Owen Williams
I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time this week explaining to grown adults why the Welsh Government needs to buy fuel for boats.
We’re not talking private yachts here. We’re talking patrol vessels, operated by the Welsh Government’s marine and fisheries division. One guy on Reform MS Cai Parry-Jones’s Facebook page demanded to know who in government “owned a boat”. Others were unhappy about batteries and the cost of servicing life jackets…
As always (and like a lamb to the proverbial slaughter), I did my level best to explain: Wales has a bloody big coastline. It has a fishing industry, and responsibility for enforcing fishery regulations is devolved. Welsh Government has operated patrol vessels for years. They need fuelling and servicing, and their crews need safety equipment.
I hadn’t anticipated spending my weekend explaining any of this, and yet there I was…
This unnecessary back-and-forth followed Parry-Jones’s latest attempt to “expose” what he believes to be “wasteful” Welsh Government spending. Having submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request covering procurement card transactions, the shadow minister for finance and “government efficiency” published his junior detective work on Facebook.
“BREAKING!” he exclaimed! Those Plaid rascals have been whisky tasting in France! They’ve been larging it up in Cannes with taxpayer-funded Film Festival tickets! Look! They had an expensive dinner in Dublin! They even hired campervans – for festivals! Those devils!
According to Parry-Jones, these are shining examples of public money being “squandered” since Plaid Cymru took office. Those devious, devious rascals!
So anyway, I downloaded the documents.
The first thing you should know is that the spending was already public. Welsh Government publishes procurement card transactions above £500 on its website as standard (seriously, just Google “Welsh Government procurement card transactions”). What Sherlock Parry-Jones had obtained through his FOI request were additional explanations of what the purchases were actually for.
Right, sit back. This is going to get deep.
There are 82 transactions in the disclosure, totalling £102k. Eleven of them, worth £14k, were recorded before Rhun ap Iorwerth became First Minister on 12 May. His cabinet wasn’t appointed until 13 May.
Those BRAI (‘Before Rhun ap Iorwerth’) purchases included flights and accommodation for visiting journalists, equipment, subscriptions and office supplies. They were made while Labour was still in government, although that doesn’t make them personal expenditure by Labour ministers either.
Here’s the kicker – Welsh Government is made up of not only the FM and his cabinet, but also some 5,500 civil servants. They’re the people working in departments covering everything from education and economic development to fisheries, tourism, digital services and international trade. They do those jobs regardless of which party is in power. The news often calls them “Welsh Government officials”.
It’s also worth pointing out that not every spend by a government department involves a cabinet minister.
Let’s take Parry-Jones’s infamous whisky “scandal” and the “shocking” £523.19 spend. The description says the money paid for whisky and consumables at a business engagement event in France, designed to promote Wales as a destination for inward investment.
Now, I can’t tell you whether that particular event led to inward investment. But I do know that promoting Wales overseas is something Welsh Government ministers and officials (i.e. civil servants) have been doing for decades. There’s zero evidence of a Plaid minister enjoying all that France has to offer, mainly because the transaction took place on 12 May – the same day Rhun ap Iorwerth became First Minister, and his appointment wasn’t confirmed until 8pm that evening. His cabinet wasn’t even in post until the following afternoon!
The Cannes tickets were recorded on 13 May. Two tickets, costing £618.42. That’s £309.21 each. The supplier was Marché du Film – it’s a professional film market that runs in parallel with the Film Festival. It’s a huge marketplace for international film production, financing and distribution, and Wales has a creative industry with a great deal of interest in all of it.
The film market opened on 12 May, the day before Plaid’s ministerial team was appointed. We don’t know who booked the tickets, when the arrangements were made, or who went. But it clearly wasn’t the new Plaid cabinet!
And then there’s £1,319.43 spent at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin on 21 May.
It sounds like an expensive dinner, until you read that it was a technology networking event for 14 people, with the goal of supporting inward investment. Hang on, let me grab my calculator… yep, that’s £94.25 per person.
Then there’s another dinner, at the acclaimed Pasture restaurant in central Cardiff. It cost £507.68 for eight people during a Canadian journalists’ visit organised by Visit Wales. Again, that’s just £63.46 each.
As a brief aside, my day job is communications. Hosting foreign journalists, introducing them to a destination and encouraging them to publish coverage is a standard part of tourism comms. I think £63.46 is a really weird starting point for Parry-Jones to make allegations of government extravagance.
