CHILDREN, YOUNG PEOPLE AND EDUCATION COMMITTEE COMPLAINT

From: contact@assembly <Contact@assembly.wales> - Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2019 at 13:24
Subject: RE: feedback / complaint - (email address removed)

Dear (name removed), - Thank you for your enquiry.

As you have highlighted, standing order 17.43 states that “A motion proposed under Standing Order 17.42 must identify the grounds on which the Member proposing it believes should give rise to the exclusion of the public.”

Standing order 17.42 states that “A committee may resolve to exclude the public from a meeting or any part of a meeting where …” and goes on to list a number of reasons to explain why the public might be excluded from that part of the meeting. These are listed i – ix, and the one relevant to the specific motion is included in brackets, as is the case in the example you have copied and pasted in your enquiry below.

17.42(ix) refers to excluding the public on the grounds that – “any matter relating to the internal business of the committee, or of the Assembly, is to be discussed.”

You can find a copy of the full list of reasons in the Standing orders which can be accessed here:

https://www.assembly.wales/NAfW%20Documents/Assembly%20Business%20section%20documents/Standing_Orders/Clean_SOs.eng.pdf

If you would like more information, you can contact us by calling 0300 200 6565 or emailing contact@assembly.wales

The National Assembly for Wales is committed to providing an outstanding service. To help us to do this we invite you to take part in this survey to monitor and improve the service we provide to our customers. This will only take a few seconds and we appreciate your feedback – Public Information Feedback Form

Best wishes, - Ceri Williams - Public Information Officer, National Assembly for Wales

email from M59-20190528 to Ceri Williams - Public Information Officer, National Assembly for Wales.

Your ref: 6342
Our ref: PWAL-AV-CYPE-2020-01-11-DPR-to-WAG-email

Subject: Children, Young People and Education Committee meetings, 18 & 26 September 2019

Dear Ceri

Further to my initial complaint on 15/12/2019 and your email dated 16/12/2019, please identify the location, time and status (in public or private) when the Children, Young People and Education Committee of the Welsh Assembly Government discussed the paper "Are our children's lives being put at risk? and. Is the Welsh Assembly Government party to that risk?" Submitted to them by David Richards and Neilson Kite on the 22nd August 2019?

The Committee's reply indicates that they have researched and discussed the content of our paper and they must have done so on either the 18 or 26 September or most likely on both of these dates. However, it is clear from the National Assembly for Wales website that they have not done so in public. The purpose of this email is to request information from you about when the Committee discussed our paper.

I would like to draw your attention to the wording of Standing Order 17.42 (ix) which relates to excluding the public from Committee meetings:

"any matter relating to the internal business of the committee, or of the Assembly, is to be discussed."

In particular, I would like you to pay attention to the words "internal business" which in this case would mean that the committee could only discuss actions or tasks that pertain to their collective body (the Committee) or of the Welsh Assembly Government internal affairs.

This would mean that any other organisation discussed by the Committee including the children and young people of Wales or the education system of Wales are regarded as external because they are not part of the CYPE Committee or the Welsh Assembly Government's internal affairs. The standing order to which you refer in the sub-section "Openness of Committees" "Standing Orders of the National Assembly for Wales" , also has options 17.42 (i) to 17.42 (viii) which gives committee members several opportunities to exclude the public from meetings on matters relating to the external affairs of the Committee or Assembly. Therefore, if the Committee is to conduct a private meeting about a paper submitted by an external organisation or includes information about external organisations then they would use one of these options as the reason why they cannot discuss it in public.

As I have mentioned previously in my initial complaint, Standing Order 17.42 (ix) appears as the grounds for excluding the public on both the meetings of 18 & 26 September 2019.

"(ix) any matter relating to the internal business of the committee, or of the Assembly, is to be discussed."

For your information, I attach a copy of our paper (Are our children's lives being put at risk? and Is the Welsh Assembly Government party to that risk?) submitted to the Committee on the 22 August 2019 together with a copy of the reply from the Committee dated 26 September.

