Welsh Language Division Education and Public Services Welsh Government Cathays Park Cardiff CF10 3NQ By email 14 October 2016 Dear Sir/Madam Welsh Language Standards consultation We write in response to your consultation on Welsh Language Standards within the health sector. We recognise the importance of ensuring access to services in the health sector for Welsh speakers and of treating the languages on the basis of equality. We have operated a Welsh Language Scheme since 2009 and intend to build on it through the implementation of Welsh Language Standards. We understand that because of the number and range of organisations included in Round 2 of the Welsh Language Standards Investigations, the Standards are broad ranging and on the whole written for organisations that have a Wales only remit and/or are publicly funded. Therefore, we thought it would be helpful to clarify the following the particular circumstances of the GOC with regard to our remit and statutory purpose: •

We are responsible for regulating opticians across the UK. This means that the vast majority - over 95 per cent - of those for whom we provide services do not reside or work in Wales. In some cases the Standards are not clear about the audience or jurisdiction to which they apply; this is particularly difficult to interpret for organisations with a UK-wide remit.

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We only have one office, in England, and all our services are delivered by staff who are not based in Wales.

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We are a charity and, in common with other healthcare professional regulators, we are entirely funded by our registrants’ fees. We do not receive any taxpayer funding and any extra services we provide have to be funded by increasing registration fees for all our registrants.

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Healthcare professional regulators have in recent years come under pressure from the UK and Scottish Governments, the Professional Standards Authority, professional bodies and registrants to keep our fees low and operate efficiently.

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In addition, we thought it might also be useful to share our experience of operating the Welsh Language Scheme to date.

Despite the provisions of our Welsh Language Scheme we have never had a registrant or a member of the public request or take up any of our services in Welsh. This includes written or telephone correspondence, a request for translation at an event or a request for any document which has been translated into Welsh. When we consulted on our Welsh Language Scheme we did not receive any requests from any members of the public or registrants to extend the remit of the scheme beyond what we proposed and have since implemented. We would very much welcome an ongoing dialogue with the Commissioner about the use of our Welsh services. For example if there were to be a future increase in demand, we would be more likely to see a significant expansion of our Welsh language activities as proportionate. With regard to the proposed standards we would offer the following comments: We welcome the plan to exclude the GOC from certain Standards which would have been inappropriate for us. As an organisation without a physical presence in Wales, we welcome the fact that we have been excluded from Standards relating to our internal workings such as signage in our building and staffing matters. However, we have serious reservations about the proportionality of some of the Standards if they become mandatory and are applied to us via these regulations. This is particularly because of our funding arrangements, whereby all our registrants bear the cost burden of any increase in our activities, the low uptake of our existing Welsh language provision and the fact that we do not have a physical presence in Wales. Because of our duties under the Equality Act 2010 we would need to see evidence from the Welsh Government that the application of these standards is a proportionate way of achieving a legitimate aim as they have the potential to impact disproportionately on certain groups of registrants.

We set these reservations out below and would welcome their consideration in respect of ourselves and our fellow healthcare professional regulators: •

Standard 2 and Standard 5 seem to contradict each other in respect of whether we should be asking someone if they wish to correspond in Welsh, or automatically corresponding bilingually. We believe that Standard 2, asking first, would be the more proportionate when corresponding with members of the public based in Wales.

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The expectation in Standard 7 that corresponding in Welsh will not lead to delay is unrealistic. To meet this standard fully we would need to ensure that every member of our staff was able to communicate in Welsh, which is unrealistic given our physical location. As a result corresponding with registrants and the public in Welsh will always require translation services to be used and this will cause a delay.

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Standard 22, concerning our automated telephone message, is not proportionate for us given that we are a UK-wide body and we have an extremely low demand to use our services in Welsh. We are already concerned that our automated telephone message is too long, which has customer service implications; doubling its length by replicating it in Welsh would greatly exacerbate this problem.

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Standard 37, around public meeting papers, is reasonable if applied only to meetings which we hold in Wales. However if this standard is applied to our activities in relation to the whole of the UK we would see it as grossly disproportionate. For example, standard 37 would apply to our Council meetings and would lead to considerable costs; for example, the papers for our last Council meeting were around 125,000 words and would have cost us around £10,000 to translate. Given that interest in our Council is usually limited to a small number of stakeholder bodies rather than the public at large such a cost would be grossly disproportionate. It is important to note that we have never had a request from a member of the public or a registrant for a Council paper to be provided in Welsh.

