Getting the right message to the right place: navigating changes in Welsh democracy

Hi everybody [music] pal welcome cho my name is Julia Julia Adwi and yeah looking forward to this session today um [music] we'll be talking in English today on the panel but you can use the Q&A function to ask questions [music] in either English or Welsh um we're very lucky to be joined by win here who's helping us with translation thanks so much win so yeah please do [music] put your questions in the Q&A function throughout in either English or Welsh and then [music] also at the very end we have a dedicated Q&A section um where you will have the option And if you want to to raise your hand and unmute and ask a question out loud again either in English or Welsh. So yeah, welcome Chro and I think it's [music] time to get started. Um today's session is looking a bit like this. So I'll just do a quick intro and housekeeping. Um and then yes, we're handing over to the brilliant Jess from ERS Camry talking about what's happened since the election and the kind of context that we're operating in today in Wales. my lovely colleague Alec talking about come some of the kind of technical improvements we've made to write to them um for use in Wales and then I'll be doing a little bit of an update on some of our outreach engagement that we want to do around this work and what we're planning um across the autumn and for the rest of the summer how we'd like to work with you and then as I say we've got a bit of time for Q&A so yeah really excited to be talking about this made some great updates to um write to them um but first we're going to hand over to Jess if that's okay Jess um to give us a bit contact setting um and help us understand where we're at at this moment. Uh so afternoon everyone um I'm Jess. I'm director of ERS Camry and I was asked to talk in this session about what has changed and stayed the same in Welsh politics this year. Uh you might notice from the headline I'm only going to talk about what's changed really because there's not a [laughter] lot that has stayed the same. Um just by way of introduction so I work for the electoral reform society. Uh we campaign for a better democracy and have been doing so since 1884. Uh we have primarily been voting system, electoral system focused uh but also we campaign around a wider area of things including things like votes of 16 reform um increasing diversity and political life. ERS Camry is the Wales arm of ERS. We are a tiny team of two. There's me and my colleague Matt. Um, so I'll run through the uh election itself in terms of how it's changed, the outcome of the election, what this means for the Senate in practice, and some emerging challenges we're seeing as the Senate kind of uh ramped up before recess took place. So I think change was the real watchword for this uh year in Wales uh specifically around the Senate election. the outcome of the election was obviously very different but we also saw the actual electoral processes for this election change too. Uh so the senive at this election in May on May the 7th went from 60 to 96 members. Uh there was a new voting system in place. So previously the additional member system had been used similar to the one that's used in Scotland. 60 members, 40 of them elected on first pass the post constituencies, 20 using a regional closed list as a kind of proportional topup. That has been gotten away with. Fifth pass the post is no longer for center elections and all 96 members were elected via a closed list to haunt system. That in practice meant that voters when they went to the um ballot uh box in um May had one um one ballot paper and they had one vote and they could choose for either a political party with list of candidates set underneath them or an independent candidate. The kind of closed element of that means that voters weren't able to vote for an individual candidate on a party's list or change the order of those list. They were kind of set in place. There were also 16 new constituencies established. Each constituency elected six members h so everyone in Wales now has six members representing them and there were new rules put in place for residency and senate elections now take place every four years not five there also changes in terms of the outcome of this election and I don't want to kind of overstate how um significant this was um but I think that's quite hard to labor have always been the largest party in the Senate in the history of devolution in Wales. They have always uh run the Welsh government as the largest party working with other parties but but have been the main party in government throughout devolution in Wales. They are now in third place. They have nine seats and a 96 seat senive. Ply Camry won the election with 43 seats and have formed a minority government reform UK with 34 seats become the official opposition. Uh and the conservatives who were the opposition in the previous Senate down to seven seats. We are seeing green representation for the first time. Two members both representing the Cardiff constituencies. Uh and we have found the one thing that has stayed the same in Welsh politics this year. There is one Liberal Democrat Jane Dodge. She has remained in the Senate. Um Queen on the right here has become the Welsh first minister and appointed his cabinet uh that are here. Some really kind of big uh hitters from we've implied on this cabinet. Shauned Williams is deputy first minister. Ellen Jones, the former SLIV, speaker of the Senate as cabinet minister for finance. And