If you check the dates of the Committee meetings in between these dates, you will see that the two previously mentioned dates, 18 & 26 September are the only possible dates in which the Committee could have discussed our report yet no information about our paper appears on the National Assembly for Wales website during the public sessions for the meeting.

If you check the content of our paper, you will note that the following external (to the CYPE Committee and Welsh Assembly Government) organisations or people are included in our paper.

Dai Richards, Neilson Kite, Play Wales/Chwarae Cymru, Adult Learning Wales, United Nations, Play Education (Bob Hughes), Playlink, Welsh Government (Minister for Children) and Welsh children.

The following external (to the CYPE Committee and Welsh Assembly Government) organisations or people can be found in the content of the Committee's reply.

Dai Richards, Welsh Government, Play Wales, UK Government Health and Safety Executive.

Please can you confirm receipt of this communication, together with an estimated date of when I can expect to receive a reply. - regards M59-20190528

The Assembly complaints contact team forwarded my complaint to the CYPE Committee.

Dear (name removed),

Further to the correspondence below, I have been asked to respond to your correspondence below (received by the Committee team on 14 January 2020).

Timeline

· Your hardcopy letter (dated 22 August, and re-attached for completeness) was received by the Chair’s office in August 2019.

· As the letter was received in her capacity as Chair, in accordance with usual practice, her office shared a copy with us for logging and processing on 30 August 2019.

· A response, sent in the Chair’s name on behalf of the Committee, was posted to you on 26 September 2019 (copy attached).

Consideration of the letter and paper

Your correspondence asks for information about the location, time and status (public/private) of the Committee’s discussions about your letter and paper, and raises concerns that Standing Orders were breached. I can confirm that they were not breached, for the reasons outlined below:

· As a matter of course, letters/emails/correspondence received by the Chair are first handled by the Committee team (for which I am responsible as Clerk).

· Due to the volume of correspondence the Committee receives, not all letters/emails etc are shared with all Members – they are most often handled by the Committee Clerk in consultation with the Chair only.

· This is the process that occurred in relation to your correspondence.

· As such, your letter and paper were not placed on the formal committee agenda, nor were they discussed in formal committee, either publicly or privately.

Next steps

· As the Committee is an entirely separate entity to the Welsh Government, the Chair’s letter of 26 September suggested that you may wish to draw your concerns to the attention of the Welsh Government and request clarification on its position.

· The Chair also offered, on the Committee’s behalf, to consider any further correspondence you might wish to send – this offer remains open and we would be happy to liaise with the Chair (and the Committee, if deemed necessary by the Chair) should you wish to share anything further.

· In line with the information provided by the Chair in her letter of 26 September, the Committee questioned the Minister and Deputy Minister for Health and Social Services about Play Wales’s funding in the recent scrutiny of the budget. You can see the transcript, and the additional information provided by the Welsh Government following the session – including details about Play Wales’s budget – on the Committee’s website.

· You may also be interested in the Welsh Government’s recent statement announcing its Ministerial Play Review, developments relating to which the Committee will follow with interest.

If I can be of further assistance, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Kind regards, - Llinos Madeley - Clerk, Children, Young People and Education Committee, National Assembly for Wales

Our Reference: 20200210a-EM-ABWA-DPR-to-CYPE-CP06

Subject: Paper submitted by David Richards and Neilson Kite to the CYPE Committee dated 22 August 2019:

"Are our children's lives being put at risk? and. Is the Welsh Assembly Government party to that risk?"

Dear Llinos,

Thank you for your reply to my complaint dated 11 January 2020 and your offer of further assistance. There several points in your reply on which I would clarification or further information so I am pleased to take you up your offer.

To make it easier for both of us I have formatted this letter as follows

Information: I will provide you with the information contained in you reply on which I would like further information.

