The Revolving Door: The Man Who Marks His Own Homework

There is a well-understood principle in governance: the person who designs a policy should not be the same person who implements it, evaluates it, and reports on whether it has succeeded. The reasons are obvious. If the strategy was wrong, the author has every incentive to defend it rather than admit the flaw. If the implementation is failing, the architect has every incentive to redefine success rather than acknowledge failure. Self-assessment is not assessment. It is narrative control.

At Digital Health and Care Wales, this principle is not merely ignored. It is institutionalised.

The Strategy Author Becomes the Strategy Implementer

Ifan Evans spent 15 years in the Welsh Government. During that time, he was one of the architects of A Healthier Wales — the national health strategy that defined the digital transformation agenda for the Welsh NHS. This was the policy document that set the direction, the priorities, and the framework within which all subsequent digital health investment in Wales would be made.

He then left the Welsh Government and joined DHCW as Executive Director of Digital Strategy. His role: to implement the strategy he had authored. His reporting obligation: to tell the Welsh Government and the Senedd whether the strategy is working.

He now marks his own homework.

This is not a peripheral concern. A Healthier Wales is the foundational document. It shaped DHCW's programme portfolio, its investment priorities, its organisational structure. Every major programme under Level 3 escalation — all nine of them — exists because of decisions that flow from the strategy Ifan Evans helped to write. If the strategy was sound, then the implementation has failed. If the strategy was flawed, then the foundation on which hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent was wrong from the start. Either way, independent assessment is essential.

Instead, the person conducting the assessment is the person who wrote the strategy.

The Credentials Question

Ifan Evans holds three degrees. The subjects of all three are undisclosed in any publicly available source. This is not a minor omission. For a role titled "Executive Director of Digital Strategy" at a national digital health organisation, the public has a reasonable expectation of being able to verify whether the person filling it has relevant qualifications.

We have searched LinkedIn, DHCW's website, Senedd testimony, conference biographies, and published articles. No technology-related qualification has been identified in any public record. This does not prove that no such qualification exists — but it means that no member of the public, no Senedd member, and no journalist can verify the technical foundations of the person setting the digital strategy for the entire Welsh NHS.

His salary is disclosed at £120,000 to £125,000. In the 2022/23 accounts, his pension contributions were recorded at approximately £97,000 — a figure that reflects the generosity of the NHS pension scheme and the seniority of the role. Total remuneration exceeds £200,000 per year.

For a position that requires — or should require — deep expertise in digital technology, health informatics, programme architecture, and technical strategy, the absence of any publicly verifiable technical credential is a gap that warrants explanation. That explanation has never been provided.

The Structural Problem

The issue is not personal. It is structural.

When the person who designed a strategy is also the person implementing it, and also the person reporting on its progress, there is no independent assessment at any point in the chain. The design is not tested against external expertise. The implementation is not measured against external benchmarks. The reporting is not verified by anyone without a stake in the outcome.

If the strategy was wrong — if A Healthier Wales set digital health priorities that were misaligned with clinical need, or underestimated complexity, or overestimated the capacity of Welsh institutions to deliver — then Ifan Evans has every professional incentive to continue defending the framework rather than admitting it was flawed. His career, his reputation, and his role all depend on the strategy being seen as correct. He is not an impartial evaluator. He is the most partial evaluator imaginable.

This is a textbook revolving-door scenario. A policy author moves from the body that commissioned the policy to the body that delivers it, carrying with them an irreconcilable conflict of interest. The revolving door is well documented in defence procurement, in financial regulation, in pharmaceutical oversight. Its presence at the heart of Welsh digital health strategy should concern anyone who cares about whether public money is being well spent.

The Wider Pattern at DHCW

Ifan Evans is not an anomaly. He is an exemplar of a pattern that runs through DHCW's entire senior leadership.

CEO Helen Thomas was Director of Information at NWIS — DHCW's predecessor organisation. NWIS was the body that a Senedd committee described in 2018 as having a culture that was "the antithesis of open," where staff were "reluctant to be critical on the record," and where the committee felt it was receiving "pre-prepared lines" rather than honest testimony. Helen Thomas now leads the organisation that was created to fix the problems she presided over at NWIS. She is, in effect, reforming herself.

Chief Data Officer Rebecca Cook has spent approximately 19 years within NWIS and DHCW. She leads the National Data Resource programme — a critical initiative to unify health data across Wales. Its target completion date is 2030. She is implementing a data strategy within an organisation she has worked in for nearly two decades, during which the data infrastructure of NHS Wales has consistently failed to meet modern standards.

The pattern is clear. DHCW's senior leadership is drawn overwhelmingly from within DHCW itself or from its predecessor organisation. The same people who created the problems are now charged with fixing them. The same people who presided over a culture described as the "antithesis of open" are now responsible for cultural transformation. The same people who oversaw chronic non-delivery are now accountable for delivery improvement.

This is an insider monoculture. It is not a sign of institutional strength. It is a sign of an organisation that has closed itself to external challenge.

What Good Looks Like

The contrast with comparable organisations is instructive.

When NHS Digital in England needed transformation, it brought in CEOs from outside the health sector entirely — leaders with proven delivery track records at Deloitte consulting and Jaguar Land Rover. The principle was explicit: transformation requires people who are not invested in defending the status quo.

When the Government Digital Service was created to reform UK public services, it recruited leaders from the digital industry — people who had built products at scale and who brought methodologies, standards, and expectations from outside the civil service. The result was a step change in how government approached digital delivery, including the Service Standard that DHCW has never adopted.

The principle is neither radical nor controversial. When an organisation has failed consistently over a long period, the people who led it during that failure are not the right people to lead its recovery. They carry the assumptions that caused the failure. They have relationships and loyalties that prevent honest assessment. They have reputations that depend on the narrative that things are improving under their watch.

Transformation requires outsiders. People who owe nothing to the existing structure. People who can look at a failing strategy and say it is failing, without that admission destroying their own career. People who bring skills, standards, and expectations from organisations that have actually delivered at scale.

DHCW has none of these people in its senior leadership.

Conclusion

The revolving door between Welsh Government policy and DHCW implementation means the architect reviews his own blueprints, the author grades his own paper, and the designer judges the quality of his own design. At every stage — strategy formulation, implementation, evaluation — the same small group of insiders controls the narrative.

The Welsh public deserves independent assessment of whether the strategy that guides DHCW is the right strategy. Not self-assessment by the person who wrote it. Not reassurance from leaders whose careers depend on the current direction being vindicated. Independent, external, expert assessment — conducted by people with no stake in the outcome and no loyalty to the incumbents.

Until that happens, the revolving door will keep turning. The same people will keep marking their own homework. And the people of Wales will keep being told that the strategy is working — by the person who wrote it.

All facts in this article are drawn from DHCW's published annual accounts, Welsh Government publications, Senedd committee records, and publicly available professional profiles. Where qualifications or credentials could not be verified from public sources, we state that explicitly.