COMMISSION ON THE POWERS AND ELECTORAL ARRANGEMENTS OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY FOR WALES

MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS

of the

EVIDENCE OF:

NATIONAL MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES OF WALES

held at

Committee Rooms

County Hall, Haverfordwest

on

11th April 2003

LORD RICHARD: Good afternoon. Thank you very much for coming and thank you for bringing it forward, which is certainly a convenience for some travellers today. What we have asked people to do is first of all formally to identify themselves for the purposes of the transcript and then to talk for five or ten minutes to open up the subject as you see it, and then the Commission could pursue the issues that it would like to, if that is alright.

MR LOVELUCK: I am Paul Loveluck, the President of the National Museums and Galleries of Wales and I have with me Dr Eurwyn Wiliam, who is currently the acting Director-General of the National Museums and Galleries of Wales. Let me explain that particular circumstance. The previous Director left last October, a new Director has been appointed who takes up post on Monday, and Dr Wiliam has been acting very well in that capacity for the last six months.

Thank you for the opportunity to come and talk to you. Just a bit of scene-setting background first of all but not too much of it. The National Museums and Galleries of Wales currently has eight locations in Wales. In a couple of years there will be nine because with Swansea City Council we are building a new Industrial and Maritime Museum at Swansea and hopefully not too long after that we will have some presence in this part of Wales because we are working with Pembrokeshire National Park to see whether we can establish some facility where we can display on rotation the Graham Sutherland collection which we hold. We are an organisation of some 630 staff and last year we entertained almost 1.3 million visitors, a figure which has increased quite remarkably in recent years because of the introduction of the free entry policy, which is something the Museum has aspired to for many years and we are delighted that the Assembly has brought it about at a very quick rate.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: What was the resultant increase?

MR LOVELUCK: It went up some 80 per cent.

LORD RICHARD: Really?

MR LOVELUCK: It was quite phenomenal. What is encouraging, and we will come back to this later perhaps, is that there has been quite a strong increase in the C2 to D categories of the population and that is encouraging because we aspire to support the Assembly in their social inclusion policy. The National Museum was established by Royal Charter almost 100 years ago and it is also a registered charity, so we have to comply with the terms of the statutes of the Charter and in a sense we are responsible to the Privy Council for that, and also with the provisions of the Charity Commissioners. So those are requirements of governance which exist alongside the obligations we have to the National Assembly as an Assembly Sponsored Public Body. The management of the Museum is vested in a Council of 16 people, four officers and 12 members. As a registered charity, the councillors are trustees and subject to charity law and we have to be mindful that we fulfil our obligations under charity law. Another element of the governance of the National Museum is the Court to whom we must present a report as Council members at least once a year and the Court also has responsibility to appoint some of the members of the Council. It is a typical Edwardian organisation, and it is mirrored in the National Library of course, which is a sister organisation, and the University as well.

I draw your attention to the responsibilities of the Court. At one time it had a cast of thousands, at least it appeared so, with150 on the Council, now mainly reflecting the various reorganisations of local government in the last 30 years, it is down to a more manageable number, 40-odd?

DR WILIAM: 50.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: What sort of people are on the Court?

MR LOVELUCK: It includes nominated representatives of local authorities, of a good number of public bodies in Wales, for example the Countryside Council for Wales, the University ---

TED ROWLANDS: Members of Parliament.

MR LOVELUCK: There are four Members of Parliament on it. It is supposed to represent a cross-section of informed opinion in Wales.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Thank you very much.

LORD RICHARD: Since you have been interrupted can I interrupt you on another point, the ASPB point. You are not a normal ASPB?

MR LOVELUCK: No we are not and this is where any question, to cut to the chase, of extending the powers of the National Assembly vis-à-vis registered charities has to take into account the wishes of the Privy Council and the Charity Commissioners because one thing we do not want to do is imperil our status as a registered charity because that is very important for us.

LORD RICHARD: You behave as if you were an ASPB?