I just wanted to flag uh two newly elected MSS, David Tristan and Anna Bracken, becoming straight uh becoming minister straight into cabinet. I think David Tristan Davis's role in particular as cabinet minister for government effectiveness and the constitution is particularly interesting given he's setting up a cabinet office for Wales. There are also deputy ministers that have been appointed. Um, a couple of relatively new faces here too. Mark Cooper, a newly elected MS as deputy minister for transport and Neris Evans, a former MS, not in the last uh senive, but returning to the Senate and straight in as a deputy minister for public and preventative health. Uh, now as I mentioned 16 new constituencies, each electing six members and I was going to try and talk you through a little bit of what this means in practice. So this is my constituency, Kaidiv Panaf, down here. And these are the six members that represent me. So I have three ply Cumbry representatives. Joe Martin is a reform uh representative. Anthony Sto, the leader of the Welsh Green Party is also elected here. And Hugh Thomas for Welsh Labor, the former leader of Cardiff Council. I'm going to do something risky. Let's click on this link. Go to the Senate page. And actually a really useful resource here. If you click around on the constituencies, you can see the six members representing each of these constituencies uh and kind of see their political makeup, which I think is quite interesting. Now, the challenge is to get back to the There we go. Navigated that so smoothly, you wouldn't have known. Um and then the other thing to mention is committees are finally in place in the Senate. It has taken a couple of weeks longer than it normally would, I think. Um I think there is completely different dynamic in this sen that I'll come on to in a second but committees are finally in place their um chairs have been appointed and membership um sorted and they are starting to some of them have outlined their future priorities. Some of them are taking um consultations on their future priorities over the summer which I think as um kind of campaigning organizations or charities are kind of really important to keep an eye out on. Uh committees are a really fundamental part of the way that the Senate operates. Um committee chairship allocation is done kind of by party representation in the Senate. So Ply Cry have six committees that they chair. Reform have five Wor and the Conservatives both have one a piece. Um and then I just really quickly wanted to run through some emerging challenges. So as I mentioned earlier, Ply Cry have formed a minority government. Uh that is something very normal in W politics. No party has ever had a majority in the Senive. It is very common for parties to work together and very much expected as part of the way that the Senate operates. Um it is however uh I think something to be aware of from a kind of campaigning or charity perspective that the fact that Pride have this minority government um they aren't going to be able to do all the things they might have done if they had a majority government. Uh and I think that has been illustrated by the Welsh government losing the supplementary budget vote last week with Labour refusing to back spending plans over row on additional learning needs. There's also a really different dynamic in this senive. Uh and that's particularly with reform as the official opposition. There is um I would say a different tone to this senive and we're already seeing a couple of examples of them making a real impact. a walk out uh from multiple different parties has already taken place and um I think there's there's a real feel that this senive is very different that is me so I will stop sharing and hand back over >> fantastic so thank you so much chess that was really interesting and especially like starting to hear about some of the new committees storming I'll come a bit to where we sort of want to think a bit more about how like committees um how we can help people navigate these things when sort of thinking about their different representatives. So, just to click through the slides you've already seen, spoilers. There we go. Here we are. Updates to write to them with me, Alex. Uh, so just a bit of a background on this. So, write to them.com is a website to help people write to their representatives. It was originally fix your MP in the early 2000s. It wanted to cover both email and elected representatives at every layer of government. And this has become a key use of the service and it's especially useful in Wales as a way of seeing all the layers at once and providing signpost about each what each one does. As part of the Welsh government's democratic engagement grant, we've been working to improve right to them to help people navigate the system and make it easier to work with. Uh so I'm going to talk a bit about some of the recent changes we've been making to write to them and what we're planning to do in the next few months to build on that more. Uh so the three key things are that are now live is a Welsh language version to write to them, embeddible widgets to integrate with other sites and new advice on how to choose which of your uh six MSS to talk to. So on the first one like this is one bullet point in our list of three but it's massive. Uh so uh the right to them interface is now bilingual. The postcode picker advice about different lays of government and the writing interface. Uh, it's been a lot of work by development team to go through a 20-year-old website and