Wed, 6 Jul 2011 CF99

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Hello and welcome to CF99.

There is one major story in our programme tonight.

After weeks of being suspended,

Aled Roberts has now returned to the Assembly

as an AM for North Wales.

But is this the end and what lessons can be learnt for his party,

the Assembly and the Electoral Commission?

We're joined by Simon Thomas, the Plaid Cymru AM,

journalist Gareth Hughes and the Liberal Democrat Assembly Member,

Aled Roberts, who's in our Wrexham studio.

The Assembly has 60 members tonight for the first time in two months.

After a fierce debate in the chamber this afternoon,

the majority of AMs voted to let Aled Roberts back into the Assembly

as the Liberal Democrat AM for North Wales.

A new face, Eluned Parrott, gets the second seat

after the party decided that John Dixon wouldn't be a member.

The whole chapter raises questions and we'll discuss some later.

First, here's a summary of the last two months by Owain Clarke.

For a time this afternoon, the Assembly turned into a court

and the politicians were the jury.

At four o'clock, the accused, Aled Roberts, got told his fate.

After two unpaid months,

Aled Roberts can once again sit in the Chamber.

But in John Dixon's case, the second Lib Dem to be suspended,

his seat had already been filled.

Last night, his party gave up on trying to save him.

It was an end to a very important chapter in the Assembly's history.

It all began just days after the May election,

after taking part in only one session,

it became clear both were elected while members of banned bodies.

Aled Roberts was a member of the Pricing Wales Tribunal

and John Dixon was a member of Care Wales.

Their party said this was a technical matter

to solve in a few days.

Others disagreed.

The first question is whether the election was valid.

According to my knowledge of the law, it's quite simple

and the election was not valid.

After a complaint by UKIP, police went to investigate

whether the two had broken electoral law.

If they lost their jobs, whoever was second on the list

would replace them.

One of them was starting to lose patience.

In a statement to this programme on 8 June,

Eleanor Burnham said that the situation was a shambles,

and looked like a farce which reflected badly on her leader.

This was her party's response.

There is blame on the party, isn't it the party's fault

that this has happened with two candidates?

I agree that the party is to blame.

During this process, like Eleanor said,

Kirsty Williams has made sure the party has co-operated

with the Commission and the police.

In the end, the police decided not to prosecute.

The fate of the two were in the hands of the Assembly.

But before the vote, the Assembly's Standard Commissioner

was asked to weigh up the evidence.

According to Gerard Elias, at the time of their nomination

and the time they were elected, they were unsuitable

as Assembly Members.

In the case of John Dixon,

Gerard Elias says there is belief that he was in a situation

where he could have known this, but not Aled Roberts.

This, because Mr Roberts had followed guidelines

for candidates that were incorrect in the Welsh language

compared to the ones in the English version.

With the solicitors having looked at these points,

it was now the politicians' turn.

The Welsh language issue is very relevant to the case.

The information in the Welsh language was not correct.

If we suspend Aled Roberts, the suggestion is that it doesn't matter

and that you shouldn't depend on any Welsh version.

I think it's absolutely appalling that the Welsh language guidance

was wrong.

That's a matter for a different time.

This isn't the issue here at all.

The issue here is whether the offence that has been committed

is one of strict liability or not.

Tonight, the Assembly has 60 members

for the first time in two months.

But this chapter will raise a lot of questions.

Aled Roberts is probably very happy and he isn't the only one.

We will discuss the politics of this later.

Aled, on a personal level, these last two months must have been hell?

Yes, it's been very hard for me and the family.

Without the support of people across North Wales

it would have been even harder.

I am very grateful to the people who contacted me.

I wouldn't want anyone to go through this.

Did you consider turning your back and just say

this isn't worth the bother?

I have a family, children, I might as well leave it.

Yes. There was a lot of emotion every day.

In the end, we had to go through a police investigation

and after that, having interviews with Gerard Elias,

and I was very keen for the facts to come out.

I know you couldn't face to watch today's debate

how did you find out the outcome and what was your response?

It was a phonecall. By today, I was very keen to get a decision.

What was important to me was that it all came to an end.

I'm very happy that I have the chance to represent the people

of North Wales.

Simon Thomas, 30 voted in favour, 20 against,

you abstained your vote. Why?

For two reasons, firstly, I felt a little uneasy

we were deciding who could join the Assembly.

It felt as you were using white and black balls in a members club.

I also felt a little uneasy that we were sending a message

to people who hadn't come to the Assembly.

Maybe people who had chosen a career as politicians.

The councillors are facing the same problems, for example.

I felt that we should consider carefully what message

we were sending out as a full legislative Assembly.

If we change the rules after to let someone in.

In the end, I wasn't convinced enough to vote in their favour.

Why? Why didn't you vote in favour of letting Aled Roberts in?

I wasn't convinced that this was the best thing to do.

Whatever Gerard Elias' report says, that was ad hoc.

Aled Roberts nor John Dixon weren't members of the Assembly

and therefore weren't bound to the rules.

