Top Tory's 20mph tweet damaged Senedd - ruling

The default 20mph speed limit has been in place in Wales since September 2023

The Conservative leader in the Senedd has been judged to have brought the Welsh Parliament into disrepute by calling Wales' 20mph speed limit a "blanket" policy on social media.

Andrew RT Davies had insisted that his choice of words was "a matter of opinion" but will be officially reprimanded next week in Cardiff Bay.

Senedd's standards commissioner Douglas Bain said that as "leader of the Welsh Conservatives and a former experienced member of the Standards of Conduct Committee it was incumbent of the member to set a good example".

The Welsh government has consistently said the "blanket" description is wrong because the default limit, which was previously 30mph, is subject to exemptions.

Andrew RT Davies said his choice of words was "a matter of opinion

Mr Bain received two different complaints in relation to Andrew RT Davies using the phrase on social media.

The tweet - posted after the finding of the Senedd's Standards of Conduct Committee that the term “blanket” was "imprecise and inaccurate" - read: “Another bus route cut thanks to Labour and Plaid’s blanket 20mph speed limits.”

The commissioner considered whether Davies had breached the following rules from the code of conduct:

▪ Rule 1 - Members must uphold the overarching principles.

▪ Rule 2 – Members must act truthfully.

▪ Rule 3 - Members must not act or behave in a manner that brings the Senedd, or its Members generally, into disrepute.

The cross-party standards committee agreed with the commissioner's finding that Davies breached rules 1 and 3, but did not breach rule 2 because the commissioner had concluded "there was no intention to deceive".

The committee says it "considers a breach of the code of conduct by any member of the Senedd to be a serious matter".

"The reputation of the Senedd as an institution, and the public’s trust and confidence in it, rely upon members demonstrating integrity and leadership through their actions."

Davies will be censured by the Senedd on Wednesday afternoon - a form of official reprimand and in effect a telling-off with no further consequences.

The report is the first by the Standards of Conduct Committee since Hannah Blythyn became chair.

She was a Labour minister before her sacking by the then first minister Vaughan Gething, who had alleged that she was the source of a story which revealed he told ministers he was deleting messages from a pandemic-era group chat.

Blythyn denied leaking.

Davies' colleague Natasha Asghar has also been officially reprimanded for calling the 20mph speed limit a "blanket" policy.

Douglas Bain had previously served as standards commissioner in Northern Ireland

In a separate report, the standards committee has recommended to the Senedd that Davies has breached the code of conduct on another matter "but no further action is required".

The standards commissioner received a complaint about a tweet posted by Davies which stated: “Vaughan Gething’s Labour government is embracing the same extreme ideology as its predecessor. Nothing has changed.”

Davies copied into his tweet from the Guido Fawkes website an image of Gething - first minister at the time - and of a pregnant woman with the text “Welsh Government press release celebrates ‘birthing people.’ Wales makes womb for ‘birthing people.’ "

The committee stated that the complainant considered this tweet to be “a blatant lie”, "misleading and dangerous".

The commissioner reported that the statement released by the health secretary on 26 April 2024 did not “celebrate the arrangements for women and birthing people”.

The statement, rather than a press release sent directly to journalists, had actually quoted from a Health Inspectorate Wales report.

That document, rather than the Welsh government itself, had stated that “staff at all levels in the service work hard to provide a good experience and that sufficient arrangements are in place to provide safe and effective care to women and birthing people”.

The committee also noted Davies' representation that "although he had personally composed and posted the tweet, he had not written the text copied from the article published in Guido Fawkes".

However, the committee agreed with the commissioner’s finding that this was “irrelevant” and that “members are fully responsible for any quotation they choose to include in a tweet in the same way as they are responsible for anything they retweet or any tweet that they like.”

The committee agreed that Davies did "not carry out sufficient due diligence before posting his comments".

However, it concluded "although we consider the member is in breach of the Code of Conduct, we do not consider that any further action is warranted".