National Assembly for Wales

I call Members to order.

Members will be aware that a point of order was raised yesterday regarding the use of language in the Chamber. This has prompted me to reflect more generally on a recent tendency among Members to sail close to the wind in relation to the words they choose to use. I’m satisfied that my response to date has been correct and in accordance with our Standing Orders. However, judgments of this kind are finely balanced and can depend much on the context in each case. This is why no Member should interpret a ruling as having established some hard-and-fast line of what constitutes acceptable behaviour.

Whilst I have made clear from the start that I want to ensure robust scrutiny and lively debate, the people of Wales would not expect this Chamber to become a place where accusations about the personal integrity of Members are thrown around lightly or frequently. All Members must think carefully about the words they use. I will not allow a pattern of behaviour to develop that deliberately tests our boundaries.

So, we move on to the first item on the agenda, which is questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Infrastructure. And the first question is from Rhianon Passmore.

Yes. Our tourism strategy sets out our principles and priorities to support the industry across Wales. This includes marketing campaigns in the UK and overseas, it includes capital development funding for new and existing tourism businesses, and it also includes revenue funding for regional projects.

Thank you, Cabinet Secretary. The Valleys taskforce has expressed its desire to use the wonderful natural landscape of Wales to promote our economy. In Islwyn, we have the wondrous Cwmcarn forest scenic drive, which we need reopened. We have the historic grade II Navigation colliery, with its grade II listed buildings. Cabinet Secretary, what can the Welsh Government do to showcase the great Valleys to the world and, as a consequence, revitalise our economy?

Well, can I thank the Member for her further question, and also thank her for the keen interest she’s shown in the visitor economy? The Valleys could benefit considerably from the growth in tourists to Wales in recent years. The thematic years, I think, have been particularly beneficial, being focused on the great outdoors, building on the primary purpose that people come to Wales for holidays for, which is to experience adventure, the great outdoors, outdoor discoveries. And I’m hoping that, in the years to come, communities in my colleague’s constituency will benefit further from our initiatives.

In terms of the specific projects that the Member highlights, I do believe that the Crumlin Navigation colliery is probably the finest surviving group of former colliery buildings in Wales, and it’s been supported with financial resource from the Welsh Government to undertake reclamation works. It’s my hope that we will see further improvements there in the years to come.

In terms of the Cwmcarn forest drive, this is something that I know was incredibly popular when it was in operation. Perhaps we could look to the Year of Discovery in 2019 as a way, and as an opportunity, to reopen that drive. I think it would be fantastic to see it reopened. I do recognise the challenges—financial challenges—facing Natural Resources Wales, but we are looking for major events, new and innovative activities, which can be launched in 2019, and perhaps I could meet with the Member to run through the opportunities for that particular project and more widely in her constituency.

Cabinet Secretary, earlier this month, the director of the Welsh Centre for Tourism Research at Cardiff Metropolitan University said that Wales is not reaching its full potential in attracting high-spending international tourists. She pointed out that Wales was not doing as well internationally as our competitors, getting about 3 per cent of visitors and 2 per cent of spend. Given the importance of tourism to the Welsh economy, what action does the Cabinet Secretary intend to take to increase the number of international tourists coming to Islwyn, and Wales altogether? Thank you.

Yes, I appreciate the points made by the Member. The challenge of getting international visitors out of London is one that faces all regions outside of London. Wales is not unique in that regard. But we have redoubled our efforts to attract visitors to Wales, and the results, I think, are quite impressive, in terms of all types of visits. We saw an increase of 15 per cent last year on the previous year. In terms of day visits, we’ve seen numbers increase to above 103 million last year, and, in terms of international visitors, trips were up last year by 10.8 per cent compared with the year before. In terms of spend, which is really what matters to businesses in the visitor economy, the sums that were spent increased by more than 8 per cent. It is now a fact that, when visitors come to Wales on day trips, they now spend more per head than is the UK average. But we don’t want to rest there—we want to continue to attract more international visitors to Wales and that’s why we’re increasing our marketing activities, making sure that we attend more travel expos abroad, bringing in more tourism experts and travel writers on familiarity trips, to get more people interested in the incredible offer that we have in our country.