Question: This identifies the additional information I would like to receive.

Answer: I will leave this blank so for your ease and if you would prefer it, you can cut and paste the information/question/answer section, add the additional information requested and reply using the same format. I'm sure you will find this an easy system to use as have others with whom I've had contact previously. This system begins here:

CLARIFICATION AND/OR FURTHER INFORMATION REQUEST

1 - MISSING INFORMATION

1i - Information: The first item to which I refer is an error in the information you attached to your reply. I refer to the Timeline first line:

"Your hard copy letter (dated 22 August, and re-attached for completeness) was received by the Chair's office in August 2019".

You should be aware that the scanned copy of our paper attached to your email did not include appendices i and ii. These appendices were evidence of Welsh Government funded life threatening play taken from a Play Wales publication. You will see these referred to at the end of the paper so therefore it is not complete as submitted to the Committee as you have stated in your email ("re-attached for completeness"). These appendices were stapled to the document when they were sent to the chair and other members of the Committee. I attach these documents to this email as a .pdf and in .jpg format so that you will be able to identify them in your records.

1q - Question: Were these appendices attached to our paper when you received it from the Chair Lynne Neagle A.M. when you logged it on 30 August 2019?

1a - Answer:

2 - COMMITTEE DISCUSSIONS

2i - Information: In Consideration of the letter and paper, point 4 you state that the Committee did not discuss our paper formally". "As such, your letter and paper were not placed on the formal committee agenda, nor were they discussed in formal committee, either publicly or privately."

2q - Question: Did the Committee members discuss our paper informally, for example, did they discuss it amongst each other, vocally in person or over the telephone, by text or by email. Did the Committee members communicate about our paper by any method?

2a - Answer:

3 - COMMITTEE REPLY (dated 26 September 2019)

3i - Information: In your sub-section, "Consideration of the letter and paper", points 2 and 3 you state what the process was for our paper arriving at your office. "·Due to the volume of correspondence the Committee receives, not all letters/emails etc are shared with all Members – they are most often handled by the Committee Clerk in consultation with the Chair only." This information is generic and not specific but it does infer that you wrote the letter as a reply to our paper.

3q (i) - Question: Please confirm that you are responsible for the content of the Committee's reply dated 26 September 2019 with consultation or advice from the Committee chair. If this is not the case, please state who was responsible for the final content of the letter.

3a (i) - Answer:

4 - PAPER

4i - If you refer first to the wording of my complaint:

"Further to my initial complaint on 15/12/2019 and your email dated 16/12/2019, please identify the location, time and status (in public or private) when the Children, Young People and Education Committee of the Welsh Assembly Government discussed the paper "Are our children's lives being put at risk? and. Is the Welsh Assembly Government party to that risk?" Submitted to them by David Richards and Neilson Kite on the 22nd August 2019?

The Committee's reply indicates that they have researched and discussed the content of our paper and they must have done so on either the 18 or 26 September or most likely on both of these dates. However, it is clear from the National Assembly for Wales website that they have not done so in public. The purpose of this email is to request information from you about when the Committee discussed our paper."

You will note from the above complaint that it only mentions our paper. The main focus of your reply however is our cover letter which is referred to in the timeline and is partnered with the paper when you discuss the process. This cover letter to which you refer only introduced our paper to the committee and is not a record of note. Our contact with the Committee therefore should only have been logged as a 'paper' submitted for consideration by the Committee and not a letter. In future please can you only refer to our contact with the CYPE committee as a 'paper', it was not a letter. This will avoid confusion with other letters we have sent to the Committee.

I am concerned that you have not dealt with our complaint correctly, not only have you ignored the paper In your description of the process of how our paper was handled, you use general terms throughout and not specifics. I quote from your email below:

"· As a matter of course, letters/emails/correspondence received by the Chair are first handled by the Committee team (for which I am responsible as Clerk)". You also state that " Due to the volume of correspondence the Committee receives, not all letters/emails etc are shared with all Members – they are most often handled by the Committee Clerk in consultation with the Chair only." Again these are not specific to our paper because you only mention in this process letters/emails/correspondence.

