Buy-As-You-View likes to stress its respectable credentials, sponsoring the Inspire Wales awards, promoting ‘green’ working and most astonishing of all talking up its ‘corporate social responsibility’.  There is another spin, of course – blatant profiteering from low income households.  Inspire Wales? More like rip off Wales.

All three bidders for the £6 Million pilot to provide Welsh news for the third channel promised to democratise news provision by opening up news gathering to the masses.  Who needs professionals when you can have amateurs? 

Of course it could all go pear shaped as the Tories have promised to unpick any contract signed if they win the General Election.

But regardless of the outcome an important principle has been recognised.  Wales needs more than the BBC to provide a ‘plurality’ of news coverage, and if the market can’t provide it then the State has a role.

But clearly it is not just broadcasting that presents a problem.  Less than 1% of the population now read the Western Mail.  The business model of the regional press is imploding across the world.   As the Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger noted in his very interesting Cudlipp lecture “the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place”.

On Monday Sir Martin Sorrell, one of the biggest buyers of advertising in the world, suggested that governments might have to consider subsidising newspapers such as the Guardian to maintain a diversity of editorial viewpoints if their losses reached a point that would force them to close.

After all if banks are too important to fail why not newspapers?

I have little doubt that ‘hyper-local’ news will flourish in the digital age – as Rob Williams discussed in an excellent posting over on Wales Home.  My worry is the all-Wales level.  How can we sustain a democratic tier in the face of a profound information deficit?

As I’ve argued here before there’s a case for looking at a Welsh equivalent of the Scott Trust – the not for profit foundation that owns the Guardian Media Group. A public interest company underwritten by the taxpayer that could safeguard Welsh news.

I’m still not entirely convinced of the wisdom of this course, as previously discussed.  But if it going to happen then it needs to be won.  In my view perhaps one of the most misleading points made by True Wales is that voting No will have no negative consequences.  That somehow we’ll be able to carry on as before.

Irrespective whether you think a Yes vote will give the Assembly the tools it needs, it is certain that a No vote will be a damaging reverse in the devolution process.

We already know that Whitehall mandarins needs little excuse to sideline Welsh affairs.  If there is a no vote within the next 12 months the slow and complicated system of law making will get even worse.  Whitehall will feel emboldened and legitimised in frustrating the Assembly’s requests.

So the status quo is not an option.  Forward or back, that’s the option.  And lets not pretend otherwise.

Setting aside the questions of the lack of jobs full stop, the fact that there is NO evidence that unemployment benefits deter people from working, the increase in bureaucracy (because 1,000s of councils are paying tax rather than one big government department), all the unforeseen side-effects (as unemployed people ‘border hop’ from low benefit to high benefit areas) there is the little matter of history….  In the 1930s, unemployment in Merthyr Tydfil was so high that the authorities were no longer able to afford to provide ‘public assistance’ and the town was near bankrupt.

Sixty one years ago today – 1st Feb 1939 – S.O. Davies MP said in the House of Commones that ‘areas which have suffered widespread and longstanding unemployment ought not to be left to bear entirely the financial and social consequences of such a burden’.

Sixty one years on, that same principle holds true.

The Western Mail reports today that Forest of Dean MP Mark Harper is the first.  If the Tories win “Each department would have a minister with a specific duty to ensure Wales is not inadvertently left out of key legislation”, the paper reports.

On top of a Conservative dominated Welsh Affairs Select Committee, and Dame Cheryl herself, every Whitehall Ministry is to have a Junior Minister with licence to meddle in devolution.

I am sure the ex-pat future Welsh Secretary means well.  “It places the interests of Wales at the heart of every government department” she told the paper.  But it could easily get out of hand.

At the moment the chief frustration is a disinterested Whitehall machine and a Welsh Select Committee eager to use their oversight powers.  But we could have idle hands getting in on the act.

Surely if you invite a Minister to have a role in deciding which powers should be devolved they will exercise that right?

Has this one been properly thought through…?

Rather than changes to structures there needs to be a hard look at what works and what doesn’t, what could be done quicker and cheaper, and what people most want.