make it ready to be bilingual, marking up all the strings and uh, fixing up the copy while we were going through some of this stuff. And thanks to our translator win who's on the call for then going through these little isolated fragments on website and then putting it back together in something that makes sense. And so we'll be looking at this more in the next few months. But like this is now currently live. Um, and one of the things I'd be interested in like thinking about more in the long term is not just as like this is available, but like what does it sort of mean to write to representatives in Welsh? Like what what does that sort of mean as a cultural thing? Uh, so what we're trying to think about here is um we've got the language picker top right, but we're also integrating a bit more into the flow on the English language version in terms of when a Welsh postcode is used, we sort of flag up would you like to write in Welsh? um just as sort of an experiment to sort of see like which of these items gets clicked on and sort of just generally interested in like that as a as a thing talking to representatives as we go. Um second point is embeddible right to them widgets. So one of the things we want to do is it's great when people come to write to them.com but we want to sort of make it easier to get this information into more places. So we've gone back over some old functionality and made these little widget boxes that can be embedded on other websites. Uh so these include the language toggle but also can be customized to only look at say say say say say say say say say say say say say say say say say say say say say at local counselors or to only look at members of the senif u and we sort of see this as a way of like getting get helping if you're writing your own advice guidance be say like we think counselors are useful for this area here is a link to find your counselors out and we sort of because a major use of right to them is around not just writing but just what's the list we've tried to customize that and how this works as well to make it a bit easier uh to just use it for that first purpose and then in the long run sort of see if there's anything we can do to sort of pull that out a bit more as a use. So that is hidden one of our help pages on a link then I can share a link in the chat after that. Um and the third is and this is like very draft at this point because we're still it's still the conventions are emerging but how should you choose which of your representatives to write to? Uh so we've added a not sure which one to write to button which links. This is too small to read on this. just give give you the gist of it. Um is and I think it's what we currently provide for multi-member uh constituencies like local councils now like the Senf is an option to write to one or all of your representatives and our advice we're sort of currently separating this which these is better depending if it's a sort of writing about a personal problem so like case work or if it's writing about campaigning or policy issue. So for casework, we sort of represent finding a way to choose one where that is a connection you have with a party. So for instance, if you voted for a particular party um or if you just have a particular connection or just picking a random one if you uh if you want to pick one of those um and then writing one at a time to represent a personal problem in part because we think with um because personal issues tend to involve more personal information and people might prefer to just write to one person at a time on that. We're very interested in feedback on that, but we also know especially like data sharing between representatives might be complicated. So, we're interested in sort of getting feedback about how this is working in practice on campaign change policy. Um, there it is certainly more accepted to be able to write to all your representatives at once. Um, so we were talking to people in various people's offices earlier in the year. It's like, yes, that happens and that's that's a reasonable thing to do if you're trying to lobby everyone at once. But what one of the things we sort of put our advice here is it's useful to do extra research on if there's particular messages that's useful particular people to maybe try different messages by different groupings. Um and leading on from that so like basically we have this advice here. We are interested in how it lands with people. We're interested in how it works with people's offices in in question. So we imagine this will change over time but this is our initial stab on like who is the right person to contact and not so who's who is specifically the right person to contact but who what is the right right way of thinking through that process. Um so building on that the further changes we have in the pipeline is think about the option to write to some of your representatives not just all or one and this is especially in multi-member constituencies where for instance you might have multiple members of the same party and you might want to write to all of them at once or more interestingly perhaps that there is you know a big rise in block politics in Welsh voting um in terms of people that that voters voters and citizens themselves might see some parties effectively interchangeable from their point of or the parties themselves wouldn't uh but certainly like there may be different messages that is equally applicable to different parties and so just giving people the option to sort of pick I want to send a message