the other way around.
The untransmitted highlight was a scene shot in Cardiff’s main
shopping street, where I walked and talked with First Minister
Rhodri Morgan as a way of demonstrating the pleasing
informality of Welsh public life – one of the things England
should learn from Wales …. you get the point.
As we walked a small group of youths hailed us and Rhodri,
never one to miss a chance with voters, loped towards them,
handshake at the ready. “Hey, one of them said: you’re that Ron
Davies aren’t you.” The programme got top ratings in those
Welsh homes then capable of receiving Channel 4 broadcasts;
so far as I can tell it wasn’t watched by a soul in England.
But that is what I really, really like about Wales. Its lack of
pomposity; its disregard for the new new thing, its unassuming
modesty. Beautiful and liveable -a place where you are happy
to raise children.
Its values, to be sure, are sometimes in tension with the roaring
affairs of the planet at large and perhaps this is, in some part,
what nourishes the Welsh creative genius: rooted but not
parochial.
I love the memorial in Cathays Park in Cardiff to the Spanish
Civil War. As a teenager, I got to know the work of the poet RS
Thomas and his peasant farmer, Iago Prytherch, he who “pens a
few sheep in a gap of cloud.” Note the grace of transfiguration
in simple, monosyllabic meter. It was also Thomas, I think,
who talked about the uncorrupted language of the birds,
contrasting it with the political distortions evident in human
language.
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But you probably didn’t come here this evening to hear me talk
about RS Thomas. I owe you some politics and disputation.
The fact that I’m fond of Wales doesn’t mean that I don’t every
now and then rage against the dying of enlightenment.
Let’s face it, Wales since devolution has been a disappointment.
Hasn’t it?
Just look at the three undisputed top priority items in any
country’s politics: economy, education and health.
The Welsh economy since devolution has gone from bad to
worse to barely better. Economic valued added per head has
fallen from 77 per cent of the UK average in 1999 to 75 per
cent. By this same measure, West Wales and the Valleys run at
65 per cent of UK average: a pretty desperate state of affairs.
Structurally, the Welsh economy has not recovered from the
short era of plentiful natural resources and associated heavy
industry. It is, for reasons which are not agreed, stuck in
yesterday.
Today, the public sector accounts for roughly two thirds of
economic activity in Wales, which at times makes it feel closer
to the monoculture of a late Soviet era satellite state, than a
diverse modern economy operating in a global marketplace.
Export performance is narrowly based; inward investment rates
are fragile and there is an anaemic level of new business births.
In the next few years, as the public sector suffers further
cutbacks in the cause of the UK as a whole maintaining
credibility in financial markets, the Welsh public sector will
shrink and more jobs will be lost.
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From the first stages of devolution, politicians here have, of
course, recognised the urgent importance of improving this
situation.
Patrick was always jubilantly sceptical about the chances of
Wales out-performing other areas of the UK sufficiently to
diminish the economic gap.
In a book published in 2002, he ran his eye over Rhodri
Morgan’s economic development strategy and applied what
Patrick called “the first rule of government plans: the likelihood
of them being achieved is in inverse proportion to the number of
adjectives used to describe the objectives.” Noting the First
Minister’s belief that Wales could romp along in the tracks of
the Irish Celtic Tiger, Patrick tersely noted the substantial
differences between the two and concluded: “Not for the first
time many people wonder what Rhodri knows that they don’t.”
Ten years ago, I thought Patrick was too pessimistic, but he was
right. So far.
If you ask most economists what to do about an economy which
has structural problems as severe as those which Wales displays,
they will tell you that the long term, strategic answer is
investment in education, the vital source of the skills
enhancement needed to enable people and institutions to
respond to economic change through innovation and
entrepreneurship, which are the engine of jobs growth in the
private sector.
Now Wales, supposedly, has an exceptionally strong cultural
attachment to the virtues of education. We all know stories, like
the one which saw Richard Burton’s elevation to greatness
under the care of a super-teacher. But we also have to face the
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fact that Wales’ performance in education is nowhere near as
good as it should be.