Thank you. Yes, we are developing a strategic approach to economic development based on prosperity for all, enabling all parts of Wales to benefit from economic growth and the opportunity to secure greater degrees of job creation.

Thank you for that, Cabinet Secretary. As you will know, the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park covers vast swathes of my constituency, and the decisions taken by them can have major impacts on businesses operating either wholly within the park or partly park and partly the rest of Pembrokeshire. Whilst I understand the need for consideration to be offered to the park’s overriding principles, it is vital for economic development in west Wales that businesses can grow and mature. Can you outline what support your department, along with the department of the Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Rural Affairs, can offer to businesses to ensure that decisions taken by the national parks are taken in the timeliest manner so as to minimise the economic impact on businesses operating in the area? Otherwise, I fear that a number of businesses will be driven from west Wales.

I’d agree with the Member that our national parks do need to work in partnership with the businesses that are located within them. We do see, in many parts of Wales, very proactive national parks working effectively and very efficiently with businesses in the spirit of partnership. With regard to the national park in Pembrokeshire, I think there has been a concerted effort by the park to take advantage of the Year of Legends and the forthcoming Year of the Sea, working in partnership with the local authority and crucially with businesses.

The Member is absolutely right that the park must be proactive in reaching out to businesses and in assisting businesses to—I was going to say, ‘exploit’—take advantage and work with the park to draw more visitors in and to make sure that visitors stay for longer. There are some phenomenal attractions on the Pembrokeshire coast. That’s why I go there every summer for my personal and private holiday with my family. It’s an amazing place, but we’d like to translate more day visits and weekend visits into week-long visits, and you can only do that by having a partnership approach that brings together all businesses and brings together those providers of attractions and events.

Thank you, Llywydd. The Cabinet Secretary will be aware that publishing books is very important in the west of Wales, and I declare an interest, as is in the register of interests, as my wife and my niece work in this area. So, I’d like to ask him about publishing but starting by paying tribute, if I may, to Tony Bianchi, a gentleman who passed away some three weeks ago, who was from Newcastle, who learnt Welsh and became an eminent Welsh writer and promoted Welsh writing and publishing in Wales and professionalised the art too.

In that context, we have the Professor Medwin Hughes report, which has created something of a headache, from time to time, for the Cabinet Secretary over the past few weeks. I would like to thank him for the way he’s responded to the report and the way he’s brought everyone together to agree a way forward. Can I ask him specifically whether he will ensure that, as we are in a situation where the people who are seen to be criticised in the report are raising their voices, he will also listen to those people who are frankly less vocal but do want to work with him and everyone in the area to secure a prosperous future for publishing in Wales?

Can I thank Simon Thomas for his question? Simon makes an important point that we should all behave responsibly and fairly when we respond to a report of this nature. Can I also pay tribute to Tony Bianchi and the incredible work that he produced and also his commitment to Welsh literature? His passing is very much missed, I’m sure, not just in my colleague’s constituency and region, but right across the country and beyond given the reach that his work had. I think, in terms of publishing, the report was designed and is designed to strengthen literature and publishing in Wales. Now that it has been produced, I think it’s important that all interested bodies work together to ensure that all interested bodies become strengthened in their respective areas, and deliver better what they have been delivering well to date. The arts council, the Welsh Books Council and Literature Wales—they all have delivered magnificent events, services and activities, and do an incredible amount to promote publishing. I want to make sure that these bodies go on strengthening and flourishing in the future.

I call on the party spokespeople to ask their questions of the Cabinet Secretary. Plaid Cymru spokesperson, Adam Price.

