He Wrote the Strategy. Now He Marks His Own Homework

He wrote the strategy. Then he moved to the organisation responsible for implementing it. Now he reports on whether his own strategy is working. In any regulated industry, this would be a conflict of interest. At DHCW, it is the governance model.

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. [Source: A Healthier Wales, Welsh Government, 2018]

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.

What He Revealed at the Accountability Meeting

At the January 2026 Public Accountability Meeting, Evans himself described the scale of the challenge: "There are over 1,400 different systems in operation" across NHS Wales. [Source: DHCW Public Accountability Meeting, 29 January 2026]

This is the fragmented estate that the strategy he authored was supposed to rationalise. Five years after DHCW's creation, 1,400 systems remain. The Interim Chair revealed that "around 80% of our resources are committed to those operational services" — keeping the lights on. Twenty per cent for the transformation the strategy promised.

The strategy author is now the strategy implementer, and the strategy has not delivered its objectives. The question is who will say so — because it will not be him.

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 a conflict of interest that, in other regulated sectors, would require formal declaration and management. 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. [Source: Committee on Standards in Public Life, "Upholding Standards in Public Life," 2021]

What a Conflict of Interest Register Would Show

If DHCW operated under the Senior Managers and Certification Regime used in financial services, or under standard academic peer review rules, Ifan Evans would be required to declare:

• Authorship conflict: He authored or co-authored the strategy that his current organisation is implementing. Any assessment of the strategy's validity involves a direct conflict between his professional reputation and his duty to report honestly.
• Career interest: His role as Executive Director of Digital Strategy exists because of the strategy he wrote. If an independent review concluded the strategy was fundamentally flawed, his role — and the rationale for it — would be called into question.
• Relationship conflict: He moved from the Welsh Government (the commissioning body) to DHCW (the delivery body). His former colleagues at the Welsh Government are now his overseers. The professional relationships he built over 15 years create an inherent difficulty in adversarial scrutiny.

Under financial services regulation, these conflicts would require formal registration, ongoing disclosure, and management by a compliance function. Under academic peer review rules, Evans would be excluded from reviewing any work derived from his own strategy.

At DHCW, no such framework exists. The conflict is unmanaged because it is unacknowledged.

The Remuneration

His salary is disclosed at GBP 120,000 to GBP 125,000. In the 2022/23 annual accounts, his pension contributions were recorded at approximately GBP 97,000. Total remuneration exceeds GBP 200,000 per year. [Source: DHCW Annual Report and Accounts 2022/23]

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 warrants explanation. Evans holds three degrees, though the subjects of all three are undisclosed in any publicly available source. We note this not as an allegation of inadequacy — degree subjects are not always publicly disclosed — but as a transparency gap. Comparable executives at organisations like NHS England or the Government Digital Service typically have publicly visible technical credentials that enable external scrutiny of their suitability for the role.

What Good Looks Like

The contrast with comparable organisations is instructive.

NHS Digital / NHS England: 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 as CIO at Jaguar Land Rover. The principle was explicit: transformation requires people who are not invested in defending the status quo. Crucially, the strategies these leaders implemented were assessed by independent bodies — Audit Wales equivalents, select committee inquiries, and external consultancies with no prior relationship to the programmes under review.

Government Digital Service (GDS): When the GDS was created to reform UK public services, it recruited leaders from the digital industry — people who had built products at scale. It also established the Service Standard: an independent assessment framework that requires external panels to evaluate every programme at each stage of delivery. The assessors are external. The person who wrote the strategy does not grade its implementation.

Scotland: NHS Scotland's digital transformation is led by a dedicated directorate within the Scottish Government, but strategy formulation and implementation are separated by design. The Scottish Government commissions external reviews of digital health programmes through bodies like Audit Scotland, ensuring that the people evaluating strategy are not the people who wrote it.

Estonia: A nation of 1.3 million people — less than half of Wales's population — that built a world-class digital health system. Estonia's e-health architecture was designed by external technical advisers and is independently audited. The principle is simple: the architect does not inspect his own building.

The principle across all of these 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.

Conclusion

Until someone outside DHCW evaluates whether A Healthier Wales was the right strategy, the revolving door will keep turning. The person who designed the plan cannot be trusted to tell Wales it was wrong. Independent assessment is not optional. It is the precondition for everything else.

Right of Reply: CareNHS welcomes a response from DHCW to the matters raised in this article. No response has been received to date. Contact: carenhs@carenhs.org

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.

carenhs.org is an independent public accountability campaign focused on NHS Wales digital infrastructure. We welcome corrections and responses from DHCW, the Welsh Government, and any individual named in this article. Contact: info@carenhs.org

Related pages:

• Nepotism & Empire-Building — The Evidence — the full insider culture analysis
• The Credential Sprint — how the CEO accumulated titles during failure
• Governance Reform — how to prevent conflicts of interest
• Ghost Directors & Shadow Workforce — the invisible decision-makers