The Committee's response indicates that our paper was within its remit.

4q (i) - Question: Would it be normal practice to share all 'papers' submitted to the committee that fall within the Committee remit to each of the Committee members?

4q (i) - Answer:

5 - COMMITTEE MEMBERS RECEIPT OF PAPER

5i - Information - We sent our paper to all members of the Committee by recorded delivery. The post office website has confirmed the delivery of the six papers to the offices of the Committee members.

5q (i) - Question - Were you aware that all members of the Committee received our paper?

5a (i) - Answer:

5q (ii) - Question: Which members of the Committee, if any logged our paper with you?

5a (ii) - Answer:

6i - Information - The following additional publications were included with the Committee's response

Welsh Government - Wales - A Play Friendly Country (2014)

HSE - Children's Play and Leisure - Promoting a Balanced Approach (2012)

Play Safety Forum - Managing Risk in Play Provision (2013)

6q (ii) - Question: Were you responsible for adding these publications? If not, please can you indicate who identified each publication as a suitable publication to accompany your response?

6a (ii) - Answer:

Thanks again for your reply, I look forward to receiving the requested information. Please acknowledge receipt of this email. I will assume that your turn around time to reply will be under 20 days as per your last email. If this is not the case please can notify me with an estimated reply date. Thanking you in anticipation.

regards - Dai Richards

attachments - .pdf = paper-missing-info (appendices i and ii)

also enclosed as

.jpg images - 40-deep-play.jpg & 59-deep-play.jpg

We requested further information from the CYPE Committee clerk by email - This email is not available to view yet. Below are notes relating to this email.