to this set of representatives and we sort of see as an extension of that sort of line in our advice page about like doing the research and sort of try to personalize the message and then similarly as we sort of refine and stabilize these guidance pages we want to get the push the bilingual pull it through the fully through our advice pages um and to get complete that translation of the site but that is oh one extra thing on that sort of point about helping people with research we're also thinking about how we can make some tweaks to they right companion site they work for you which does cover the senif so to sort of improve that sort of uh constituency landing page sort of bring in stuff like the senif website does on who on cabinet positions but also u sort of surface uh committee memberships and cross party groups as sort of a clear sort of signal about um what is what are my different representatives interested in. Uh so that is me. I will now pass to Julia to talk a bit more about the new resources and seminars we are working on. Thanks so much Alex. Yes, maybe I'll do um the resources and seminars and then we've got a nice question from Melinda from Open State Foundation about the platform itself and I thought because we have quite a lot of time maybe we can just do a little screen share of showing the platform both in English and Welsh and the step through but um Melinda's question was about um moderating the kind of messages. So I will pass over to you to do a bit of technical dive on that in a minute. Um real but first let's just go through yes our resources and seminars that we have planned and this is basically just to say that uh if I can have the next slide please Alex sorry thank you so much. Um, we've got this plan for the kind of autumn month where we want to do some more of these kind of webinars and write some accompanying guides to help people um, understand a bit more what's going on and use the tool and fundamentally also just kind of get out there a bit more and talk to people who might use the tool um, as part of their work in Wales. And so, as you can see here, we have a few planned in September. We're going to talk about the power and what's going on in Wales. a bit um covering some of the stuff today, but going through exactly who does what and how things are are kind of lining up um and then talking about uh the tool as a route to kind of persuade an elected representative. So what an effective message looks like and understand how messages are kind of handled behind the scenes. As part of this project, we did some really interesting interviews with um offices of MSS of counselors and of Welsh MPs to find out what happens when they receive a message and how constituents can kind of set themselves up for success um when writing to representatives. So I think that will be a really interesting session. Um and then in November looking at policy, so issue specific guides um thinking about if you're writing about housing, what are the key things to remember or include there? Or if you're writing about the NHS, what sort of things would you like to include there? Um, so trying to get really specific there just to kind of accompany the site and make it as helpful as possible. Um, but speaking of the site, Alex, if you wouldn't mind stopping your screen share, I will just quickly screen share what people see on the site just in case anybody hasn't um interacted with React to them before. So, >> thanks, Alex. Um, this is our homepage, which hopefully everyone can see nicely there. Just going to try and hide the kind of bar thing. um oh I've put it exactly in the wrong place um that you can see here in English or in kamar um which you can toggle between and yeah thanks again to win for helping us translate all of these um bits and pieces that are across the site um and as you can see here the flow is to enter your postcode. So my old postcode when I was living um Wales um was this um and so the site then shows you your different representatives at that um at each level and so uh counselors I think there's maybe a bi-election happening in my old ward and then MS's um and then MP and yeah a bit like Jess was showing us earlier we do list um the representatives and their parties um and then this will uh take you to writing to them Um, as you can see and as Alex mentioned, we've got some guidance here on who to write to. Um, and there is also this button here, write to all of your MSS. So, you can do that all in one go. If not, um, and then if you pick someone, so say for example, for whatever reason, I might want to write to this person, we then have a screen helping us understand what the message is about. Um, this is for our monitoring and for like um, helping us understand more and hopefully in the future helping us give more advice depending on the issue. And so, for example, I might be writing about a specific campaign, say the environment, and that's what I'm writing about. And then it takes you to this page. And we have some instructions here and campaign tips. Um just uh name and email address um that sort of thing. And uh address to help the um member confirm that they are a um that they are a constituent. Alex, did you want to come in on um how the kind of moderating flow works from our side? It's pretty minimal, isn't it? >> Yeah, sure. So, there's a series of automated rules. Uh, we basically, so a key thing is we try not to read the messages like we fail messages. So, we we we we're working between people. We don't want to sort of be reading everyone's