The so-called PISA rankings, produced by the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development and as close as you
ever get to accepted comparisons across national boundaries,
show that Wales currently ranks 38th among 67 countries in the
world for reading, 40th for maths and 30th for science. Within the
UK, Wales lags Scotland, England and Northern Ireland.
The picture in health and social care is even grimmer. We all
know that a great Welshman invented the National Health
Service. We also know that there has been no improvement in
Wales’ key health metrics since devolution; Wales has a worse
record on public health issues than almost anywhere else in the
UK.
According to the most recent official survey of health in Wales
more than half all adults are on regular, prescribed medication
and a third of us report that we had attended the outpatient
department of a hospital in the last year. Physical activity rates
have been static for a decade. Nearly 60 per cent of adults are
overweight or obese. And pressures on the health service in
Wales will get much more intense, as the number of people
living beyond 75 is due to double by mid century. As Dr Chris
Jones, Medical Director of the NHS in Wales, has said, starkly:
“If we don’t change we will be overwhelmed.”
It is, of course, a good deal easier to name these problems than
to solve them. But it is also essential to avoid drifting on a tide
of fatalism, where we start to think that nothing can change.
Those of a fatalistic disposition should look at countries as small
or smaller than Wales on the opposite flank of Europe: countries
which following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 have had to
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deal with economic, social and cultural difficulties which
exceed those faced here in Wales; countries which were indeed
monocultural Soviet satellites.
A good example is Estonia. It’s at the top right hand corner of
the map of Europe and has a population of1.3 million, which is
less than half that of Wales. Or its larger next door neighbour
Latvia, which has 2.2 million people.
The story of Estonia is one which has combined radical policy
thinking, such as the country’s flat rate income tax; with an
exceptionally strong commitment to digital technologies: I-pads
are replacing physical text books in schools as well as in
Cabinet meetings and internet access is better than the UK.
Like all European countries, Estonia was battered by the 2008
banking crisis, but in the years before that its growth rate
averaged 8 per cent a year and by 2010 it had already recovered
to today’s growth rate of around 3 per cent a year. Latvia has
also hit bumps, but it is now vying with Estonia as liveliest of
the Baltic Tiger economies, both liberal in outlook and
successfully responsive to change.
Estonia, I should add, is way ahead of Wales in the PISA
education rankings, though it trails its neighbour to the north,
Finland, which is Europe’s top performer.
The journalist and academic Anne Applebaum, an American
who is married to a Polish politician, has written brilliantly
about the end of the old Eastern Europe and the inspirational
instructiveness of these political and economic stories.
Applebaum spends some time working in North Africa and says
that since the Arab spring, there’s much more interest in the
stories of Latvia, Poland, Slovakia and Estonia than France,
Italy, Portugal or Greece. Or, she might have added, Wales.
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What serious effort is Wales making to learn from these
countries?
In a recent article in Prospect Magazine, Applebaum asks
herself what is the single most important factor in determining
whether a given post-communist country succeeded or failed in
its transition to liberal capitalism. This is how she answers her
own question:
“I would point to the existence, or absence, of an alternative
elite. And by alternative elite I mean something specific. Not
just a few economists, but a larger class or group of people who
had worked together in the past, who had adopted an alternative
set of values and who, by 1989 or 1990, were at least somewhat
prepared for Government.”
It is, no doubt, an exaggeration to compare the political and
economic momentum occasioned by the end of the Cold War
with the tide of events that made devolution a reality for
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
But it is worth reflecting upon these questions of motivation and
readiness. Or, at least, recognising that when we discuss faults
and potential solutions, we should look first and foremost, if not
first and last, to ourselves.
When I discuss with friends in Wales the decade and a bit since
devolution, I often hear it said that the level of energy and
optimism in and about Wales has diminished rather than grown.
People sometimes then add that this reflects an anxiety among
politicians and others not to create waves which might damage
or undermine Wales’ fragile new political institutions, which
opinion polls suggest have, in a quiet way, gained wider public
acceptance following the hair’s breadth Yes vote in the
devolution referendum.
