RIFW, what next?

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For sale sign with Welsh government logo in a field
Image caption,

An assembly committee begins an inquiry in the autumn into what went wrong at RIFW

By
Political editor, Wales

So what happens next to the Regeneration Investment Fund for Wales?

It was suspended after the Wales Audit Office began what was its most complex ever investigation.

I set out the details in Week In Week Out.

The £30m which has sat in the bank account will now be spent directly by ministers in the field of regeneration.

Remove the money and you remove the point of RIFW's existence, although that has yet to be confirmed by the Welsh government.

Political fallout

The political fallout will roll into the autumn, when the public accounts committee at the assembly begins its inquiry into what went wrong at the fund.

There was plenty of criticism of the Welsh government in the report, but from a ministerial perspective there was no smoking gun.

The length of time it took to develop the idea, and then implement RIFW, makes it difficult for critics, led by the Conservatives, to maintain political pressure on any one individual.

But the thrust of the criticism from the Tories is serious for the Welsh government.

The accusation is that at a time of complaints about the financial settlement from Westminster by Labour Welsh government ministers, this was an example of a failure by those very same ministers to maximise the assets under their control.

Legacy

It would be serious at the best of times but at a time of austerity, even more so.

There are some key questions for the public accounts committee to try to get to the bottom of.

Among them will be to hear from senior government officials and advisors about why key information was not passed on to the board, such as the true market value of the sites and the true time-scale that needed to be followed.

It's also a striking feature of this story that after three years, no-one can actually say with any degree of certainty how much the taxpayer will receive as a result of the deal.

In terms of the legacy of RIFW, it will probably become less likely that the Welsh government will set up new semi-autonomous bodies to deliver transport or economic development policies in future.

There's no shortage of task and finish groups and advisory panels but the RIFW experience is likely to mean that they remain exactly that, advice groups, rather than bodies with budgets.