Welsh Government materially shaped the DHCW failure conditions: annual funding cycles; contradictory remit letters; a recruitment freeze imposed while delivery was being accelerated; the £33M-to-£28M DPIF cut for 2024–25; funding confirmations arriving 25% into the financial year; the GDS director — DHCW's principal technical counterweight inside WG — driven out and not replaced. Reforming DHCW without reforming the funder reproduces the conditions for the successor. Six functions to embed at WG level: capital/revenue coherence; RAG honesty against milestones; milestone realism; remit-letter discipline; structural separation between commissioning and delivery oversight; reinstatement of the independent technical assessor.
Welsh Government did not merely fail to oversee DHCW. It materially contributed to the conditions that produced the failure: red ratings were pressured down (Evans, Performance and Delivery Committee, November 2024); DPIF was cut from £33M planned to £28M allocated for 2024-25; capital funding for e-referrals and the integration hub was refused in November 2025 while milestones requiring those very systems were retained; LIMS was compressed from a four-year programme into two; recruitment was frozen by remit letter while delivery was tightened. Replacing DHCW’s leadership without reforming the funder leaves these conditions in place for any successor body.
This intervention is parallel to I1-I5, owned by Welsh Government and the Senedd Public Accounts Committee. It has five elements.
Capital and revenue coherence. Capital allocations cannot lag the programmes that require them. Settlement before fiscal year start. The November 2025 refusal of capital funding for e-referrals and the integration hub, while milestones requiring those systems remained on the books, is the structural failure mode this addresses. The new procedural rule: no programme milestone is binding until the capital envelope underneath it is confirmed.
RAG honesty. Welsh Government ceases to pressure DHCW to soften red RAG ratings. A published RAG criteria document. A RAG audit trail visible to the Senedd PAC: every change of rating logged with author, date, and rationale. Evans’s Performance and Delivery Committee admission that “Government was asking… why then are those programs rated red amber? If you’ve got a reasonable confidence that you will hold the implementation dates” is the precedent: this rule prevents its repetition.
Milestone realism. Externally-validated milestone setting at programme inception. No compressed timelines without published risk acknowledgement. The LIMS compression from four years to two was a deliberate decision with predictable consequences (Michelle Sell, PDC February 2025). The new rule: any compression beyond initial scoping requires a named accountable individual at Welsh Government, a published risk register, and milestone deferral if the conditions underpinning the compression change.
Remit-letter discipline. Recruitment freezes paired with milestone deferral, not concurrent with milestone tightening. The 2026 remit-letter freeze on recruitment while delivery was being escalated created a structural impossibility — Glazzard, six years in: “We’ve always struggled because it’s one-year funding. We should have worked it out by now, surely.” The new rule: any reduction in input authority (recruitment, capital, programme staffing) is paired with proportionate output relief — milestone deferral, scope reduction, or formal recognition that delivery is contingent on the input being restored.
Co-author accountability. When Welsh Government sets a condition that contributes to programme failure, Welsh Government is named in the post-mortem alongside DHCW. The entity issuing the corrective signal cannot be invisible in the post-mortem. The Performance and Delivery Committee, the Cabinet Secretary, and the responsible Director General each carry named accountability for conditions they imposed. Audit Wales is empowered to examine Welsh Government decisions as causally upstream of DHCW outcomes — not just DHCW decisions in isolation.
Why this intervention runs in parallel, not in sequence. Unlike Interventions 2-5, which depend on Competent Leadership being in place at DHCW, this intervention is owned by a different actor (Welsh Government and the Senedd) and addresses a different governance level. It can — and must — begin in Months 0-3, alongside the forensic review under Intervention 1. Without it, the same RAG pressure, capital refusals, milestone compressions, and remit-letter tightening will be applied to whichever leadership team replaces the current one. The conditions reproduce. Reform of DHCW alone is not reform.
The downstream cost of these funder behaviours is measurable on the staff record. Annual funding cycles drive short-term contracts → staff turnover → overload of remaining staff → burnout (65% → 68.9%) → sickness (+82% across three years against headcount +30%). The Chair’s 2022 warning that “you just heap misery on misery every year when you do that” was issued at the September 2022 board and erased from the published minutes; the strategy continued; the welfare cost is now in the Annual Report. The structural reading sits at Psychological Safety — the prerequisite for digital delivery that funder behaviour is currently inverting upstream.
This is the structural precondition. Interventions 1-5 reform DHCW. Intervention 6 reforms the funder, the overseer, and the political environment in which DHCW operates. Both are required.