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.

Introduction: Linguistic context

While drafting this Strategy, we have just obtained the initial results of the 2021 Census. The number and percentage of Carmarthenshire Welsh speakers has fallen once more.

We’ve lost 6,000 Welsh speakers, which equates to 4 percentage points. The number who consider themselves Welsh speakers now stands at 72,800 which means the county has lost its position of being the local authority with the most Welsh speakers in Wales. Gwynedd has now taken up that mantle.

Although Carmarthenshire has seen the biggest drop in percentage of Welsh speakers compared to other counties in Wales for the second Census running, the percentage drop is smaller than in the last Census. The downturn has slowed and that is encouraging, but there is no doubt that even more vigorous action is needed if we are to hold on to areas within the county where the Welsh language is the natural medium of our relationships with each other.

Initial results indicate that of the 112 small areas in Carmarthenshire, the percentage of people aged three years or over who were able to speak Welsh ranged from 62.2% (area around Brynaman) to 15.0% (area adjacent to Llanelli). At first glance, some wards have seen a slight increase in the number of Welsh speakers, and it will be interesting to analyse the causes of that growth in areas such as Gorslas.

However, it is also true to say that the greatest reduction has happened in the areas which are traditionally considered the natural home of the Welsh language, where there is a high density of Welsh speakers, in areas such as the Amman Valley.

The Welsh language is still strong in these areas, but it is losing ground quickly. Analysing the reasons behind this decline will be essential for implementing an effective Promotion Strategy for the county. Identifying the language transmission and population mobility trends, for example, will help us identify what actions would lead to change in these geographical areas.

Compared to the situation across Wales, the initial results of the Census suggest that the initial conclusions are not as relevant to Carmarthenshire. The significant reduction in the number of the youngest children able to speak Welsh, largely attributed to the COVID-19 era when play groups, childcare and schools were closed, has not happened in Carmarthenshire.

The reduction in our numbers has manifested itself in the 45+ age group and the percentage has fallen most in the age 50+ and up to the age of 80. Further analysis of population mobility will shed significant light on this change.

Planning for this Strategy was finalised before the Census results were published. And it is acceptable that the planning was based on the last Strategy report, with the statistical and qualitative detail it contains, rather than the bare Census figures.

There are limits to the usefulness of census figures, considering the effects of the census being conducted during Covid-19 lockdowns and the significant difference between the figures and other survey figures such as the Annual Population Survey. That said, due attention will be given in the second Strategy to analysing the figures when they become available in their entirety, and to plan some priorities as a result.

The Annual Population Survey Statistics, from the Office for National Statistics gives us a very different picture. As of June 2011, 82,300 (47.2%) Welsh speakers are recorded in Carmarthenshire, placing the county second to Gwynedd in terms of numbers. According to the same source, there are 94,000 Welsh speakers in Carmarthenshire in June 2021, (52.5%), which places us with the highest number of speakers in Wales. Therefore, not only do the mayor figures here significantly exceed the Census figures, but they also show a completely opposite trend to the census of growth in numbers and percentages in Carmarthenshire, as in the other counties.

The importance of data on Welsh usage for meaningful language planning is well known. It is key that we maintain communities where Welsh is the community and social norm and the number of those who can speak Welsh is only half the picture.

According to the Welsh Language Commissioner and the Welsh Government’s joint Language Use Surveys, the percentage of Welsh speakers using Welsh every day in Carmarthenshire fell from 80% to 71% between the 2004-6 Survey and the 2013-15 Survey. This was very similar to the national average and matched the percentage losses of the counties similar to us in terms of density of Welsh speakers.

Unfortunately, the 2019-20 Language Use Survey was finished early due to the pandemic. This meant that the sample was a third lower than previous surveys and it was not possible to analyse the survey results by local authority as had been done in the previous surveys.

The national results suggested however that ‘over half (56%) speak the language every day (regardless of their fluency levels) compared to 53% according to the 2013-15 Language Use Survey, and almost one in five speak the language every week (19%, exactly the same percentage as in 2013-15)’.