messages. Uh, what we do is we have a set of rules that sort of flag things that are likely to be spam. Like for instance, if the message is very short or uh we also have some rules around copying and pasting messages. So if the same message is coming up from lots of different sources that will start to get flagged and frozen and send me some rules about send from the right postcode. So uh basically that then goes it gets held for a bit and usually released by um one of our team um that day or the next day. Uh so it is basically sort of very basic stuff around spam um spam protection and also just keeping an eye on if uh we're seeing lots of copy and paste campaign through the site because that's sort of one of the ways we sort of try to differentiate ourselves from other sort of campaigning websites is we think it's important that sort of people express themselves in their own words and sort of help make things more personal. So, uh, just to give that advice and to, um, sort of encourage that for the system or at least for us to be aware if a big campaign is going through if that should adjust our future how any of our future content. >> Absolutely. I think I don't know if we mentioned, but it does say on the site that um, it will email the individual to confirm. They have to click confirm to try and uh, make sure. So, there's that step in the workflow, too, to make sure um, that people are intentionally sending their their messages. >> Yes, absolutely. So, and that means that we can then say send the message as them. So, it goes the replies don't come back for us, they go straight back to the source. We then survey people a few weeks later to ask if someone wrote back and if they were a first- time writer. And so, from that, we're starting to build a bit of a we're also running a survey about what what the messages are about. And from that, we're start Google right to them insights, we're starting to sort of build some some reports based on that. uh but just understand a bit more what's going through our system without intruding on users privacy. >> Yeah, absolutely. Brill. Um and yeah, well, please do feel free to email us if you want some more, you know, technical specific um advice there. Um Jess, I had a question for you. Sorry, I know your cat wrangling and so [laughter] uh don't worry too much. Uh take your time. Um I guess any senses you had got I know that a big, you know, topic in the run-up to this election and since has been how are MS setting up their offices? How are they dividing their workload? um amongst these much bigger constituencies. We're still only a couple of months after the election, but have you heard any workings of how that's happening? >> Yeah, I think it's really um depending on the constituency and the individuals elected. So, I know for example in Ky fun and tough um there are free applied members elected, they they pulled their resources and they were hiring kind of a central team of staff to work for all of them. Uh whereas in other constituencies, we're seeing individual MS appointing individual staff. So I think it's very much kind of dependent on um the the MSS and also you know there might be an argument that that particular constituency where they've pulled staff is um an urban area that's relatively easy to do that versus uh if you are in a more urban a rural constituency with uh kind of wider it might be up to the party to think actually it would be worth having an office here in a southern constituency and in the north. So it's just very uh individual at the moment. Yeah, that's really helpful and I think hopefully in the course of this we'll get to talk to some more RMSS too and to talk to as you know Alex is saying we have this survey so it'll be interesting to hear um how those things get handled. Um, one interesting finding from our initial survey was that um, all of the different representatives we spoke to, we thought that there would be more um, uh, people saying, "No, that's not my job. You need to go and talk to your MP or your council, whatever." But on the whole, people seem to be very keen to respond, um, when they received a message. And so, um, there was definitely the willingness, we heard at least from both the MS side, MP side to like be the person that fixes the issue. And so it will be interesting to see how that continues in under this new system. Um, great. So we're doing really well time wise. It might be that we can keep this to a nice half an hour session. If anyone did have any more questions, we would love to hear them. As I say, please do feel free um to raise your hand, ask um out loud in either English or Welsh or in the chat. Um do make sure you're subscribed to our um social media and mailing list and things. So we will be publicizing those webinars that I talked about in the autumn so that you can register for those. And again just to stress that now that we've done the brilliant technical work with the help of win um we can go out and talk to people and try and help people to use this site. And so that's our next step is trying to make it helpful for all sorts of users individual level but also kind of civil society level and charities and organizations in Wales. Um and you know adding more features where it can be helpful and more advice and guidance. So that is very much our intention. Um, hi Peter. Have you looked at how other countries which use large constituencies to manage this sort of thing? Did this inspire you at all? Um, yeah, really good question. Um, we did have a little think. I know