Annual Report and Statement of Accounts of the Assembly Commission: 2007-08

5. How we comply with our duties

Our Boards

The Chief Executive and Clerk who is also the Accounting Officer, is accountable to the Assembly Commission (described in more detail in section 2 of this report) and to the Assembly for the management and organisation of the Assembly staff, services, resources and assets. A series of Boards were established during the year to assist her in this role.

The Executive Board

The Executive Board’s role during the year included the provision of corporate leadership, advising Commissioners on the allocation of resources to achieve objectives, managing resources and performance against objectives, ensuring an effective and transparent system of controls and to assess and manage risk.  The Executive Board comprised of the Chief Executive and Clerk, Claire Clancy; the Chief Operating Officer, Dianne Bevan; the Director of Assembly Business, Adrian Crompton and the Chief Legal Adviser and Director of Legal Services, Keith Bush.  The Executive Board met formally on 10 occasions during the year and considered issues such as key performance and corporate performance measures, a service planning and risk management framework which was focused on embedding the goals in the Assembly Commission Strategy, a leadership development programme, the Commission’s budget, the future proposals for the Pierhead building and a range of corporate policies including equalities, freedom of information, records management and data protection.

Independent Advisers

We appointed four Independent Advisers to ensure that the Assembly Commissioners and the Assembly’s senior management were supported and constructively challenged in their roles.  We wanted people with a breadth of experience in business, industry and other sectors. Their responsibilities include performance monitoring and maintaining a critical overview of the Assembly’s financial controls and risk management procedures.The advisers are:

Mair Barnes CBE
Mair holds a number of non-executive directorships and was Chair of Vantios plc and Managing Director of Woolworths plc and held non-executive directorships at DTI and the Cabinet Office.

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Richard Calvert
Richard's current position is Director of Strategy and Resources at the Food Standards Agency.  He previously held a range of positions in central and local government, most recently as Finance Director at the Department for International Development.  He is a qualified management accountant, and is a non-executive member of the Audit Committee at the Child Support Agency. He has also been a member of the Treasury's advisory panel on best practice in financial management.

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Tim Knighton
Tim is an Associate of the Chartered Building Societies Institute and a Fellow of the Chartered Association of Certified Accountants.His current position is Business Solutions Delivery Director in Companies House. He has extensive private sector experience at a senior level gained with a number of blue chipcompanies including Tesco and Goldman Sachs.

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Professor Robert Pickard
Robert provides scientific advice for the broadcasting media and an extensive range of companies, charities and public bodies. He is Emeritus Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Cardiff; Chairman of the Consumers' Association, Which?; Chairman of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management at DEFRA and Chairman of the national NGO Forum for the Royal Society of Health.

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Corporate Governance Committee

Our Corporate Governance Committee, which met for the first time in December 2007, consists of our Commissioner for Assembly Resources, William Graham AM and three of our Independent Advisers - Richard Calvert (Chair), Professor Pickard, Tim Knighton. It is an advisory committee performing a role similar to that of an audit committee in other public and major private sector organisations and meets five times a year. It advises the Commission on matters relating to risk, audit, good governance and financial practice and provides assurance to the Accounting Officer, Claire Clancy, who attends the meeting along with relevant colleagues.  Representative from the Wales Audit Office and our internal auditors, RSM Bentley Jennison, also attend.  

Parliamentary Services Board

The Board was established to provide direction, and to act as a sounding board, for the improvement of the parliamentary services provided to Members and their staff, and to those wishing to engage with the Assembly.  Chaired by the Director of Assembly Business, Adrian Crompton and attended by the Chief Executive, Directors and directorate service heads, it provided a forum to enable a step back from day to day operations in order to take an overview of the services being delivered; to drive closer and more systematic integration across services and for supportive peer and external challenge. We were delighted that Laura McAllister, Professor of Governance, University of Liverpool, was able join the Board to provide an external reference and challenge.  It met on five occasions during the year.

Operations Board

The Operations Board was established to consider issues relevant to the Operations Directorate.  Chaired by the Chief Operating Officer, Dianne Bevan and attended by the Chief Executive, service heads and their colleagues, it existed to secure and support customer-focussed service improvement, empower and engage a wide leadership team and to foster corporate working across Assembly services to improve strategic decision-making and planning.  It enabled participants to share operational decisions where there was a significant impact on other services, encourage clear and timely communication and identify risks.  The Operations Board met on seven occasions during the year.