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Andrew Davies, the former Labour Cabinet Minister, has used
the term “captive state” to describe the unwillingness of people
in public life to speak out strongly on the issues as they see
them: to avoid rocking the boat.
Which brings me to the main point I would like to make this
evening. Given a choice between doing something in a way
which is open, transparent and contestable or in a way which
prioritises privacy, obscured authority or even secrecy, we
should never be in any doubt:
choose open.
Or, as the point is often put in debates about information and the
Internet, we should set the default switch to open and then
mitigate the risks of being open, rather than first and foremost
worrying about loss of control. And we should use these open
channels to design solutions around the expressed and
researched preferences of users of services – of citizens.
With open also comes plurality – healthy competition between
individuals and institutions.
The opposite course tends towards the concentration of
information and power in the hands of a few: a real danger here
in Wales.
So:
- open to competition from wherever competition stems;
- open to new ideas and innovation, even where change is
painful;
- open to the movement of people, ideas and culture in the
confident belief that strong cultures learn quickly and become
stronger as a result.
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This open versus closed argument has run through our economic
and political life in the last century. It informed every breath of
the great economic arguments of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s,
when a politics based upon unrealisable protection against the
consequences of economic change was overwhelmed not so
much by an alternative politics, but by an alternative world. We
re-visited some of this debate on the occasion of Margaret
Thatcher’s death. We also still hear it, here in Wales, in Labour
Party reflections upon the Blair legacy.
Let me be clear where I stand on this. Tony Blair, in my view
rightly, told the Labour Party that it must choose open for its
approach to the economy, casting aside controls in favour of
viable regulation of an economy rooted in market information
and market transactions. Only this would protect the funding of
what needs to remain public and enable us to address other
questions of fairness.
That zone of reasonable regulation is where we need to build
our confidence in addressing issues that the market cannot
address, from climate change to constructive honesty in
banking. But capitalism’s shortcomings do not alter the need to
set the default switch to open; rather they reinforce it.
Tony Blair, however, was only half open. To his great credit, he
delivered the 2005 Freedom of Information Act, which gave
citizens the right to access much more data and information
about life inside government. Here alas is what Blair wrote in
his memoir, published in 2010:
“Freedom of Information. Three harmless words. I look at those
words as I write them and feel like shaking my head till it drops
off my shoulders. You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible
nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no
matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of
it.”
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Several fulminating paragraphs later, Blair’s source of regret is
clear: he thinks that he gave something away to journalists,
rather than to the people, and that this has made it harder to
govern well.
Wrong on both counts.
Journalism, for all its current travails, exists to serve people and
that includes challenging politicians. Strong and empowered
news media make good politicians better and help us dispose of
bad ones.
And, in the still unfolding age of the Internet, open data has
enhanced value, because of the ease with which we can organise
and distribute it.
But let me give you a more congenial example, where Wales has
done a great job, compared with, say, Scotland, in choosing
open versus closed.
Football.
For those who don’t follow the sport (I know it’s second fiddle
in Wales) Scotland has its own premier league, in which
Scottish teams play Scottish teams, as a result of which a
Scottish team always wins the championship. Fry the haggis
whole!
Wales, by contrast, is part of the, dominantly English, premier
league, which is a global market leader and so, rich, because of
the value of its television rights.
Even if you don’t follow football, you will know that Swansea
secured promotion to the premier league in 2011 and that
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Cardiff City have just secured the right to join Swansea in the
coming season, after a 51-year exile from the top flight.
Both clubs, but especially Swansea, have made progress by
taking a very open and cosmopolitan view of talent recruitment.
Swansea are managed by a Dane, who admits that he can get
better value talent by shopping outside the UK. Cardiff are
managed by a Scot, who Cardiff City fans like me are hoping
will be as good at this aspect of his job as Swansea’s Michael
Laudrup.
It is also true, however, that setting the default to open in Welsh
football involves discomfort. For years, Wales had no club in
the top tier. Some argue that the arrangement also weakened the
structures of football within Wales – there is a similar argument
in Welsh rugby.
