Aiming at the right target

Tweet Some of the expense claims made by staff within IBW are truly headline-grabbing. And blaming the man who happens to be at the top when the news comes out makes an easy press release for lazy opposition politicians. But it seems to me that both these approaches are missing the point.

I wouldn't seek to defend the expenses claims made by the staff involved; but I'd be a great deal happier to take a relaxed view if they'd actually been delivering. If I were to rank the elements of scandal in order of importance, then top of my list was not the front page reports of strange expenses claims - it was the detail relegated to the business pages about how the organisation was targeting the wrong companies in the wrong market place, and was delivering poor value for money. And second on my list is how on earth this was allowed to go on for so long under a succession of ministers.

It's not just in the big things that they appear to have been getting it wrong. For a government agency in a bilingual nation to have appointed a non-German speaker to run the office in Munich is something I find hard to believe given the lack of understanding it shows of the need to respect local culture.

It's easy for opposition politicians to have a pop at Ieuan Wyn given that it's come to light on his watch – although it was he who commissioned the report which has identified most of the failings as I understand it. But the issues were obviously missed by his predecessors as well. I'm not sure how valuable it is to play the 'blame' game, even though it's often a lot easier that debating the real issues.

Many years ago, when I was leading an IT project team, I appointed one of the team members as 'team scapegoat'. The idea was that once we'd all decided who was to blame, we could get on in earnest with the real issue of analysing and resolving the problem, rather than everyone being afraid to speak openly about what had happened. A bit of a corny idea, I know; but it was a genuine attempt to get out of a blame culture and into a problem-solving one.

I doubt that some opposition politicians will be in any hurry to move on from blame; but that's surely what we need most now. Recognising that we've been doing the wrong thing - and not even doing it terribly well - is a hard thing to do; but the One Wales government has done that. In doing so, it has established a basis for setting an alternative direction for the future - one based more on expanding and encouraging indigenous businesses than attracting 'footloose' major employers.

I think that's the right way forward. And if we start to re-localise our economy in the process, then we'll be moving much more in the direction of the government's aspirations for a green economy than we have done to date.