Secondly, I feel the case in the paper

presented by the Liberal Democrats wasn't good enough

to change something that was legally supposed to be very rare.

To ask your own question,

what message is the Assembly sending out to the people?

Is is right for a legislative body to bend the rules?

It's obvious that it's legal because that's what it states in the law.

It's was a matter for every individual AM today

to decide whether this was acceptable.

I wasn't convinced as were some 20 others

but the process has been done and Aled has been elected.

Gareth, Aled and John Dixon had no choice but to follow the law,

when dealing with this problem.

It struck me that people were saying all the time

this has to be judicial.

Asking a politician to leave politics on the doorstep

is like asking an alcoholic to leave his drink by the door.

Politics was bound to affect the way people behaved today.

Yes. That was definitely the intention of the report.

The intention was to say, "Don't be tribal about this issue.

"You must sit back and look at the facts."

This is the first time I've seen politicians look at the facts!

They go by the emotion of their parties.

This time they had to make up their own minds.

I think that within party groups,

they said, "What's the best thing for us to do as a party?"

I think that is what has come out of today's vote.

I noticed that if you look at the voting pattern,

Plaid Cymru was supportive of Aled, the Cabinet supported Aled.

What struck me was that Assembly Members

representing Liberal Democrat areas were against his re-appointment.

It must be the case that politics is at play for some.

Certainly.

If you look at it, you can see the people...

I don't doubt that Simon, in the way that he abstained from voting...

I wasn't going to name anybody.

There may have been a political element to that.

Of course we know that in Ceredigion,

the campaigns between the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru

are ferocious there. I'm sure that had an effect.

You could look at that.

It is also interesting that in the Labour Party,

of course, the Cabinet members are in favour,

and the leader of the Labour Party is a barrister,

maybe that has an influence.

All of the backbenchers, I would say,

the new ones, have more or less all said, "No. Thumbs down."

Aled Roberts, you've clearly experienced personal pain.

Most members clearly sympathise with that.

Are you concerned that the Assembly and the Assembly's image

has taken a knock as a result of this?

Peter Black admitted that in his speech this afternoon.

I'm very unhappy that this situation has arisen.

I think that there's a lesson to be learnt for many public bodies

and also for my own party.

What lessons, for your own party? We'll discuss the bodies in a moment.

The directions were clearly not being given from up high.

What happened was that the party depended on the directions

that came from the Electoral Commission.

It has become clear that the party should have its own guidelines.

The process that candidates go through

should include making sure that those guidelines are correct.

That may be the case in future.

Could I raise another point with you, Aled?

This linguistic point.

It appears to me as though this is the reason you are here.

There are people who feel you've suffered from discrepancies

on a linguistic level.

How important was that support for you

from the Eisteddfod and the Welsh Language Society,

in pushing forward that argument?

It was useful, but in the long run I think the most important thing

for me was the support of the ordinary people in this region.

That is what helped me.

They are people I have known since birth,

people I've grown up with.

They were the most important thing for me.

On that linguistic point, Simon, didn't that sway you?

Wasn't that a reason to vote for this, on principle?

It depends what you think the main principle is here.

I believe it is a matter for the individual

to try to ensure they are eligible.

That is what I did as a member and a prospective candidate.

I resigned from a job because I knew it was illegal

for me to be a candidate and hold the job.

I believed it was the individual was responsible,

along with the party,

and there's no doubt Aled has been wronged by his party.

The Welsh issue is important here.

There have been many failings in terms of Welsh language provision.

But is that enough to open the door to allow somebody to return?

As I said earlier, I thought the threshold had to be very high

in order for us to reinstate anybody at the Assembly

on the basis of the law alone.

It doesn't provide any guidelines,

it simply states that if you think it's appropriate, you can do it.

There are no guidelines, it is the decision of every Assembly member.

We will leave it there and turn to a related matter.

The Electoral Commission has apologised to Aled

for not updating the Welsh language advice on its website.

Tonight it told CF99 that statistics suggest

that nobody had visited the Welsh webpage in the relevant period,

although that evidence is not entirely dependable.

Elliw Gwawr spoke to Rhydian Thomas of the commission,

and asked whether user statistics on its Welsh language website

had been analysed for the period leading up to the election.

We accept the findings of Mr Elias.

We accept that Mr Roberts had taken all the steps he should have

to check that he was eligible for the election.

We accept that.

What the commission has done is we've looked at the relevant pages

on our corporate website

to try to discover the effect this error has had

on any potential Welsh language users.

That is something that concerns us.

We take responsibility for this mistake, it is not good enough.

We looked to see how many people it affected.

We have collected the statistics for the number of hits,

as it were, that this document on standing for election had had.

The English version, for example,

has had 143 hits.

In terms of the Welsh language version,

as far as we can tell,

not one person has viewed the Welsh language version of the document.

This is not some kind of forensic analysis.

It's possible that someone has looked at it

and it doesn't register with our analysis

or with the way we collect the information.

For example, it's possible to hide an IP address.

It's possible not to register a hit

if you come from a website like a search engine.

