Mr. Aled Roberts:

A great deal of goodwill, to be honest. The first stage of the process is based on whether the public body accepts responsibility for the breach alleged. There are some instances where the public body just turns around and says it is not itself but some other public body that is responsible for a particular complaint. We have some instances of those and we have others where there is a ready acceptance of responsibility, but we might not be satisfied with the explanation given and we want to investigate to understand. The body may have put its hands up but we want to know how it got into that position in the first place because it assured us previously it had sufficient measures in place to ensure this kind of breach did not occur.

We have a small number of a cases, and I can provide the committee with statistics to give some indication of the number involved, where the public body does not accept responsibility and I have to undertake an investigation. At the outset of the investigation I can call for evidence from the public body. I must ensure the call for evidence is sufficiently broad to ensure I have all the evidence before me to come to a reasonable adjudication. Luckily, those instances are, if anything, reducing in number as the bodies become more aware of the workings of the standards.

Among those bodies where there have been a high number of complaints, there was a tendency for those complaints to be dealt with by the Welsh language unit and the Welsh language officers. Because the senior management teams within those organisations are concerned about the attention that is drawn to them for breaches of language legislation, we have seen the language complaints increasingly being dealt with by the corporate complaints department, which means the evidence provided to us is substantial and allows us to come to a proper decision earlier in the case. Among those same public bodies, I spend a lot of time, as do my directors, maintaining those relationships at the higher level so there is an awareness that we are actually keeping tabs on them.