that Ireland the have a very similar system. Um, and we got a little bit of advice there, but in that case it was again like they all do it quite differently. There's not one way of doing it kind of thing. Um so yeah but it might be something to look take a more international approach on. Um Alex on that one. >> Sorry I was I was jumping before you asked me. Uh but yeah so basically case work it's so like the advice we got from campaigning groups Northern Iron was essentially like on campaigning side people tend to write to all their MS's. What we're trying to understand a bit more of um is about how casework is managed in practice. uh because that's sort of our because one one of the sort of because the change in the Welsh system uh originally there was as currently the case in Scotland a constituency um representative and then the additional repres um the additional regional representatives and what we saw through our system was in practice casework tended to go through the constituency MS because that's kind of what the system was signposting you towards and so one of our concerns is not just that people can't navigate the thing but that it might effectively default back to the MP rather than picking someone at that level so that's probably want to really improve our guidance there. Um, but case work and how that proc is processed internationally is just massively underststudied which is it's funny whenever you talk to people actually in this area because they're like there's not enough but I'm the only one doing it so it's great. Uh, so like there's some interesting stuff published by um box pop in the US trying to look at a bit about multi-member constituencies because there's some interest in in that reform in the US but basically that it's case work is so different in different places. It depends a lot on the relationship between MPs and the legislative process, how much time they have for case work. Anyway, so sorry there's a long way of saying we have looked a bit we haven't found much. Uh if someone knows more than me, please tell me. I'd love to know more. Great. Yeah, I think it is just a very emerging situation as yeah, offices are being set up and yeah, it was interesting to hear Jess from the um the committees are all set up now because that is another avenue where we might want to you know if someone has a very policy specific sort of campaign that might be a relevant thing that they want to um uh understand and yeah I think Alex mentioned also we do in they work for you have um party group memberships as well. Um, great. I think we actually have a question to the Q&A. Um, uh, great. I'm pressing answer live. Is it possible to watch previous webinars on persuasion or policy in case you have produced them? Thank you. Oh, I don't think we've done webinars before, but we do have some guidance uh, I think is either coming up on the site very soon or is being Yeah, might be up now. >> It is excitingly live now, >> but I think live this morning. So, um, maybe in our follow-up that we'll send around after this event, we can link to that. Um, yeah, it's an area that we're really really interested in, um, in helping people not only in the technical like flow to get their message with representatives, but try and help that whole system work better for both sides. Um, so yes, I don't think we have webinars, but we will link to our resources in the follow-up email. Um, and uh, yeah, maybe I'll also link to some other um, other organizations doing work on that. So yeah, thanks for your question. >> Because these changes are also uh so recent and so so in flux what things are going to look like in weeks or months or years time, we're very interested in just understanding how things are working and how we can sort of adapt our guidance so we're not going against sort of wellness we want to go against the flow but going against how how things are actually settling down in practice and to an extent how we can encourage and help uh spread good working practices on the other side as well as helping people contact. So we're just we're interested in helping the system work effectively in any way we can. So if anyone wants to you know send me emails about things we can be doing better or just like what they've noticed always happy to you know hear from people if there's anything you like to say Jess. >> No I think the only thing maybe to flag is that things are still really new in this senive and it certainly feels like MSS are finding their feet for the first time. So what we have noticed is kind of delays in MS getting back to us. I'm hoping over the summer that will kind of iron itself out and have a bit more capacity. But in terms of contacting MS's um that is maybe something to be aware of too, but thank you for having me today. >> Oh, thanks D for joining us, Jess. Um yeah, and D and Bal for coming along today. Thank you so much. [music] Um we've really really enjoyed it. Um and yeah. Oh, great. Nice [music] to see um that people are also interested in similar projects. Do email us. Yeah, it's um it's one we're really proud of and I think um that [music] you know relationship between um uh representatives and constituents and [music] making that work and work better for everyone involved is very much while we're here. Um but uh and it's nice [music] that we can be adaptive as the situation changes. Brilliant. Well, yes, thank you D everyone again. Um [music] really appreciate everybody's time and really appreciate you coming along. Um [music] great. Thanks so much Traa. MC over