But it's important that we try and discover what kind of effect

this mistake has had and this is useful to us and allows us

to move on and work with others and ensure this doesn't happen again.

Have you passed this information on to Gerard Elias' investigation?

The commission has presented this information

about the number of people that have looked at the relevant pages

to Mr Elias as part of his investigation.

So questions are being raised about whether Aled looked at it at all.

That means there's a bit of a hole in his defence, doesn't it?

We as a commission accept Gerard Elias' report.

We accept today's vote in the Senedd.

What we are going to concentrate on now is ensuring

that, in future, any material that's produced by the commission

in any language is correct.

We have a lot of work to do

with regards to improving the commission's image.

That's important.

It's important for us now to move on

and work with the political parties in Wales,

to work with individual candidates in Wales

and to work with Assembly Members.

Hopefully then, we can ensure that they understand

that we're putting the appropriate steps in place now

to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

Aled Roberts, we'll have your reaction to those allegations.

Nobody had visited the website.

That is a strong allegation,

but they emphasised the evidence isn't forensic.

What do you make of that?

Gerard Elias covered this in the interview,

as well as what I did on the day.

Don't forget the published documents in Welsh and English

were incorrect.

A link had been sent out on 24 March by the Electoral Commission

to the local authorities. The Welsh link was incorrect.

I looked at that one.

If their figures are not reliable, that is a matter for them.

I know what I did and I gave that evidence to Mr Elias.

Did you print out the document at the time?

No, I didn't print out the document.

What do you make of that, Simon Thomas?

It's clear Gerard Elias and the police looked at the evidence

by the Electoral Commission and said it wasn't enough.

But it does raise further questions about the commission.

This is a body which has been criticised many times,

especially in the context of the referendum.

What do you make of the commission's role in Wales' democratic process?

It's not fit for purpose.

There have been so many failings by the commission on a Welsh level

and also on a British level.

You need only go back to the last General Election

to see they were ill prepared for the number of voters in some place.

They blamed the returning officers, but there is a problem here.

The commission is a form of interface between the public

and the political process.

The public trusts the commission to be correct.

But the commission doesn't take responsibility

when something goes wrong.

They have a perfect life. They're supposed to be trusted intermediary.

But they don't take responsibility when things go wrong.

The commission needs to be re-examined.

Should they be making this allegation without being certain?

To be honest, I'm gob smacked about this.

This wasn't in Gerard Elias' report. He said the commission couldn't say.

But they've said the website didn't receive any hits.

Who is telling the truth?

The commission's reputation has been dragged through the mud.

We have to take this on what Aled said to Gerard Elias.

We can't go on anything else.

Gareth, what do you make of the commission

and what they've said tonight?

People have looked at this evidence, why raise it now?

What they're saying is political dynamite.

If this had been in the report, I have no doubt

that Plaid Cymru's vote would have been different.

I cannot speak for other individuals.

It was a decision for the individual.

We did not meet as a group to discuss this.

But we did discuss it among ourselves.

The Welsh factor was in many people's minds.

It was raised in the chamber today, this is a linguistic matter.

The point was repeated again and again.

If that would have been in the Elias Report,

that would have taken some of the steam out of the linguistic debate.

But that is important because of the principle.

If the evidence says that is not what was in the report,

we must also ask the question to Elias.

They are not making a comment on that tonight.

We have been in touch.

Aled Roberts, what do you make of the commission,

which seems to have put you in this hole

and have raised further questions tonight?

One thing I have learned during the past two months

is not to be biased. It's important that people look at the facts.

They need to look at what went wrong and learn from these mistakes.

There are a number of lessons to be learned.

I looked at the various processes Westminster goes through

and those the Assembly goes through once the Queen has given consent.

The current system in Cardiff Bay isn't good enough.

It's important that people take their time to look into this.

I, for one, don't want anyone to have to pay a price for this.

We just need to learn lessons from this.

We've talked about the mistake by the Electoral Commission,

but there was a long period before the Assembly told the commission

that this list of banned bodies had been changed.

The new list was passed last year,

but it took until this year for them to learn about this.

That suggests something has to be done

about what happens once legislation is passed.

Possibly. I believe the legislation was passed in January.

Certainly, I was aware of the legislation.

But having said that, we should look at the information processes.

To be honest, it's the Electoral Commission's work

to look at election legislation.

They don't have an excuse.

To say the Assembly Government

or the Assembly itself hasn't told them isn't good enough.

You would think they would have sat in the public gallery or committee.

It went through committee, plenary, the Commons and the Lords.

It then went to the Privy Council.

There were enough opportunities for any quango, with money and staff,

to see what was going on. I don't sympathise with them at all.

What will people from outside this political bubble make of this saga?

I don't think it will cause much movement on the Richter scale.

They'll see it as another political row.

It won't affect people's day to day lives.

That is the tragedy, because important principles are at stake.

But the public aren't taking much notice.

We're the only ones who do.

On that low note, I'll say thanks to our guests.

-You old cynic!

-That's not true.

That's all for tonight. We'll be back at the same time next Wednesday.

-Until then, good evening.

-Good evening.

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