‘I hope we’ve got a parliament that’s going to last hundreds of years’
In his latest Martin Shipton Meets podcast, our chief reporter talks to Adrian Crompton, who before his recent appointment as Auditor General for Wales was a senior official at the National Assembly for many years.
THE new Auditor General for Wales doesn’t believe it’s his job to kick public sector bodies just because he can – but Adrian Crompton thinks the Wales Audit Office that he heads has a crucial role in ensuring they are run properly.
After getting an economics degree at Bath University, he worked for a while in Paris as a removal man and a barman.
But his first real job was working for the House of Commons Research Service, which he says provided him with an understanding of the need for politicians to be properly briefed with neutral information.
He says he applied for a job with the Welsh Office immediately after the referendum in 1997 which resulted in the Assembly being brought into existence.
Asked how the body has developed since, he said: “Fundamentally, the place has evolved in the space of 20 years from a pretty odd, weak institution to one today that has all the features and characteristics of any fully-fledged, mature parliamentary body, with fiscal powers now as well.
“The members themselves now undoubtedly have developed skills and the political culture you would see in parliaments all around the world.
“The staff and structures that sit around the institution are now comfortably on a par with any that you’d find in bigger parliaments elsewhere, and the whole culture of the place is now very definitely recognisable as a parliamentary one – and that wasn’t there in the very early days.”
Mr Crompton said that in constitutional terms, 20 years was a “click of the fingers – absolutely nothing” – and it was a tribute to everyone concerned that the Assembly had developed in the way it had so quickly.
He said it was a good thing that successive Presiding Officers had taken ownership of the institution and driven it forward: “The Speaker, the Llwydd, the Presiding Officer in any parliament is an absolutely critical figure and is the person best placed to act and speak on behalf of the institution itself.
“With respect to Dafydd ElisThomas in those early days, this was a newly formed institution. By crikey, it needed someone to speak on its behalf and shape it and mould it and give it self-confidence and capacity to grow. He certainly did it in his time. Rosemary Butler took it on and certainly Elin Jones is taking it on now. And I think it’s absolutely needed.”
Asked to respond to criticism that the devolution story had been too much about constitutional matters and not enough about policy delivery, Mr Crompton said: “I understand the argument absolutely, but if you haven’t got the constitutional arrangements and the structures and the capacity in place, then you won’t be able to deliver effectively through our parliamentary model.
“So all those endless wrangles in the early days about powers and definitions and so on were absolutely needed to enable any government of the day and any Assembly to undertake its role effectively.
“One of the equivalents today is around the size and capacity of the institution. Again, bone-dry to most people – it doesn’t feel to many that that’s the burning issue, But I hope we’ve got a parliament that’s going to last hundreds of years. Now is the time to get it right and fit for the future. Any institution in a parliamentary setting needs capacity – member capacity – to work effectively. Otherwise legislation will be the poorer, policy will be the poorer, governance will not be challenged and kept on their toes in the way our system demands.”
Responding to concerns about the extra cost involved in expanding the Assembly, Mr Crompton said: “There is never a good time to argue for more politicians. It’s vital, I think, for the democratic system we have in Wales to get these things right, and to get them right as soon as we possibly can. With Brexit and the devolution of fiscal powers, the pressures on the capacity of the institution have never been more than they are now, and they are destined to increase.
“The argument for some will be about the cost of more politicians. The Welsh Government is responsible for spending £15bn, making laws that affect the lives of everybody in Wales in fundamental ways. The Assembly’s job is to check and control and scrutinise and challenge all of those decisions. If you can put in capacity amongst the members to improve the work they do in that regard, you don’t have to make many improvements to legislation or many improvements to spending decisions and big government policies to recoup the cost many times over. So I think the value for money argument represented by an Assembly with better capacity, and therefore a better functioning Assembly, is frankly quite an easy one to prove.”
When it was put to Mr Crompton that the role of the Wales Audit Office was not to pat public sector chief executives on the back, but to highlight things that went wrong, he said: “Things are rarely black and white. Public service delivery is a complicated environment. I don’t see it as my job to come in and kick anybody in the public service just because I can. That’s not helpful to anyone. Where we identify things that need to be highlighted because they are poor or inappropriate, then absolutely we have to do that and do that very clearly and firmly. But I see it as our job as well to work alongside the public sector, to be partners to assist them in dealing with the challenges they face. The messages I’m getting back from leaders across the public service is that we’re pretty good at the moment in managing that relationship.”