I was interested to note references to ‘AOF targets and requirements’ sprinkled through her documentation.  The Annual Operating Framework for 2010/2011 was published just before Christmas. The Minister concludes her covering letter to the bosses of the NHS in Wales: ‘I am looking to you to make sure that your organisations are aware of their responsibilities and deliver the AOF requirements’. The AOF makes a surprisingly good read.

The NHS in Wales has been moving along in a unique direction since devolution and this year’s strategies and targets build upon the strengths of policies, programmes and people that have been established in recent years. It makes me even happier to be a general practitioner serving the Welsh NHS.

If you have not read Scott Greer’s analysis of the priorities within each devolved administration and their styles I warmly commend his paper ‘Devolution and divergence in UK health policies’ to you. 

I have been mulling over how the NHS might become a political issue in the forthcoming General Election. Surely there will be no debates in the media or hustings in Wales since Welsh MPs have no say in Welsh NHS affairs? Why should precious time and energy be spent during the Welsh campaign on political issues that only matter in England?

Last week the Nuffield Report about the differences in healthcare between the four Nations ten years after devolution was published.  The media paid the most attention to the headline figures in the Report about “efficiency”. It was reported that the Welsh NHS was less cost-efficient than the English Service. The Governments in Cardiff and Edinburgh made some cogent criticisms of the report’s methods and conclusion. The report was reviewed in the British Medical Journal by Peter Donnelly, now Professor of Public Health Medicine at St Andrew’s.  Peter will be remembered in Wales as a dynamic public health doctor who worked in Cardiff and Swansea. His concluding remarks are very interesting in the context of the General Election: ‘Ten years on, anxiety on behalf of the devolved administrations is unnecessary and perhaps even patronising. Their parliaments are accountable for the performance of their versions of the NHS. The UK parliament is accountable for the financial settlement with these devolved administrations.’

What does this mean for the General Election contest in Wales? Should the manifestos of the Welsh parties only be tackling strategy and policy in relation to the ways in which Westminster will influence the Assembly? How much influence do MPs have upon decision making about the financial settlement?

But what’s happening to the poorest is only part of the story. The other part is what has happened to the incomes of the rest of society – because poverty is defined in relation to social norms.  And here is the rub: over the last 10 years the incomes of vast majority of households – the middle 80% – have gone up by around 25% (those on lower incomes have done slightly better). But the poorest 10% have seen a fall in real incomes over the decade, whilst the richest 10% have seen their incomes rocket by almost 40% (see http://www.poverty.org.uk/09/index.shtml).

There will be no eradication of child poverty while society polarises in this way. Ending child poverty needs some unpalatable action to close the income gap – increasing benefits for the very poorest and increasing taxes at the very top.  Without action to redistribute income, all the other much needed action is doomed to fail.

The Conservative Leader has pledged to cut the size of the House of Commons by 10% as part of his initiative to reduce the cost of Government.  It is of course completely unrelated to the desire to recalibrate the Parliamentary boundaries that currently disadvantage the Tories.

It is assumed that a 10% cut would reduce the size of the Welsh Parliamentary Party from 40 to 36.  But as Richard Wyn Jones from Cardiff University’s Welsh Governance Centre has pointed out, this may be an incorrect assumption.

The only clear statement setting out how the change would be implemented comes from Lord Kenneth Baker. The Tory grandee introduced a Bill into the Lords in 2006 proposing that every constituency should be equalised at  76,000 electors – up from around 56,000 in Wales at present.  This is said to be the working model by experts in the field.

That would mean just 29 Welsh MPs.  And given that the number of Assembly seats is related to the number of MPs it would cut the number of AMs from 60 to 49, throwing the Assembly into chaos.  And causing profound tensions within the main parties as politicians scrabble for seats.

Little detail has been given by the Conservatives in public about exactly how they will determine the cuts – or indeed how much money it will really save, or the exact implications for devolution.

• ITN with Newsquest, Northcliffe Media, Tindle, Boomerang and ITV Wales news staff;
• Tinopolis;
• UTV with NWN Media Ltd.

The winning team will get an annual allowance of about £7m of public money to create a replacement for ITV’s news service, aimed at providing an alternative news service to the BBC..

So what debate or media coverage has there been about this? None that I can find (though I am happy to be corrected) – which perhaps if nothing else highlights the need for an alternative to the BBC / Media Wales.