Cardiff’s success in the last two years has depended upon risky
and high profile foreign direct investment from Vincent Tan, a
Malaysian businessman, who has angered many loyal fans by
changing the team’s colours from blue to red; awkward if you’re
known as “the Bluebirds,” but apparently rational if you are
thinking about the marketing potential for Cardiff City in Asia.
Half way through this last and eventually triumphant season,
Bristol City came to the Cardiff City stadium, occupying the
small wedge of seating reserved for away fans. They
brandished their St George’s Cross flags and taunted the home
fans with songs about human-sheep interaction. Then, when a
reference to Malaysia was shown on the stadium’s big screen,
they jabbed their fingers in jeering unison with a line which
we’ll translate roughly as: “what the hell is that?”
I wanted to go over and have a little chat with them about how
Bristol’s greatness and prosperity have grown from centuries of
global trade and open-ness and that South Wales will be very
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happy to show Bristol the way from now on, starting with the
construction of the River Severn tidal energy barrage.
Or, if I were delivering this homily today, starting with the fact
that Cardiff, as a result of Mr Tan’s investment, are now
promoted from the Championship, just as Bristol City are
relegated to the tier below.
Having taken appropriate health and safety advice, you will
understand that I did not actually deliver this lecture to the
Bristol fans, but I’m sure they’ll be listening to the broadcast of
this talk on Radio Wales.
So, what might setting the default to open mean for Welsh
politics, the economy, health and education?
It would mean that information about every area of Welsh
public life is as open as is consistent with reasonable defences
against breach of personal privacy.
It would also mean that Government ensures that not only is the
information and data needed to form judgments about policy
and other matters available, it is also there in a form which
makes it readily usable.
This is the only way to ensure that the evidence used to justify
policy decisions and political thinking is of the best possible
quality. It is also the only way to deploy the insight of those
outside government, from the individual citizen to big business,
in designing solutions to policy problems.
In the world of digital communications, where I spend much of
my time, people talk about this Big Data being “the crude oil of
the new economy.” That is why the likes of Google, Facebook
and Apple are leading the gold-rush, if you will excuse the
mixing of metaphors from different extractive industries.
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The Government of Wales needs urgently to ensure that it is an
outstanding player in this game, along with the rest of the Welsh
public sector, and that Welsh technology companies, small and
large, are well positioned and encouraged to take advantage. As
they are in Estonia.
In education, we have seen too many political jitters about the
case for putting information openly in the public domain.
School league tables are an obvious case in point; the debate
about school banding is another. The current Education and
Skills Minister has, in my view correctly, made strong use of the
PISA international comparisons, but he has encountered
considerable resistance, from teachers’ unions and from the kind
of public sector managers who simply don’t want others to be
able to debate the quality of what they do.
So let’s take another example, this time from health. Professor
Brian Jarman is an exemplary and stubborn academic, who
worked out more than a decade ago that mortality data, ie death
rates, adjusted for variables like demographics and time
patterns, could be used to provide an early warning system
against the risk of life-endangering underperformance by
individual hospitals. His work was largely unknown and, he
says, deliberately sidelined, until the scandal of the MidStaffordshire NHS Foundation drew attention to it. Professor
Jarman has argued that 20,000 lives were lost that might have
been saved had his research been deployed when it was first
available.
How does Wales today stand with regard to Professor Jarman’s
risk-adjusted standardised mortality data and its deployment in
the interests of high standards in the Welsh NHS? Well,
according to data released last month the Wales figures are not
good in two senses: first they appear to indicate what an unnamed official in a BBC news report termed a “fire alarm” by
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showing that 11 out of 17 district general hospitals in Wales
have higher death rates than the norm; but that this conclusion
has to be qualified because of the poor quality of the data
collected for Welsh hospitals.
I very much hope the new Health Minister will put the
collection, maintenance and publication of quality performance
NHS data high on his list of priorities.
In the economy, absence of openly disputable evidence is also,
very frequently, a problem. When I investigated Wales’
creative industries in 2009, the job was made harder by the
absence at the time of anything resembling an up to date map of
what was actually happening on the ground. I also drew
attention to what I felt were weaknesses in the transparency of
governance applying to some areas of public investment.