MR LOVELUCK: As we say in the paper, this interface is not terribly well articulated and it is one of the issues we do have to try and articulate in the next session. The reason we have to articulate it in the next session is because there has been a quinquennial review of the National Museum at the instigation of the Assembly and one of the recommendations of the review is that the Court of Governors should be abolished, and the Welsh Assembly Government has accepted that.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Who carried out the review?

MR LOVELUCK: The review was carried out by a team of people including people from Leicester University.

DR WILIAM: I understand that it was a firm of consultants based in the University of Birmingham.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: What sort of people - auditors or museum experts or art historians?

DR WILIAM: They sub-contracted two museum experts onto their team so it was a well-balanced team.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: It was generally accepted from early on as the right way to conduct a review?

DR WILIAM: Yes, we felt it was a comprehensive and positive review.

LORD RICHARD: Is that the way the previous reviews had been done on that sort of pattern?

DR WILIAM: The pattern seems to vary. Sometimes they are done in-house. The current review of the Royal Commission on Ancient Monuments has been done in-house by civil servants.

PAUL VALEIRO: Who commissioned it?

MR LOVELUCK: The Welsh Assembly government. It was not exceptional. They have a policy of reviewing all ASPBs every five years.

LAURA McALLISTER: Just a point of clarification about your status. You are not unique in having charitable status, the Sports Council and Arts Council have, but are you unique in having your own Charter and charitable status?

MR LOVELUCK: No, the National Library has that status too.

LAURA McALLISTER: Only those two?

MR LOVELUCK: The Arts Council may have it too but they may not be a registered charity, I am not sure.

LORD RICHARD: That makes the interface blurred.

MR LOVELUCK: It has not been articulated and we do have to try to articulate it because of these proposals coming out of the quinquennial review. There are two of them. The first is to get rid of the Court, and that of itself precipitates the need to consider how the Council is composed. The issue which we have consider is who holds the balance of appointments on the Council? In the quinquennial review they did address this issue and the reviewers thought it was important, bearing in mind the importance from the Charity Commission standpoint, that the trustees were clearly seen to be independent and to exercise their judgement in the long term interests of the charity. Thus the quinquennial reviewers thought that the balance of appointments should be with the Council itself seven to five with the Officers also being appointed by Council. The Welsh Assembly government takes the opposite view and argues that it should be seven to five in their favour, plus all the officers being appointed by the them, and that is an issue that we have to consider.

LORD RICHARD: Who will resolve that?

MR LOVELUCK: It will have to be considered in conjunction with the Charity Commissioners. Their views will have to be taken into account as well as the views of the Privy Council.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: We have one Privy Councillor here and last time he was summonsed to a Privy Council on which there was consideration of such a matter would be a very long time ago.

PETER PRICE: The office does the job. They do a lot of the detailed work in looking at all these sort of amendments.

MR LOVELUCK: That is right and of course if something were put to the Privy Council which was a matter of contention they might well take a different view of it.

PETER PRICE: The office stops the thing getting there.

LORD RICHARD: I do not sit on that, I promise you that. I have never seen any pieces of paper like that. What I am interested in you say you have got to articulate the relationship and presumably you mean by that you have got to express it in clearer language. What language do you want to use?

MR LOVELUCK: We need to define and tease out what the Assembly means by the "arm's length" relationship. This is something that charitable bodies have always attached a great deal of importance to a) because it preserves their independence as Charity Commissioners and b) because it preserves their independence of action on cultural matters on which it is particularly important, because arguably it would not be a desirable situation if cultural organisations were subject to political value judgements as to the sort of things they ought to be doing. These two issues need to be teased out and the reason they need to be teased out is because we are uncertain at the moment of the way in which the balance of appointments will go on the Council, so all of those issues have got to be discussed.

There is a degree of nervousness in the Council about the proposals. It certainly does not show from anything that the Welsh Assembly Government has done to date. I have to say it has been extremely supportive of the sort of things the Museum has wanted to do - the new Swansea Museum is an example, free entry is an example. Just looking to the future, those sort of circumstances might not apply and in such cases it would be quite useful to have this arcticulation of roles and responsibilities.