Welsh Language Scheme

The Welsh Language Act 1993 prescribes that Crown Bodies must prepare and implement a Welsh Language Scheme and on 11 July 2007, we published our first Scheme which will run until 2011.  The Scheme is available here.  Since its launch, a team of Welsh Language Co-ordinators representing each of our 11 service areas has met regularly and has developed an action plan to ensure delivery of the Scheme’s requirements; a language skills audit has taken place; a bilingual skills strategy is being developed and a compliance report has been completed to ensure that we deliver our objectives.  The compliance return has shown excellent performance across the organisation in terms of the delivery of bilingual services to Assembly Members, our stakeholders and the public.  We hope to build on the success of our first year to ensure that we reach our ambition of becoming a truly bilingual organisation.  To do this, in the coming year we will be concentrating on raising staff awareness, mainstreaming the Scheme’s requirements, launching our Bilingual Skills Strategy and marketing our bilingual services to encourage greater take-up by our customers.

Equalities

The Commission is committed to promoting equality of opportunity and eliminating unfair discrimination in its employment practices. It has taken steps to ensure that all job applicants and staff are be treated fairly, with respect and without bias and that no one will be disadvantaged because of their gender; sexual orientation; marital or family status; racial group; religious belief, or a similar philosophical belief (or lack of any of these); disability; age; part-time or fixed term contract status; and trade union membership status/activities.

Operation Black Vote/Assembly Member Shadowing Scheme

Between October 2007 and April 2008, the National Assembly for Wales hosted the Scheme to help address the deficit in BME democratic participation in Wales. The Scheme won a Hansard Political Society/Channel 4 Democracy Award in January and there have been some positive outcomes: some of the Scheme’s participants were selected as candidates for the May local elections in Wales and also one was selected for a parliamentary seat.

Development of a Single Equalities Scheme and Action Plan

Much work was undertaken during the year to develop our Single Equalities Scheme which will set out our approach to promoting equalities as an employer and as an organisation that serves Assembly Members and interacts with the public.  The equalities team has been working to develop a consultation document for the Scheme which will go beyond the requirements of the public sector equality duties and will cover the following equalities strands: age, disability, gender/gender identity, race/ethnicity, religion/belief and sexual orientation. We aim to consult publicly throughout the summer in readiness for publication in October 2008, making contact with community groups and representative organisations to involve under represented groups in the development of the Single Equalities Scheme’s priorities for action.

Staff Equalities Survey

In February, we carried out an online staff equalities survey to profile our workforce from an equalities perspective and collect statistical data on age, grade, disability, gender/gender identity, race/ethnicity, religion/belief and sexual orientation. The survey also provided an opportunity to identify any equalities related issues that might affect staff. The data will be used to inform the evidence base for the Single Equalities Scheme and Action Plan.  

External Review of our Recruitment Practices and the Impact of these on Increasing BME Representation in our Workforce

The review consisted of analysing existing policies and practices within the Assembly Commission, examining other good practice in relation to recruitment of BME staff, and making recommendations on additional activities which the Commission might be engaged in, which would lead to both to measurable and meaningful outcomes and increase BME representation in our workforce.  Consideration of these recommendations will be undertaken in 2008/9.

Staff Equality Networks

An LGBT staff network was developed in December 2007. The network will provide informal support to LGBT employees and will be able to participate in the equality impact assessment process.  We also entered Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index for the first time – and we were delighted to be ranked as the 208th gay-friendly employer in thewhole of the United Kingdom. This is an excellent achievement for the Assembly Commission aswe have only been an employer inour own right since May 2007. A staff network for people with disabilities is currently being planned.

Health and Safety

The Commission is committed to promoting health and safety as a priority issue. Its aim is to take appropriate and reasonable steps to ensure that it conducts its business in such a way that employees and other people who may be affected by its work are not exposed to risks to their health and safety.  To deliver this Policy the Commission has published a statement of intent setting out its commitment to health and safety, strengthened the health and safety function by recruiting an appropriately qualified Health Safety Officer and merged the function with occupational health to form a more holistic team within the Human Resources Service.

Internal Communications

Effective communication is the key to the success of an organisation and in addition to day to day communications that take place between our staff, their managers and colleagues in other service areas, various stands of communication were set up or further developed in 2007/08.  These were:

Our Newspage, which is used for daily messages for staff A similar Newspage is produced for Assembly Members and their support staff. A Weekly Bulletin pulls together, in one place, various items of information that staff would otherwise have to search our intranet or Emails for, including what has happened in Plenary and Committees, a forward look of the following week's business together with staff messages of a corporate nature and all the visits, events and exhibitions that are taking place in our buildings.

Enabling the views of staff to be fed through to senior management on particular topics, Cyfnewid (Exchange) ensures that their observations are shared with their service heads and provided to the Executive Board.  A discussion forum takes place and the Executive Board then publishes a reply noting action to be taken in response to the feedback.  Llechen/Slate is a staff magazine and much more socially focused.  Published on a monthly basis, it concentrates on issues that may be of interest to staff about their colleagues; social occasions, special interest features, competitions and book and film reviews.

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