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Standard 40, about the type of documents we must translate, is overly prescriptive and covers too many documents that are not of interest to the general public. This particularly includes ‘policies’ - a word that is highly subjective - and also consultation documents. Where a consultation is on issues with a strong public interest we will translate these into Welsh. For example, last year we published the consultation on our Standards of Practice in Welsh. This cost over £1,000, but it should be noted that we received no responses to the consultation in Welsh. We also issue other consultations which are highly technical

and legalistic and only of interest to a small group of stakeholders rather than the public at large. In these circumstances we do not consider it to be proportionate to translate these consultations in Welsh although we would provide a translated version if we were asked for one. •

Standard 42, about press releases, is reasonable if only applied to specific issues about Wales or the fitness to practise outcomes of Welsh registrants, which might be targeted at bilingual or Welsh language media. However requiring all of our press releases to be published in Welsh would be disproportionate and of no benefit. Most of our press releases are targeted at UK-wide publications which publish only in English and there would therefore be no benefit to publishing them in Welsh. Press releases also need to be timely translating them, even on the same day, is highly impractical.

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Standards 48-50, around written correspondence in our legal proceedings, are reasonable as long as they apply only to registrants and complainants based in Wales.

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Standards 52-56, concerning our website, would not be proportionate for us. In keeping with our principle of making information targeted at patients and the public available in Welsh, but not information solely aimed at the profession, we think having our entire website in Welsh would be a grossly disproportionate step. Our web developer estimates that the infrastructure for this would cost £50,000 to provide all of our services in Welsh, with significant one-off and ongoing translation work required on top of that. This is particularly the case because the hits to our existing Welsh content are so low - on average, less than one hit per day during the last six months. This compares to over 2,000 hits per day for the English site. Our existing Welsh language section provides key information to the public in Welsh including our standards, information about how to complain, our strategic plan, annual reports and a guide on what to expect from an optician. We believe that this is a proportionate response to the requirement to provide information to the Welsh speaking members of the public. A large proportion of the content on our website – whilst available to the public – is aimed at registrants, prospective registrants, those providing legal representation and stakeholder organisations. These areas of the website are regularly updated. We do not consider it necessary or proportionate to spend significant amounts of money to translate these aspects of our website into Welsh on the grounds that a

very small number of Welsh-speaking members of the public may seek to access them. We have also made it possible for Welsh speaking members of the public to search our register search in Welsh – an innovative development beyond the scope of our Welsh Language Scheme. As far as we know we are the only healthcare professional regulator to have done this. Despite this, we have had very minimal take up of the service. The landing page has received just seven unique hits so far this calendar year despite this being clearly signposted from the Welsh section of our website and search engine optimised. Given that searching the register is the most common reason for people to use our website, this suggests that demand for other information would also be low. As a result we would not be able to justify translating our whole website in Welsh particularly given the very large sums involved and the impact that this would have on registrants’ fees. | •

Standards 71-75, around tendering for work, are reasonable for work in Wales (such as if we were seeking a partner to run an event in Wales). However, we do not see them as proportionate for all GOC contracts. As we do not have a physical presence in Wales, English is the operational language of our office and we would therefore expect to communicate with any contractors solely in English. EU tendering rules only require publication in one language, even though tenders are designed to be aimed at the entire European market. This is a more proportionate approach.

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Standard 78, around our corporate identity, is proportionate as long as it only applies to events in Wales.

We will provide a more detailed assessment of the likely costs involved in meeting these standards when we submit our impact assessment in November but based on an initial assessment it is already clear that if we are required to meet all the Standards set out in the consultation document we would find it very difficult to resource without either increasing our fees or reducing expenditure on our statutory functions. To conclude, as a regulator without access to tax funding we have an overarching statutory duty to protect the public within the resources available to us. We cannot expend resources which do not in some way meet this statutory duty. We also have a statutory duty to comply with the Equality Act 2010. Because of the disproportionate impact in terms of potential fee

increases on non-Welsh registrants we could only justify expenditure to meet these proposed standards if we could demonstrate that they are a proportionate way of meeting a legitimate aim. At this stage whilst we recognise that enabling Welsh speaking members of the public to access services in the health sector is a legitimate aim we do not consider that the application of the proposed standards in the way set out in this consultation document is a proportionate way of achieving this objective.

Yours sincerely

Samantha Peters Chief Executive and Registrar [email protected]