LORD RICHARD: Can you tell us a bit more of the detail of the relationship with the Assembly now? How often do you see them? Do you go to Committee? Do they ask for reports from you? Do they communicate regularly with you, or is it just cash?

MR LOVELUCK: No, it is more than that.

LORD RICHARD: What percentage of your income comes from the National Assembly?

MR LOVELUCK: 95 per cent of current expenditure.

LORD RICHARD: Is that as a result of abolishing admission charges?

MR LOVELUCK: The percentage of grant in aid was in excess of 90 per cent, even before charges were abolished. I will ask Eurwyn to explain the official connections but I meet officially with the Minister once every six months. I also join with the other heads of ASPBs in meeting with the First Secretary less frequently than that. I have the sort of relationship with the Minister which enables me to pick up the phone and speak to her at very short notice. It is a very close relationship in that sense and we can speak very frankly to each other. For the formal connections, Eurwyn?

DR WILIAM: That was the linkage at board level. On the executive level then the Permanent Secretary will hold a meeting two or three times a year of all the heads of Assembly Sponsored Public Bodies, so that happens at that level, but each ASPB then has a sponsor division within the Assembly and it is with the sponsor division the day-to-day business is done. There are formal meetings at least quarterly where performance indicators are discussed which are flagged up and made as part of the corporate planning progress. Those targets are monitored formally on a quarterly basis. In practice we have contact almost daily. One interesting difference between the Assembly and the pre-devolution days is the number of Assembly questions that now come through. Previously by definition the number of Parliamentary questions which were related to us would have been very, very small indeed but Assembly questions now happen quite frequently, so there is quite a volume of business dealing with that.

LORD RICHARD: Can I just follow that for a second. You say Assembly questions - about the way the Museum is being run, something the Museum is doing or why are you not doing something you should be doing?

DR WILIAM: It could be that.

LORD RICHARD: They answer them?

DR WILIAM: Yes and whereas the civil servants will draft responses, in practice we draft the responses for civil servants.

LORD RICHARD: Of course but I am surprised at Ministers being prepared to answer questions about the way in which an ASPB is run.

DR WILIAM: They may not be questions of detail. They will be questions about museum policy in the wider field and they may be about specific developments such as the Swansea development we mentioned.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: I was interested in the rationale of querying that at the very end of the day there should be responsibility to the elected body. I am thinking of what has happened in London in the V&A and to the British Museum under the Thatcher administration where, rightly or wrongly, an Act of Parliament was passed, there was a new board of trustees and from that stemmed large revolutions in the way these bodies were run, new directors, major rows about those, as we all know. Quite apart from the rights or wrongs of that, do you accept that at the end of the day there is proper political accountability?

MR LOVELUCK: Yes.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: If you do accept that, then what is to stop having nine to seven or seven to nine?

MR LOVELUCK: The Council has not taken a view on the issue of where the balance of appointments should lie. What it wants to do is to get behind that and to try to tease out from the Welsh Assembly Government the sort of issues over which they would like to have influence because there may be some on which the Museum, bearing in mind its other responsibilities, might wish to take a different view. I doubt whether we would want a situation where because some particular Minister was very keen on Kevin Sinnott paintings, for example, the Museum was told that Kevin Sinnott paintings must hang there all the time, fine artist though he is. We need to establish some parameters. I think if we did establish those parameters, the degree of nervousness that exists about where the balance of appointments should lie might fall away. Quite rightly at the present point in time until that articulation has been achieved the Council is a bit nervous and is saying, "Let’s have some more talks please."

TED ROWLANDS: Can I just clarify because you rest a lot of your case on the charity status issue and the Charity Commission, but there are other Royal Charter bodies, sports and arts. Are they also covered by the Charity Commission or are you and the National Library separate in a sense from this?

MR LOVELUCK: We are certainly distinctive. We were set up at the same time by petition to the Privy Council. We were not set up as the Sports Council was at government behest and as the Arts Council was set up. We were set up by petition to the Privy Council so we are distinctive

TED ROWLANDS: The charitable status issue, if you have that in common with the Arts Council they have already conceded the appointments system, have they not? The appointments system is made by Government Ministers.