Business is currently lobbying the Welsh Government to
provide the quarterly economic growth data which is available
for Scotland and England, but not for Wales.
All of that, however, is small beer compared with the calamity
of the Technium business incubation centres, initially the
brainchild of the Welsh Development Agency and its academic
advisers. This has cost Wales an estimated £100m since the
programme started. Six of the ten Techniums, in Aberystwyth,
Baglan, Bangor, Pembroke Dock, Llanelli and Bridgend, were
axed in 2010. Ministers have blamed civil servants for not
telling them what was going on and others have blamed the
Ministers.
My colleague at Cardiff University, Professor Kevin Morgan,
has studied the matter in detail and sums up as follows: “the
failure to calibrate supply and demand, the lax administration of
grant aid, the inability to learn from mistakes and the hubris of
ambitious politicians who rolled out the centres before they had
been properly evaluated all played their part.”
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Lack of the right evidence, evaluated in the right way at the
right time; a disinclination to be open about what evidence there
was: cost - £100 million.
Setting the information default switch to open would not, in
itself, of course, guarantee a better outcome, but it would
stimulate informed discussion and analysis. From this, errors
can be corrected and new paths explored.
Professor Morgan has pointed to this affair as a lesson on a
wider front: the approach to innovation in the Welsh economy,
where what is needed is a well-informed, active state working
creatively with an ambitious and entrepreneurial private sector.
Such a vision cannot be pursued without an open approach to
well constructed and reliable data.
The same argument applies in the public sector: innovation is
the only way that we will protect and extend the quality of
services in the harsh conditions which lie ahead. That means
lessons - and collaboration - must reach with greater
determination across the great divide of public and private.
A more open approach will also lead to greater plurality and
diversity of institutions because it promotes informed discussion
about competitive competence.
And a greater diversity of institutions, from the public, private
and social sectors, enables Government to concentrate upon the
things that only it can do, for example to invest in the
infrastructure needed to open up the arteries of the Welsh
economy: rail, road, air and the best possible broadband and
mobile communications network.
Well planned infrastructure investment of this type makes any
economy and society more open and so more prosperous.
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In education, quality data, maintained and nurtured carefully and
consistently over time is also vital, for example if we are going
to be able to compare Welsh schools and universities with those
in England and Scotland. One of devolution’s unnecessary risks
is that we lose the ability to make these neighbourly
comparisons and so blunt our ability to learn from nearby.
Maybe there is no case in Wales for greater diversity of school
institutional structures – the academy debate – but let those who
make the argument on both sides deal openly with the evidence.
Institutional diversity can also be provided by social sector
institutions like Code Club, which is active throughout the UK
in teaching children software coding; and Teach First, which
encourages very bright young graduates to spend a short time
teaching before setting their long-range career course. Teach
First has been a great success in England, but Wales has so far
been wary. I hope Teach First will be active in Wales before the
year is out.
On the university front, massive open online courses (MOOCs)
which enable students in Wales to experience lectures live,
online from the world’s greatest universities may or may not
threaten existing Welsh universities, but the right thing to do is
to welcome the competition and to respond with our own ideas.
When it comes to health, the need for openly available
comparable evidence about relative performance is even greater,
because there is no sensible shape for the NHS in Wales that
avoids direct collaboration of service provision with NHS
providers on the English side of Wales’s long, landside border.
The only way to win permission for the far-reaching reconfiguration needed in health, from hospital-centred to
community-centred, is to explain the case consistently and
clearly and to build in user perceptions and requirements to
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product and service design, as is routinely the case in the
development of digital era products and services.
Let me make just two final points about openness and data.
The first is that the treasure trove of data opened up and
distributable through digital technologies calls for some
expertise in its mediation. Journalists call this “data journalism”
and this is growing everywhere, but at a time when journalism
itself, as an occupation and an industry, is being severely
disrupted by the Internet, which has transferred advertising
revenues from newspapers to the likes of Google.
If you look at the number of professional journalists in Wales, it
is comparatively low: Wales has 5 per cent of the UK’s
population and only 2 per cent of its journalists. We have seen
serious and worrying cutbacks of staff and other resources
among Welsh newspapers and even among Welsh broadcasters.