It therefore appears that Welsh is being maintained fairly successfully as a community and social language at this time. Obviously, having meaningful and comparative data on language use would be very useful to measure the future impact of a Promotion Strategy like this.

At the beginning of the first Promotion Strategy, an effort was made to find more local data on attitudes and awareness of the Welsh language. A questionnaire was administered mainly through the Mentrau, which gave us some useful information.

The report stated that 97% of respondents saw bilingualism as advantageous and that ‘work opportunities’ were most prominent in people’s minds when thinking about those benefits. We found that only half of respondents understood that pupils receiving English medium education in the county were unlikely to be bilingual before leaving school.

It was also possible to establish that respondents’ awareness of the organisations promoting Welsh in the county was relatively high (between 67 and 82 %). Despite the usefulness of this survey, the sample was too small to be representative and it had to be recognised also that the respondents came from the usual audiences of the Mentrau, rather than providing us with information about the residents of the county more widely.

Although it was planned to re-run the survey at the end of the strategy period, it was decided, that there was insufficient resource available to administer it, and while it would have been useful to understand whether our campaign to raise awareness of Welsh language education had had an impact, there was not the necessary infrastructure in place at county level to find meaningful and representative data.

There remains, therefore, a gap in empirical evidence that would ascertain the impact of the campaigns and interventions of the Strategy.

Foundations: The work achieved in the first Strategy

In the process of drafting the Carmarthenshire Promotion Strategy 2016-2021, regular meetings of the Welsh Language County Strategic Forum were established to assist the local authority in planning, implementing, and scrutinising the Strategy.

The significant work of the Mentrau as well as the other bodie promoting Welsh within the county was recognised as the backbone of the Strategy. Then, during the five-year period, 10 meetings were held looking at an area of work for development at each meeting. At each meeting, there were presentations from county council officials and key representatives working in the areas covered. Following the discussions, new action points were formulated for the work area.

The actions were laid out in an Action Plan which was updated on a meeting-by-meeting basis. The Action Plan remained a live document throughout the period. In between Forum meetings, meetings were held with various departments within the Council to plan for the Welsh language in preparation to present to the Forum and then following the meeting to propose and commit to new actions.

In September 2019, Meri Huws started to chair the Forum’s quarterly meetings, providing stability and astute guidance to the discussions and co-planning. Inevitably, the content of the schedule had to be revised due to Covid-19. The lockdown had hit a large number of service providers and community activity, and scrutiny on some areas had to be delayed as a result. The meetings were not suspended, however. We transitioned straight to a digital platform without losing any of the momentum or commitment of the members.

The objectives identified for the strategy were:

1. Welsh language Skills Acquisition
2. Increasing confidence and use
3. Affecting population movements
4. Geographical areas of priority
5. Marketing and Promotion.

The areas of work that were recognized for reaching these objectives and provided a focal point for the implementation of the Action Plan and for forum meetings were:

• Preschool
  
• Welsh for Adults and Welsh in the Workplace
  
• Leisure
  
• Youth
  
• Housing
  
• Planning and assimilating newcomers (and the Moving Rural Carmarthenshire Forward report)
  
• Regeneration
  
• Private sector
  
• Young people and the world of work
  
• Geographical areas of priority

A detailed report was produced to take stock of the impact of the Strategy in 2022 and came to the following conclusions on progress and lack of progress against the objectives.

It must be recognised that there has also been significant work and progress made since the end of the last Strategy period, particularly in the community provision in the Llanelli area, and in the re-establishment of comprehensive provision to support children and young people’s use of Welsh outside of formal education after COVID-19.

Effective partnership work has also been undertaken to increase the involvement of county residents at the Carmarthenshire Urdd Eisteddfod 2023. This work will be reflected and developed in this Promotion Strategy 2023-2028.

