Skip to main content Flintshire County Council Logo

Alert Section

Latest News

Welsh language annual monitoring report

Published: 10/06/2021

Flintshire’s Cabinet will be asked to approve the Welsh Language Annual Report when it meets on Tuesday, 15 June.

The Council has a statutory duty to publish an annual report setting out how it has met the 171 Welsh Language Standards (WLS) set in September 2015 by the Welsh Language Commissioner.

The Welsh Language Annual Report provides an opportunity to set out what the Council has done to meet the standards and showcase exemplars of good practice. There have been some positive areas of achievement during the year:

  • Completion rates of our Welsh language skills assessment is over 98%. There are now only 43 employees who need to complete the assessment.
  • Reduction in number of employees who do not have any Welsh language skills from 38.18% (1096) to 35.45% (992) employees.
  • Celebrated St David’s Day through supporting Menter Iaith Fflint a Wrecsam to provide virtual activities, such as a virtual parade with a performance by Band Cambria, cookery recipes and providing competitions. Schools, extra care schemes and residential homes participated in these events as well as the local community.
  • Participated in Welsh language rights day in which we posted videos via social media of some of our Welsh speaking employees to encourage our customers to contact us in Welsh and use our Welsh services.

There are a few areas where progress is still to be made:  

  • developing our employees’ Welsh language skills, particularly those in public facing posts to support services deliver bilingual services. The Learning and Development Team has been promoting taster courses to encourage employees to start learning Welsh.
  • ensuring consistent compliance with the Standards on our website, social media and public documents.

We received two complaints relating to Welsh language and three complaints were received directly by the Welsh Language Commissioner.  These related mainly to issues which arose during the height of the Covid-19 emergency and the Commissioner decided not to proceed given the exceptional context.  There is one outstanding issue relating to Clwyd Pension Fund website.

Flintshire’s Cabinet Member for Corporate Management, Councillor Billy Mullin, said:

“We take seriously our responsibility to comply with the Welsh Language Standards and are committed to providing equal services in English and Welsh. It is only right that our Welsh speaking customers receive the same standards of service in Welsh as our English speaking customers receive. The report shows what we are doing to achieve this and the steps we are taking to improve.”