Mr. Aled Roberts:

At the time the measure was introduced, a conscious decision was taken that the commissioner would not just be the regulator. We retained some duties with regard to language promotion. In the main, these relate to seeking to ensure private companies and the voluntary sector ensure services are available through the medium of Welsh. Through the standards, the regulations also provide us with the ability to ensure the public bodies we regulate take steps to promote the language as well. The Senator will see the language standards do not just relate to service delivery. They also place responsibilities on those public bodies to assess the impact on language of any policy decision they make. A certain number of these bodies, including all of the local authorities, also have a responsibility to produce a five-year promotion plan to ensure the usage of the language and the number of speakers increase within their areas.

If I am honest with members, I have to say that during the initial period the standards were introduced, a lot of attention was given to service delivery to ensure reception areas and so on had public information etc. readily available in both languages. If you look at the investigations that were undertaken during the first three or four years, they mainly concentrated on complaints received which related to the lack of websites being available in both languages, the lack of public information that was available and the lack of staff who were able to provide the service in the Welsh language.

As our office has matured and as the workings of those primary standards have settled down, we have seen our functions move to being much more critical as to whether the standards relating to policymaking and promotion are sufficient. We are going through the second promotion plans now and they are all being prepared. Half of the local authorities are preparing their five-year plans this year and the other half will prepare them next year. We have provided guidance on what we would expect to see in a good promotion plan with the hope that this will improve the quality of the plans. To be honest, the quality of the first round of plans was not what we would have hoped for and is not what we would expect to see in the second round of plans that are being prepared.