CYPE-CP06		CYPE-CP06 - What is clear from information contained in the above reply is that the Committee have broken the National Assembly of Wales rules. If we look at their reply to our paper (illustrated left) we will see that it is clearly a response from the Committee which is made up of 6 members from a cross-representation of the parties. The reply dated 27/1/2020 from the Committee Clerk Llinos Madeley indicates that she is responsible for the reply with guidance from the Committee Chair. If we look at the Committee guidance and rules contained on the NAW website (link below) we will see that if this is the case then the clerk cannot be regarded as a member of the Committee and the Chair if replying on her own without reference to the other members of the Committee then it is not a reply from the Committee because there is no cross-party representation. If we refer to our Notes on CYPE Committee Private Meetings and the use of the word 'formal' in the clerk's reply (below) we might see why the CYPE Committee meet every week in private without identifying why. Are they meeting informally discussing the life and death policies in which they are placing Welsh children? · "As such, your letter and paper were not placed on the formal committee agenda, nor were they discussed in formal committee, either publicly or privately." (Llinos Madeley, Committee Clerk)
		NAW Committee information https://www.assembly.wales/en/bus-home/committees/Pages/what-is-a-committee.aspx
CYPE-CP06		If we refer to the "Timeline on the above reply from the Committee Clerk you will see that she states "Your hardcopy letter (dated 22 August, and re-attached for completeness)" This attachment was missing the appendices (illustrated left) from our paper. We have to ask the question "Why is this information missing?" I believe the reason the information is missing is because it shows evidence of the Welsh Government funded 'child neglect'. We have requested information from the Committee Clerk to identify if the appendices were attached to the paper when logged by the clerk or if they were removed beforehand by the Committee Chair.
CYPE-CP06b		A request for further information was sent to the Committee Clerk on 10/2/2020 - no reply or automatic confirmation of the email delivery was received by 15/2/2020.
CYPE-CP06c		A follow up email requesting confirmation of the email delivery was sent on 15/2/2020.
CYPE-CP06d		The Clerk to the Committee, Llinos Madeley replied to the above email on 20/2/2020 stating that she had received our email and that she will respond as soon as she is able. The NAW policy states that they should reply within 20 working days, (by 9/3/2020).
		Dear Mr Richards, Thank you for your message. Please find below answers to each of your questions in the format requested. 1q - Question: Were these appendices attached to our paper when you received it from the Chair Lynne Neagle A.M. when you logged it on 30 August 2019? 1a - Answer: Everything we log is kept electronically. The appendices were not logged or saved electronically. When drafting the response in September I did not have sight of the appendices, just the letter and paper. I have checked with the Chair’s office and the original hard copy is not available to be able to check if the appendices were received along with the letter and the paper. Having read the appendices, I see that the information they contain was reflected in your original paper and am therefore satisfied that the response dated 26 September 2019 draws on this. 2q - Question: Did the Committee members discuss our paper informally, for example, did they discuss it amongst each other, vocally in person or over the telephone, by text or by email. Did the Committee members communicate about our paper by any method? 2a - Answer: The only communication among committee members I was party to about your letter and paper was between myself as clerk and the chair of the Committee. (avoided the question) 3q (i) - Question: Please confirm that you are responsible for the content of the Committee's reply dated 26 September 2019 with consultation or advice from the Committee chair. If this is not the case, please state who was responsible for the final content of the letter. 3a (i) - Answer: I drafted the letter as Committee Clerk, in consultation with the Chair and Committee Researcher. 4q (i) - Question: Would it be normal practice to share all 'papers' submitted to the committee that fall within the Committee remit to each of the Committee members? 4q (i) - Answer: For the reasons explained in my response of 27 January 2020, not all information received by the Committee (whether referred to as a ‘paper’ or by another title) is shared with all Committee members. 5q (i) - Question - Were you aware that all members of the Committee received our paper? 5a (i) - Answer: No. Members would not necessarily notify the clerk of all correspondence they receive if personally addressed to them. 5q (ii) - Question: Which members of the Committee, if any logged our paper with you? 5a (ii) - Answer: Lynne Neagle AM, Committee Chair. Members deal individually with correspondence they receive if personally addressed to them. 6q (ii) - Question: Were you responsible for adding these publications? If not, please can you indicate who identified each publication as a suitable publication to accompany your response? 6a (ii) - Answer: : I included the publications which you list, in consultation with the Chair and Committee Researcher. They were provided to you in hard copy (along with the hard copy letter) to ensure that you had access to the sources of information to which the Committee’s letter of 26 September 2019 referred. Kind regards, Llinos

The Assembly has decided on a committee structure which gives committees the power to both scrutinise the government and associated public bodies and to scrutinise legislation, within a subject remit.

The Assembly has committees set up to look at specific subjects. Each committee carries out tasks such as examining a proposed law (a Bill) or conducting an investigation into policy decisions made by the Welsh Government. The decisions a committee makes may be written into a report which can be discussed in Plenary by all Assembly Members.

Between them, the Assembly committees examine the areas of law that the Welsh Government is responsible for. These subjects are the areas of Welsh life that have been devolved to the Assembly from the UK Parliament in London.

Each Committee can examine a range of issues that fall into their area of interest (their remit). A committee’s remit is indicated by its title. For example, the Children, Young People and Education Committee examines issues affecting Children and Young People.
Committees usually examine an issue through a process called an ‘inquiry’.

An inquiry is an investigation into a certain topic to see what the Welsh Government is currently doing, and whether any improvements could be made. Examples of past inquiries include looking at whether school meals in Wales are healthy enough, whether Wales should have its own cricket team, and looking into the standard of services of neonatal care in Wales.

A committee can look at any subject matter within its remit. There are a number of places that ideas for committee inquiries can spring from. These include:

Assembly Members’ ideas, based on their political and personal experiences and interests or on contact with their constituents;

suggestions from individuals and organisations (through contact with a committee as a whole, or with individual members);