Welsh Language Promotion Strategy 2023 - 28

Introduction: Policy Context

The Welsh Language Measure (Wales) 2011, regulated by the Welsh Language Commissioner places 174 Welsh Language Standards on Carmarthenshire County Council in its 2016 Compliance Notice.

The Standards set out expectations of how the language will be treated as the Council:

1. delivers Welsh language services,
2. formulates policy in a way that promotes the Welsh language,
3. operates through the medium of Welsh,
4. keeps records about the Welsh language and finally
5. promotes the Welsh language.

Within the Promotion Standards, Standard 145 and 146 specifically call on the County Council to produce this Strategy. Standard 145: You must produce, and publish on your website, a 5-year strategy that sets out how you propose to promote the Welsh language and to facilitate the use of the Welsh language more widely in your area; and the strategy must include (amongst other matters):

1. a target (in terms of the percentage of speakers in your area) for increasing or maintaining the number of Welsh speakers in your area by the end of the 5 year period concerned, and
2. a statement setting out how you intend to reach that target; and you must review the strategy and publish a revised version on your website within 5 years of publishing a strategy (or of publishing a revised strategy).

Standard 146: Five years after publishing a strategy in accordance with standard 145 you must -

1. assess to what extent you have followed that strategy and have reached the target set by it, and
2. publish that assessment on your website, ensuring that it contains the following information:

1. the number of Welsh speakers in your area, and the age of those speakers;
2. a list of the activities that you have arranged or funded during the previous 5 years in order to promote the use of the Welsh language.

Carmarthenshire County Council’s first Promotion Strategy built on the work carried out in response to the results of the 2011 Census. The Welsh Language in Carmarthenshire Report, and the work of the task and finish working group set up by the County Council, formed a sound basis for the formulation and implementation of the Promotion Strategy 2016-2001. The efforts undertaken in the first Promotion Strategy are summarised in a comprehensive report which, in turn, has offered firm basis on which to formulate this Strategy.

The wider context in terms of other efforts to plan for the development of the Welsh language at a County and National level has changed significantly since the time of the first Strategy.

In 2017 the Welsh Government published an ambitious Strategy, Cymraeg 2050. A Million Welsh Speakers. The Strategy identified two specific targets, namely:

• Number of Welsh speakers to reach 1 million by 2050.
• The percentage of the population who speak Welsh daily, and can speak more than just a few words of Welsh, to increase from 10 per cent (in 2013–15) to 20 per cent by 2050.

The Government intends to use National Census statistics and the Language Use Survey to measure progress against these targets.

At the time this Strategy was formulated, Cymraeg 2050 still stands as the core of the government’s language planning efforts, and in 2022, it was reiterated and strengthened by the vision of the new Minister for the Welsh language, Jeremy Miles MS. He placed an emphasis on using the Welsh language, ‘providing and speaking not just creating institutions’. The Minister expressed the need to shift the emphasis away from ‘promoting and facilitating’ and towards increasing the use of Welsh with the consistent message being that ‘the Welsh language belongs to us all’.

He set out the intention of encouraging co-operative organisations, which will operate in Welsh, of mainstreaming the Welsh language into all Policy areas within government, of tackling the problem of second homes and housing and of establishing a Commission for Welsh Communities to look at the situation of the Welsh language at community level.

In 2015, the Well-being of Future Generations Act was published, which set seven national goals that public bodies must work towards, to ensure they ‘consider the long-term impact of their decisions’. One of those aims refers directly to the Welsh language and the need to create ‘a Wales with a vibrant culture where the Welsh language thrives’. The significance of having a national goal that comes from outside the traditional field of language planning undoubtedly reinforces our efforts within that field.

The Public Services Board (PSB) and the Well-being Act itself are now established and it is becoming ever clearer how promoting the Welsh language through the Promotion Strategy could combine with these efforts to promote social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being. The planning timetable of this Strategy and the Public Services Board’s Well-being Plan has coincided during 2022-23 and there has been an opportunity for the Welsh County Strategic Forum to have an input to during the consultation period. The Well-being Plan for 2023-28 includes an objective of ‘Helping to create bilingual, safe and diverse communities’, and one of the key steps over the period of the next Well-being Plan will be to ‘Support the implementation, further development and monitoring of the Welsh Language Promotion Strategy’.

We want to ensure that a link has been created between the PSB and the Welsh Language Strategic Forum and that the Forum discusses key issues about the Welsh language with the Board. Similarly, we want to ensure that the officers of the partner bodies sitting on the Forum are supported by the representation of the PSB in order to realise the objectives of the Promotion Strategy.

More than just words, the Welsh Language Development Plan for Health and Social Care, has experienced a period of lull in recent years. Largely as a result of the whole sector being turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic, the ‘active offer’ has not received much attention at a strategic level recently. However, following an independent evaluation of the More than just Words Framework in 2019, a new five-year plan from 2022-2027 has been published.

Despite the positive contribution of all the above policies, a number of factors that most adversely affect the Welsh language in Carmarthenshire remain outside their scope. The affordability of housing for local young people for example is largely influenced by the open market and private sector profits.

The same is true with regard to the influx of older people from outside Wales into Welsh-speaking communities. After the first Strategy’s efforts to work with estate agents to try to gain useful information to address this problem, it must be recognised that it is only Welsh Government who are in a position to meaningfully influence these factors.

We look forward to working together on innovative efforts by the government in this area of work and to explore new law-making forces that could mitigate harmful effects on the Welsh language.

Similarly, the extent of the success of this Strategy is dependent on the commitment of other public bodies outside the control of the Strategy’s owner, the County Council. Work remains to be done to ensure that other Strategic Forum organisations commit to implementing the Strategy, at all levels within the organisations.

The aim of this Strategy needs to be integrated into the work of the Public Service Board and to ensure that there is full support from those organisations to their representatives on the County Strategic Forum to ensure ownership of the Strategy across the county’s public bodies rather than to be limited to the Welsh language element of those organisations.

We must remember ‘The Welsh language belongs to everyone’ and our aim is to ‘restore Welsh to a language spoken and used by the majority of our inhabitants consistently, and in all walks of life’.

Achieving the aim will not be easy.