Hello!
Thanks so much for all the lovely comments and emails you sent last week following the newsletter “the maps that you need to understand Wales”.
I was really rather blown away by the response. If you missed it you can read the piece (and the whole back catalogue) here.
I want to start this weeks newsletter by talking about the Welsh Labour leadership race. So far it has, in my opinion, been pretty dire in terms of the choices presented to us. I will be doing another newsletter on this in the coming weeks when the candidates have flushed out more of their ideas but there were a few commitments by Vaughan Gething that jumped out at me.
The first was that he would not privatise the Welsh NHS.
Duh. Is he also not going to make people drive on the right hand side of the road or introduce the death penalty? This is a Labour leadership race in Wales, of course he won’t privatise the NHS!
It isn’t like his opponent is promising privatise it and he is providing an alternative. It is an empty promise and shrivels my already meagre hope that this leadership election will be a real conversation about Wales’ future.
He followed it up with more superficial promises. Take a look at this one:
So he guarantees that per head spend on the health and social care in Wales would never fall below that of England? This means nothing when it comes changing the lived experience of any Welsh person using the NHS.
Wales has an older, sicker & more spread out population than England. It HAS to spend more to deliver the same care. Just look at the maps in the previous newsletter.
This graph sums it up:
The only time Wales has dropped below England in terms of per head spend was during Covid and that was because the UK Government spaffed billions on contact tracing. If he wants to make a real promise, he should vow to pass on all the cash Wales gets as a Barnett consequential from English health spending…
By the way that black arrow on the graph was from back in the days of the coalition government when Carwyn Jones’ administration had a few years where they tried to top up other budgets by taking money from the health pot.
A big test for the S4C chairman
I have reported extensively in recent months about the situation at S4C.
The Lib Dems, Welsh Tories and Plaid have all questioned chairman Rhodri Williams’ governance of the channel. You can read what they said here.
On Wednesday Mr Williams will appear before the Welsh Affairs Committee in Westminster and the following day will appear before the Culture, Communications, Welsh Language, Sport, and International Relations Committee (really catchy name that one) in the Welsh Parliament.
And it is really important that Mr Williams appears to account for himself and the broadcaster. S4C is an essential part of the fabric of Welsh society and helps safeguard the future of the language. How it is governed is of national interest.
There a big questions for the broadcaster and its chairman about how they have handled the accusations of bullying against from CEO Sian Doyle who took an overdose after being publicly humiliated.
However the crisis has been so long running with lots of moving parts, not to mention contradictory accounts, it can be hard to get your head around exactly what has happened.
To help you I have put together this timeline of events:
Sian Doyle appointed to modernise the struggling channel - January 2022
S4C chair Rhodri Williams clearly knew that the channel needed modernisation in November of 2021 when he appointed Sian Doyle CEO to start in a few months time and he clearly felt she was the best person for the job.
"We need to be bold in order to ensure that S4C re-defines itself as a provider of creative and bold content that audiences want to engage with across a variety of platforms," he said at the time. "The board has complete confidence in Siân's ability to address this and to take advantage of the opportunities that the digital world offers."
This was echoed by Sian Doyle who said: "I look forward to working with the team at S4C and leading the organisation as it responds energetically to the changes in the media landscape, ensuring that it makes the most of every opportunity. I am joining S4C at the beginning of this transformation and I will be focused on working to empower the talent we have in Wales to innovate further in this exciting digital world".
And S4C really needed bringing into the digital world. WalesOnline have been told that some prime-time S4C shows were only getting 6,000 viewers and that only 8% of Welsh speakers under 24 watch the channel.
Sian Doyle quickly brought in Llinos Griffin-Williams as chief content officer who would be overseeing a lot of the commissioning at the channel. Both women have expressed a desire for the channel to be more accessible to people who do not speak perfect Welsh.
Improvements in viewership but some very unhappy staff
After a year of Sian Doyle's leadership there were some real green shoots of improvement at S4C in terms of viewers. Peak time viewing increasing by 16% and S4C’s share of younger viewers at its highest level for 10 years. They were also widely praised with the way they covered the World Cup in Qatar.
However there were clear rumblings before that some staff were very unhappy because briadcasting union Bectu had raised issues months around the World Cup about how staff were feeling. Sian Doyle previously told WalesOnline in an interview: "I had been there a year and Wales qualified for the football World Cup. Obviously a massive opportunity for S4C because we're the home of Welsh football, and we have the free to air rights. Plus we also had our 40th birthday. So there was a real ambition by ourselves to really make the most of this moment in time and we did put huge pressure on the team. I absolutely have to put my hands up to that and I've said that.
"Bectu [broadcasting union] gave us a letter to say that people are a bit uncomfortable and feeling scared and so on. So we did get that warning and we met with Bectu and agreed on an action plan. We did a whole listening group around where people were concerned and what they were looking for and that we had some recruitment issues.
"So we put these things in place and then refitted a transformation team in order to help us to manage that change. It was right that people put their hands up and said 'we're under pressure, there's been a lot of work', From my perspective, we listened to that, and really tried to change that and made sure that we were taking people with us from then on."
But obviously this did not go far enough and some staff remained deeply unhappy. Broadcasting union Bectu sent a letter in April this year alleging there was a "culture of fear" at the organisation. It also described "staff regularly being brought to tears" and "too scared to share their experiences".
The union letter also detailed that staff had told union representatives that they were "being ignored, belittled, undermined, or patronised by members of the management team".
Setting up a review into the culture at S4C - May 2023
Following this letter chairman Rhodri Williams and the board appointed an external legal firm, Capital Law, to carry out the investigation. He said that the letter "obviously didn't make for comfortable reading," and that "a number of points raised, if proved to be true, would give us serious concerns." He added: "They are not the type of things anyone responsible for any organisation would like to read, be that a private or a public organisation".
He also rejected suggestions that the board had reacted slowly when there had been concerns since November 2022. He said he was "comfortable" the board's independent members had responded "in the proper manner and with the requisite speed".
This review would take months and would cost £350,000. Sian Doyle has claimed she and the staff knew nothing about the review until they saw Mr Williams giving an interview about it in the S4C HQ.
Mr Williams behaves in a “threatening, aggressive, intimidating and bullying manner”- June 2023
While that investigation was going on things were unsurprisingly tense within the broadcaster. In a board meeting in June, things spilled over.
An independent report looking at testimony from employees and board members at S4C included claims the chairman shouted and acted in a “threatening, aggressive, intimidating and bullying manner” towards Llinos Griffin-Williams. The grievance was found to have been substantiated by the broadcaster’s non-executive director and former Welsh MP Guto Bebb who carried out the investigation into the incident alongside the independent HR consultancy.
Some testimony describes the chairman “rocking back and forth, going red in the face” and “was leaning into the camera shouting, his face red”. You can read the full details here.
The report also details how Sian Doyle requested more support from the chair and board regarding the allegations of bullying being investigated at the time by Capital Law. The report describes testimony that the chair “continued shouting at her” saying he would not support anyone who has allegations like this against them, but that he then corrected himself and said “if these allegations are true”.