MR LOVELUCK: In those circumstances I would assume that the then members of the Sports Council and the Arts Council properly discharged their responsibilities as trustees by making the sort of enquiries that we are now making.

TED ROWLANDS: The second point is we are interested always in making the comparison with Scotland. What has happened to your Scottish counterpart?

MR LOVELUCK: We do the work of four museums in Scotland. We cover the same ground as four separate museums

TED ROWLANDS: Is the Scottish National Museum structure similar or identical to yours in the sense of you are chartered and so forth? What is the relationship?

MR LOVELUCK: I can help you in terms of appointments. In terms of appointments the appointments there are made almost entirely by the Scottish Parliament Ministers.

LORD RICHARD: The Director of the National Gallery of Scotland is appointed by the Parliament?

MR LOVELUCK: No, the Director would be appointed by the trustees. The trustees would be appointed by ---

TED ROWLANDS: So they have gone through this barrier?

MR LOVELUCK: They have and indeed we may go through it but at the present point in time we are doing what we should do as trustees to a charity, which is being prudent.

TOM JONES: Does charitable status in Scotland make a difference?

MR LOVELUCK: Yes it does.

TED ROWLANDS: It is different.

VIVIENNE SUGAR: I was going to ask about the relationship with DCMS and Whitehall departments, if you could explain that us.

DR WILIAM: Yes, we have a note at the end of our paper I think. Until the time of devolution, the lead body for setting standards and looking after in the wider sense museums in the United Kingdom was the Museums and Galleries Commission which was effectively a standing commission, indeed at one point it used to be called the Standing Commission for Museums. It then became the Museums and Galleries Commission. That was in existence until three or four years ago. Whether the DCMS was in existence then, I do not know, but the government took the view it would be a good thing to amalgamate that body with similar bodies for libraries rows and archives so a new Commission was formed for museums and galleries and archives, with the working title Resource. Although in one sense Resource remains a UK-wide body, nevertheless (and crucially for us) its funding remit seems to be limited to England. This does mean there are major initiatives in the museums and allied fields in England. One that comes off the top of my head is that there is a major initiative from DCMS, funded through Resource, to improve educational provision in museums and to that end DCMS are putting in £10 million over the next three years. The Department for Education and Training is putting in another £2.5 million. That is £12.5 million extra for museums over the next few years for which we are not eligible. Not only that but much of that money is potential match funding for trusts and foundations and charities and so on, so any bid that we might have made could have been doubled but without that initial tranche from Resource or the Welsh equivalent we have no potential match funding for a bid and request, so it is hitting us in two ways in essence.

A comparable Welsh body has just been established for Wales. It is comparable in that it will carry out many of the functions of Resource but it is different in one crucial area. Resource is effectively an NDPB sponsored by DCMS but it is a free-standing body and it is free within its funding parameters to take strategic decisions. The comparable Welsh body will be an in-house body, ie part of the Assembly Government Office, and so therefore it differs in one sense from Resource in that it will clearly not be able to carry out the advocacy function that Resource is able to do for the sector in England, so there is that difference. That body is to be established the groundwork has been done now, and the Chief Executive will shortly be advertised and the body will come into existence on 1 April 2004, so we are in a period of transition.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: What were the arguments for keeping it in-house in Wales where it was not in England?

TED ROWLANDS: Another quango!

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: I did not hear. We have got enough quangos?

DR WILIAM: It was that, yes.

LORD RICHARD: If your relationship with this Minister is good, it does not really matter.

TOM JONES: Matched funding is the worry.

MR LOVELUCK: We submitted evidence on that and our argument was that it should have been a stand-alone body. Where it is now, tucked away in the National Assembly, it would be very hard for the body to raise funds from HLF for example. It would find it very difficult to carry out a full-blooded advocacy role, it will have to pull its punches. Our preference would have been for a stand-alone body. There it is. The Welsh Assembly Government have made that decision and we will do our best to work with it.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: If I can go back to your long answer just now which was very interesting. My impression in England is that the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts led by the then Lord Justice, Lord Bingham, managed to keep its independence of the putting together of the other ones. Is that not right?