What we also see emerging, however, is a new generation of
local, sometimes called “hyperlocal” journalists, most of whom
are not full-time professionals and many of whom would not
claim any kind of professional status. They are helped by the
fact that when it comes to uptake of social media platforms like
Facebook, Wales is not a laggard at all: half of the adults of
Wales are signed up to Facebook, the same level as across the
UK as a whole.
These new community journalists or hyperlocals are, along with
experts from other parts of society, including universities, the
people to whom we will have increasingly to look to gather and
distribute news, to provide independent comment and to make
Big Data accessible to ordinary people in ways that are relevant
to their needs. This is a meaty challenge and it’s why at Cardiff
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University we have just set up a Centre for Community
Journalism, which aims to help build capacity among these new
citizen journalists. It’s an important piece of work.
My final point on the openness agenda arises from the objection
which says: this may be OK for England or Estonia, but it’s not
OK for Wales. We’re different. We don’t want the private sector
to compete for service delivery with the public sector; we don’t
even want the social sector to get too big for its boots. We trust
and prefer the State, Big or Little.
When I hear this type of argument I reach for my search engine.
For example, I have been told countless times that one reason
for the weakness of the Welsh private sector is that people in
Wales don’t care about money; their religious and cultural
heritage predisposes them to suspect competition and financial
motivation. Dog eat Dog is OK for London and the South East
but don’t try hauling the Dog Show across the Welsh border.
This is one of those arguments which it is difficult to settle. I
almost did a television documentary this year in which I
imagined myself filming on a roundabout in Haverfordwest,
with the rather splendid Pembrokeshire County Council offices
on one side and Morrisons and Halfords on the other. I wanted
to ask passers by questions about the relative pay levels of jobs
carrying similar responsibility in Morrisons and County Hall: to
find out whether Welsh people are, as I’m often told they are,
anti private business, anti-profit.
Alas, I didn’t do the research. But my Cardiff University
colleague Rob Huggins has done much better research than this,
in which he (with a colleague) computes indices which measure
the “business culture” of different regions of the UK. This isn’t
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the place to explain the fine detail of Rob’s methodology, but at
the top level, his figures unsurprisingly show that on a scale
where the UK average is 100, London is tops for business
culture (with 127) and the South East of England is strong (with
105).
Where would you expect Wales to be on this scale?
Bottom of the pile?
Not so. At almost 93, Wales is ahead of Scotland and the West
Midlands, as well as the North East and North West of England.
And the all-Wales figure, as you would expect, includes a
balance of returns by locality.
So, next question: which parts of Wales would you expect to see
running above the UK average for business culture? No, it’s not
the Vale of Glamorgan: that comes just under the average,
perhaps because of all those people like me who live there –
comfortable public sector workers with a considerable interest in
not shaking things up through the disruptions of open data and
more competition.
No, the stand-out performers for business culture in Wales are,
please take a bow:
Conwy, Denbighsire, Flintshire, Gwyneth, Monmouthshire and
Pembrokeshire.
So when I ask myself what I think about Wales, I want to think
beyond the stereotypes, especially the one that says change is
beyond us.
If we get the facts out for debate and if we look everywhere we
can for ideas and lessons, we can change things.
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Another way of putting that, in the language of policy-makers
and business schools, is to say that Wales needs a systematic
approach to innovation, which brings together the right
approach to infrastructure, taxes, education, research and
development and leadership of anchor institutions, such as
universities and other public sector bodies.
I’ve just published, along with two colleagues from Nesta, the
National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, a
Manifesto – for the UK Creative Economy. It has plenty of
lessons for Wales, where the creative economy must continue to
be a priority and where investment in digital and deployment of
its opportunities needs to push on to the next level.
Wales, small and beautiful, is perfectly sized to be a laboratory
for innovation, esggpecially in the public sector.
So, that’s the Wales I’d like to see. In Rhodri Morgan’s phrase:
A small, clever country.
But more than that. A small, beautiful, clever and OPEN
country.
Thankyou. Diolch yn Fawr.
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