There’s another Irish networking event, £539.34 for four. That works out at £134.84 each. Did the price include event admission? The disclosure doesn’t say, and I doubt Parry-Jones thought to ask.
The campervans are less exciting than advertised. Two camper hires, costing £682.47 and £622.52, for promotional content production at CAMP VC and the Big Love music festival. Both transactions included transport and accommodation, and both contained £400 refundable deposits. If those deposits were returned, the combined hire cost would have been £504.99.
Both events took place in July, so these were payments recorded in June for activities happening the following month. Again, the disclosure doesn’t name the people using the vehicles.
Incredibly ordinary
Some of the other transactions are also worth highlighting – mainly because they’re so, well, incredibly ordinary…
There are four tickets to a Drupal conference, at £583.96 each. Drupal is the software that runs gov.wales, the Welsh Government website. There’s nothing controversial about sending Welsh Government officials (again, civil servants) to learn about the tech they use.
Then there were nine tickets to Social Media Conference Cymru at a cost of £2,311.09. That’s about £257 per person. The conference included speakers from Meta, Channel 4, S4C and the Senedd, with a full day of sessions and refreshments. Given the amount of comms undertaken by government departments, there’s clearly a reasonable case for staff attending something like that.
There are also some delightfully-named book purchases. £923.16 for copies of Idiot Brain and £1,091.16 for Credible.
Both books’ authors, Dean Burnett and Amanda Goodall, were speakers at the Academi Wales Summer School in June. The event was designed for experienced public-service leaders, and applications had closed on 27 April, before Plaid took office. I reckon we can make a solid connection between the books and the event, don’t you?
And then there’s the spends that are actually described as ministerial.
Five transactions, totalling £3,563.72 – covering flights and train travel for ministerial delegations. The records include £1,751.86 for flights to and from Guernsey and £567.88 for return flights to Belfast.
I checked the public record. Rhun ap Iorwerth attended the British-Irish Council summit in Guernsey on 9-10 July, while Constitution Minister Dafydd Trystan Davies was in Belfast for intergovernmental talks on 24 June.
The other flight spends in June might relate to those visits, but the FOI doesn’t state who the passengers were. What we can say is that ministers undertook official engagements in both places, and the purposes of those meetings were made public.
Data analyst
It’s all so frustrating. Cai Parry-Jones claims to be a former data analyst, so as Reform’s finance spokesperson, you’d assume that understanding financial information is central to his role.
Yet in the comments beneath his post, he suggests that Welsh children are being denied educational support because Plaid ministers are gallivanting around the world on taxpayer-funded holidays.
It’s a very serious accusation. And it’s absolute bollocks, too.
I’m both a small business owner, and chair of governors at a large primary school. I know how tricky it is to make budgets stretch. I’m not going to argue against investigating “waste”. I’d like to be confident that Welsh Government is spending money properly, whoever’s in charge. But I’m not prepared to treat every invoice as evidence of some grand conspiracy against the taxpayer just “because”.
Reading the Facebook comments, a foolish number of people have accepted Parry-Jones’s version without bothering to read the explanations. And so I ruined my weekend talking fishery patrol boats with people genuinely convinced they’d discovered a national scandal.
Sadly, this is all familiar territory for Parry-Jones. He’s already made a name for himself complaining about laptops and phones. He didn’t like the autism-friendly notice on a hand dryer. And he accused the Senedd bookshop of politically influencing children by stocking some books about refugees and Black British history.
Attention
In typical Reform fashion, Parry-Jones has discovered that dressing the ordinary up as outrageous generates a lot of attention.
The thing is, we’re paying him to do a job. As an MS, he gets a public salary and a huge amount of paid support to scrutinise the government, to represent his constituents and to develop Welsh democracy. I think we should expect him to use his brain in return.
Wales has some serious problems. Our schools need investment, the NHS is under massive pressure and local government finances are woeful. There are loads of decisions taken during Labour’s 27 years in office that warrant scrutiny, and Plaid should expect the same now they’re in government.
But here’s the rub – when an elected representative actively encourages the public to see corruption in ordinary stuff, what happens when somebody uncovers something genuinely improper?
How the hell is anyone supposed to tell the difference if the boy continually cries wolf?
The post Cai Parry-Jones is a troll. And we’re paying for it appeared first on Nation.Cymru.