DR WILIAM: The Royal Commission managed to remain separate because it was the local archive sector that was brought in but the Royal Commission has itself been merged into the ---

TED ROWLANDS: --- the National Advisory Council for the Public Records Office. I serve on the body and we have just been merged.

TOM JONES: Do you sit on a quango?

TED ROWLANDS: I sit on a quango, but it is a UK one, out of the way.

LORD RICHARD: I am very impressed.

TED ROWLANDS: Flush me out! Yes, it has been merged. The warrants have been appointed this week, believe it or not. Can I ask a financial issue. You were a part of the UK organisation called Resource which had this funding and we were part of it, and UK Resource, if there had not been devolution, would have funded some of the things on the Welsh museums front. When this devolution broke up, was any proportion of money that UK Resource had apportioned across to you as a part of the devolution settlement, so in other words have you lost out entirely?

MR LOVELUCK: To the Assembly?

TED ROWLANDS: Yes, to the National Assembly.

DR WILIAM: We are not aware that we have.

TED ROWLANDS: In that case you would not have lost out, you have got to get it from the Assembly.

DR WILIAM: The sentence with the words "Barnett Formula" would no doubt be bandied about.

TED ROWLANDS: You do not believe it has happened that, as it were, the Welsh dimension, the Welsh part of the UK Resource was not transferred to the National Assembly at devolution?

MR LOVELUCK: We are not directly involved in that. That is on the local authority/local museums side. Where it is important is because the boundaries between national and local museum activity are, and this is very desirable, being broken down. We have a number of joint initiatives with the local museum sector to share the treasures around Wales and so on and in that context I think the issue you are raising does become important and relevant for us because if the local museum side is not funded in a way to respond to the sort of initiatives we want to undertake then we will be the poorer.

LAURA McALLISTER: Can I raise questions of scrutiny and accountability because you say in your paper that you feel post devolution has seen a greater level of scrutiny of your organisation and that contrasts directly with evidence that we had yesterday from another ASPB where they claimed that actually scrutiny was not always effective and was, if anything, far less rigorous post-devolution. It may be a question of the nature of the Committee that is dealing with the scrutiny and so on or other issues. Could you explain how you feel scrutiny of your own organisation has been more effective. Secondly, if you could outline for us the accountability loop you have with the Minister and the Subject Committee? Do you have the remit letter we have discussed with other people? What kind of input does the Committee have to the remit letter or is it purely from the Minister?

MR LOVELUCK: The degree of scrutiny on our side has been greater for two reasons, firstly the way in which the ministerial portfolios have been allocated, which perhaps reflects the fact it is a coalition and reflects the fact that a portfolio has been created specifically for cultural matters. Some people would say that the Culture Minister is relatively under-loaded but it does mean that we have a ministerial politician who has the time to take an interest and a supportive Subject Committee in a sense to back her up. So my own impression is, bearing in mind I have only been doing the job for six months, that the degree of scrutiny is greater and certainly there is more time than would ever have been spent in the Welsh Affairs Committee on museum matters. The fact we have had a quinquennial review which has gone through the Committee two or three times is a reflection of that.

LAURA McALLISTER: Are you fortunate though in that the Committee that deals with your scrutiny is made up of people who have a degree of expertise about your subject area? Does it depend purely on the experience of the AMs?

MR LOVELUCK: It is a question of time rather than expertise. They simply have more time to devote to it.

LAURA McALLISTER: It is a less loaded Committee.

MR LOVELUCK: That is the point I am making. That is what we said about the allocation of portfolios.

LAURA McALLISTER: The Culture Minister does not support the Welsh language but one would say overall ---

MR LOVELUCK: But she does not have the huge executive responsibility that many of the other Members have.

LORD RICHARD: How often do you see the Committee or does the Committee see you?

