A submission to the Senedd committee’s priorities consultation
Owen Campbell · Penarth, Wales · Submitted 23 July 2026
The consultation asked for the top three priority areas the committee should consider for its Forward Work Programme. This is my response as filed.
No one has ever audited the jurisdictional dependence of Welsh public services. NHS Wales runs on a single all-Wales Microsoft 365 tenancy under a framework worth up to £450 million over six years, and it recurs. Hwb brokers Microsoft and Google accounts to every maintained school in Wales. Under the United States CLOUD Act, a US-headquartered company can be compelled to hand over data it holds wherever that data is stored, and the legal bridge permitting UK–US data transfers is currently being challenged in the European courts. In 2025 the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court lost access to his Microsoft-hosted email after US sanctions, and Microsoft France told the French Senate, under oath, that it could not guarantee French data would never be passed to US authorities. The same answer applies to Welsh data.
I’d ask the committee to consider examining, as part of its work programme, how exposed Welsh public services are to foreign jurisdiction: which services depend on which suppliers, what would happen if the UK–US data bridge fell, and whether Welsh public-sector contracts should carry a jurisdictional risk test and exit clauses, including the right to take the data out again. NHS England’s £330 million contract with Palantir, now heading for a break-clause decision in 2027, shows how live these questions are elsewhere; health being devolved, Wales still has its own choices to make.
Money spent on foreign software licences leaves Wales every year. The countries that have started doing something about this report the flow reversing: the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, a government of about 30,000 staff and so roughly the size of ours, has largely completed a move off Microsoft Office and reports savings of €15 million a year. Work on open, public digital infrastructure is work that could be done in Wales, by Welsh firms and by young people coming through Welsh colleges and universities.
I’d ask the committee to consider whether the Welsh Government’s economic development work, including the remit of the proposed new national development agency, should treat public-interest digital infrastructure as a sector Wales could grow, and whether one Welsh public body should trial an open-source collaboration suite, as Germany and Denmark have, with the results measured honestly and published either way. There’s also a language dimension: commercial platforms will rarely prioritise Cymraeg, and first-class Welsh-language technology tends to appear only when a Welsh public body leads, as Cadw’s work bringing a Welsh version of Minecraft Education about shows. Digital independence and Cymraeg 2050 point the same way.
Connectivity is in the committee’s remit, and I’d ask it to consider what connectivity is for: taking part in civic life. A growing number of Welsh public and civic services are reachable only through an account with a third-party platform, an app store, or both. People who cannot or will not hold those accounts are shut out of things that have nothing to do with the platforms. The Digital Strategy for Wales already promises alternative routes “as good as those offered online” for people who cannot or decide not to participate digitally; the committee could scrutinise whether that promise is being kept, and whether Welsh public services should ever be reachable only through a third-party account.
The consultation also asked whether there was anything else I would like to share with the committee. This was my answer:
By way of background: I’m a resident of Penarth, writing in a personal capacity. I’ve been a software engineer for over thirty years, I’m a Chartered Engineer and I help run a small family software company. I have no political background and no organisation behind me.
The three priorities above all come from one concern: much of Welsh public and civic life now runs on suppliers that answer to another country’s laws, and nobody chose that deliberately. Earlier this year I published a short paper, Digital Independence for Wales, which sets out the evidence, the international precedents and the honest difficulties, with sources.