The Forum also attempted to influence the above areas of work by raising issues with other bodies, to try to make an impact on the elements of policy that were outside the reach of the bodies on the county forum at county level. Correspondence has been shared with the Government and the Welsh Language Commissioner about Welsh-medium apprenticeships, about the consultation procedures of the Welsh in education Strategic Plans, about advertising regulations and, more recently, the Carmarthenshire Public Service Board was corresponded with about the Welsh language in the draft Well-being Plan. The Forum has matured and now seeks to influence issues affecting the Welsh language at a strategic level and will continue to do this in the Promotion Strategy 2023-28, as issues arise.

Aim and vision

Aim: To make Welsh the main language of the County. Our aim is to restore Welsh to a language spoken and used by the majority of our inhabitants consistently, and in all aspects of life.

While members of the Forum were in agreement about continuing with the same aim into the next five-year period, a desire was also expressed to change gears in terms of this aim. Following all the co-planning, influencing and collaboration that has taken place over the last five years and before, we feel there is now a basis and need to be more confident in discussing the Welsh language in the county.

We believe that we have reached a point in the history of Welsh in Carmarthenshire where we should move away from ‘encouraging its use’ and towards declaring that Welsh is at the core of the county’s identity and welcoming everyone to the language and to the community of the language, without apology. We want to plan and deliver in a way that accepts that Welsh is the norm in the county and does not need to be ‘normalised’ anymore. To reflect this, we agreed on the following vision to inform the approach we will take in implementing this Strategy.

Vision: We want to see an increase in the proportion of Carmarthenshire residents who can speak Welsh and use their Welsh consistently. We want to see the Welsh language as a working and operating norm in the County’s public institutions and increasingly prevalent in the County’s businesses. We want our young people to see a future for themselves in the County in sustainable and prosperous Welsh communities, economically, culturally and socially.

We want everyone to be proud of the Welsh language in Carmarthenshire.

We also recognise that the 2023 Census results will highlight geographical areas within the county that have not yet reached this state of linguistic confidence, and the new Census figures will drive our response to these challenges. At first glance, it appears that ‘language transmission’ and ‘population movement’ will be areas that this Strategy will explore in more detail when analysing Census results.

The fundamental objectives of the first Strategy, such as creating more confident speakers, and maintaining the use of Welsh as a whole will obviously continue in this Strategy, but there will be a more focused emphasis on the Welsh language and the economy, workforce and workplace as these are themes in which, as a forum, we have developed a clearer understanding of how action is needed to improve the position of the Welsh language in the county.

The Forum also feels that ‘Marketing the Welsh language’ has progressed in the period of this strategy. It now seems better suited to be actioned intertwined with the activity of the other objectives, as a feature of all the work of this Strategy.

The work of raising the status of the Welsh language and raising awareness of specific elements of the Welsh language (such as Welsh language education, and the need for Welsh language skills in the workforce) will be undertaken as a core part of achieving all the objectives.

There will also be an attempt, during the next five-year period to identify audiences within the county who do not understand the significance and benefits of bilingualism and of the Welsh language as a fundamental and unique aspect of our county’s identity and culture. We will seek to convey these messages in new and innovative ways.

The Forum will also prioritise the 2021 Census data. We will analyse the most significant trends at community level and respond through planning at a geographical level. Time will tell what the new geographical priorities will be, and it will have to be carefully prioritised to be realistic about what can be
achieved with the resources available.

This Strategy categorises the sub-objectives as ones that should be addressed in the short, medium and long term. This will enable us to give clearer direction to the work of the action plan whilst recognising that it is not realistic to try to achieve everything at the same time.

The Strategy also identifies an Area of Work to match each subobjective, in order to set a clear operational direction.

Approaches to implementing and monitoring the Objectives:

The Mechanism

Objectives, Sub-objectives, work areas and main partners

Objective 1 - An Increase in Welsh speakers

Objective 2 - Maintaining the pride, use and confidence of the County’s residents in the Welsh language

Objective 3 - Welsh as the norm in the workplace and workforce

Objective 4 - Thriving Welsh communities

Objective 1: An increase in Welsh speakers

Objective 2 : Maintaining the pride, confidence and use of the county’s residents in the Welsh language

Objective 3: Welsh as the norm in the workplace and workforce

Objective 4: Thriving Welsh communities