DR WILIAM: We were to have seen the Committee a month or so ago but we were bumped out in favour of something else. I guess over the last two or three years we have appeared before the Committee twice so it would have been approximately once a year.

MR LOVELUCK: Shall I take the accountability point?

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: My question is related.

MR LOVELUCK: On the accountability loop we get a remit letter. It is very much a Welsh Assembly Government remit letter but I have no doubt that it is informed by the sort of things that the Committee have been saying about the Museum and so on and if the sort of things that the Museum have been saying accord with the priorities of the Welsh Assembly government then that will find its way into the remit letter. It is essentially the accountability loop to the Assembly government and not to the Committee directly. The Committee will certainly see a copy of the letter but after it has been sent.

DR WILIAM: And the letter will include all the Assembly cross-cutting issues like the Welsh language and all those issues. Those will be written into the remit letter as well.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Do you see the remit letter before it is sent with a chance to comment on it?

DR WILIAM: We get it in draft. We usually get two drafts. We make our points. Sometimes they are listened to and sometimes they are not. That is fine, we are happy with the process.

MR LOVELUCK: The Minister will listen as well. If there are key issues there which we are very unhappy about then I will speak to the Minister, as I did in the context of this remit letter we have now had, and as a result one of the crucial points on it was changed, so that system works.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Going back to the point that was just raised, does the existence of the Committee and indeed of a Minister who is so much concerned with your kind of work in fact provide a practical alternative, to serve as any crusader, so to speak, for your objectives and indeed for money that might be more effective than the sort of arm's length arrangements which have been made in England?

MR LOVELUCK: You need both really, do you not? You need a crusader but a crusading Minister one day may be replaced by one who is not so hot the next day. You do need both. I come back to the point that we have to have regard for the well-being of the Museum in the long term. That is our responsibility and, as you know too well, political decisions sometimes do not reflect the long term.

TOM JONES: I have two questions. I have one question regarding staffing. Your staff are not civil servants, as I understand it, therefore what is their status? There is also some evidence, it came to us in the public meeting last night, regarding this idea of creating some kind of Welsh civil service. Would your staff be interested in that? Would it be of advantage to them to be part of such a system or would you prefer to keep your staff independent of the civil service? That is the first question. The second question is we are looking as to where primary legislative powers are required and one way of proving the demand is whether there is a long wish-list that public bodies in Wales would wish to see being developed. Is there any legislative matter which you would like to see developed?

DR WILIAM: I will attempt to answer the first question. No, our staff are not civil servants. I am not sure technically what their status is but most certainly they are not civil servants; they are accountable to the Court and the Council. As an organisation we have not discussed the idea of a Welsh civil service. I have no idea how the staff would respond to that. There are advantages and disadvantages I would think. I think the advantages would be from what we have talked about already, this arm's length principle, that we are responsible for safeguarding the nation's assets in the long term and therefore we do not want to come under short-term political pressure, and I think the staff would be very supportive of such a viewpoint but, on the other hand, I do not think that they would be violently opposed to the idea. I am sure that they would be interested in such a question, but I am afraid I cannot tell you any more than that at the present.

TOM JONES: The second point regarding legislative powers ---

MR LOVELUCK: Just a comment on the first issue. I speak as a former trade union official in the public sector. The things which public sector servants are concerned about are things like parity of treatment, fairness of promotion systems, and that sort of thing. I think most trade unions would be prepared to sit down and consider the issue of a Welsh civil service but would require some safeguards on that sort of issue. The issue of regional pay has just been put on the agenda by the Chancellor and I suspect that that would be a pretty emotive issue and would be one of the things that would be much discussed in the context of a Welsh public service.

Primary legislation - at the moment we cannot see any major things which the Assembly might wish to do to support the Museum's work which are impeded by legislation. Indeed, you will notice that in paragraph 26 of the paper we put in some cautionary words about the complexity of the areas of legislation which govern us and we suggest that if there are further areas where the Assembly's powers are to be extended, they ought to be elsewhere in the first instance because of the complexity involved. There is an another issue and that results again from our position as a charity. We are in the fund-raising business and we would have to be extremely careful that any separate legislation for Wales did not impede the fund-raising process, and that is particularly important. So the whole area is one which would have to be looked at very carefully before decisions are taken on the matter. Certainly we will not advance the case that this was an area where as of now the Assembly should be looking to extend its primary legislative powers.

TED ROWLANDS: Could I follow the public service point that Tom is raising. In a way, if you do not mind me saying so, you are uniquely qualified because you started in the mainstream Welsh Office civil service.

MR LOVELUCK: I started at the Board of Trade.

TED ROWLANDS: Board of Trade, Welsh Office, then through tourism and so forth, you have been through a gamut of public bodies originally as a civil servant. Some witnesses have given us evidence that there would be a case for trying to create a Welsh public civil service to allow interchange, it happened to you personally, to become almost a new career route as opposed to remaining within the UK civil service structure. Purely personally and given your background and knowledge, how attractive or how meaningful would that be as a concept?

MR LOVELUCK: Within the confines of the present powers of the Assembly I think it would stack up in the short term. If you were to contemplate a very marked and rapid increase in the primary legislative powers of the Assembly, it would not stack up at all because there is not a corpus of expertise amongst the officials within the Assembly that could run any sizeable legislative programme. If you were to do a survey of how many people in the Assembly had been involved in primary legislation it would not reveal a huge resource there. In my six years at the Board of Trade I did one Act from top to bottom, the Import Deposits Act of 1967 or 1968. In my 14 years in the Welsh Office I think there was only one complete Act which was specifically down to the Welsh Office and that was the Conwy Tunnel Supplementary Provisions Act. The other involvement was contributing to legislation being run by other Departments. There is not a huge well of experience there. I bring this back to your original point. If you were to try to set up a civil service at the same time as you were giving it those huge responsibilities I would not like to vouch for the consequences.

TED ROWLANDS: You would need to go and recruit people who have legislative skills?

MR LOVELUCK: In those circumstances.

TED ROWLANDS: People who have legislative preparation skills.

MR LOVELUCK: That is right, people who know how to write instructions to counsel and so on, and you have not got that.

TED ROWLANDS: What about all the statutory instruments, we have got officials involved in that?

MR LOVELUCK: Yes, but that is secondary legislation. It used to be a joke when I joined the civil service in 1963 that whenever you popped your head into Parliament there was always a Scottish White Fish Bill going through. The Scots cut their teeth over many decades by putting their legislation through Whitehall. We have not done the same thing in Wales and therefore in my view any increase in primary legislative powers has got to be gradual in the same way as the increase in administrative powers has been gradual. From the time the Welsh Office was set up it took 15 years or so, but it made for a sensible development. If you do it too quickly here you will not have the staff resource to back it up without bringing people in. So I link the two issues together. I hope that has not obfuscated it.

LORD RICHARD: It is a very interesting thought.

PETER PRICE: If one can follow through on the distinction between primary and secondary legislation you made in civil service terms, what is that distinction in the nature of the work?

MR LOVELUCK: It is drafting ab initio a piece of legislation, articulating for counsel what it is you want to achieve. The secondary legislation is the filling in once the general thrust has been established. I do not reckon it is of the same order.

PETER PRICE: I understand.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: We have been hearing evidence previously in the National Museum in Cardiff and it has been very agreeable, a beautiful place to do so. One sees the head of Cyril Fox when you take the lift up, a very distinguished Director of the Museum. When you come to appoint a new Director, would it be done on the Nolan principles of it could be somebody from America or elsewhere?

MR LOVELUCK: Our new Director-General is currently until 4 o'clock today the Chief Executive of Museums and Galleries in Northern Ireland. His appointment was by the Nolan process, which involved an independent assessor appointed by the Welsh Assembly and an independent expert. Mark Jones, the Director of the V&A, sat as our independent expert.

LORD RICHARD: Can I thank you very much indeed for coming. It was enjoyable and refreshing. I think your last set of thoughts about the capacity of the Assembly to prepare primary legislation is certainly one which we will have to work at, but thank you very much.