Diolch, Llywydd. Cabinet Secretary, in November last year, you told the Economy, Infrastructure and Skills Committee that the First Minister had said that he expects the economic strategy to be with him by the spring of 2017. Earlier this year, you said in Plenary that you had to wait until the UK’s industrial strategy had been published in January. On 8 February, a Government amendment to a debate on the economy noted:

the Welsh Government’s plan to publish a cross-cutting strategy to support economic growth later in the spring.’

The First Minister, on 16 May, in response to a question by David Rees, said,

We intend to publish our strategic approach to building prosperity for all before the summer recess.’

And, finally, just a couple of weeks ago, Cabinet Secretary, on 3 July, at the external affairs committee, you said you would publish this strategy in this term. Cabinet Secretary, this is the last day of term: where’s the strategy?

I’m pleased to be able to inform the Member that the cross-cutting strategy ‘prosperity for all’ was approved by Cabinet this week. It has been completed. It will be published early in the autumn on return of this Assembly, and, over the summer, we will be engaging in an extensive—[Interruption.]—in an extensive stakeholder engagement programme to further refine the work, based in action, after the strategy has been published.

For the record, Members are asking which autumn of which year we’re talking about. So, maybe the Cabinet Secretary might want to put that on the record. Now, maybe one of the reasons for it being delayed was because you had to rewrite it following the fall-out of your decision over the Circuit of Wales. Now, on 27 June, Cabinet Secretary, you told the Assembly that you could not have a definitive answer from the Office for National Statistics on the balance sheet issue until after contracts were signed. There was a risk that, many months down the line, you could find yourself with a project on the balance sheet with all the implications that would have. You’ve now admitted to me in a written answer that there was an alternative: you could have asked for a provisional ruling from ONS. Why didn’t you?

Can I first of all thank the Member for his good humour, this being the last opportunity that he will have in this current term to question me? Can I also thank him for the 12 months that we’ve had of grilling and probing and having me on the rack, during which time we have disagreed on a number of occasions, but I hope we have been able to agree on a number of subjects as well? I recognise the Member’s deep belief in the Circuit of Wales project, and I also recognise his disappointment that we were unable to support it. It would have been wholly irresponsible to have taken it forward on the basis of risk that was presented. And, in terms of the point that the Member makes, provisional advice on potential developments can be sought from the ONS, but that should only be when contractual documentation is in a near final form and following a decision in principle to offer Government support.

Well, Cabinet Secretary, your Government did ask for a provisional ruling from ONS when you made a decision in principle on your own Government’s mutual investment model in October 2016. Furthermore, isn’t it true, Cabinet Secretary, that ONS has also got provision for policy proposals that are not at a near final stage? Their classification guidelines, which you yourself referenced in your answer to me, say this:

government departments might seek a view on a proposal at an early stage of development. In such cases, ONS will provide provisional advice on the expected classification of the proposal, based on information available at the time.’

So, my question to you is this: did you seek, and were you given, provisional advice on the expected classification of the Circuit of Wales proposal from ONS? And let’s be clear: what I’m asking you is not whether you spoke to them and then formed your own view based on what they said, but did you ask them for their provisional advice in the terms set out in their guidelines? And as the Cabinet Secretary invites me to end the scrutiny on a more positive note, can I ask him this one last thing? If, out of the rubble, the Circuit of Wales project was rescued by the local authorities in the city region—with the prospect now, of course, of Formula 1 being a possibility as well—and the Welsh Government were asked not for their money, but for their blessing, would you welcome the project being salvaged in this way?

Can I thank the Member for his further questions? Of course, the one big question that we’re still awaiting an answer for is whether he agrees with our decision that was taken last month, and unfortunately there is no agreement, which I’m sure indicates that the Member would have been content to have signed off the project, only to have returned here, in all likelihood in six months’ time, to tell the Chamber that he was having to put on ice more than £300 million of capital programmes, which, as I’ve said in this Chamber before, would amount to 5,000 affordable homes or 10 schools or one superhospital. I don’t just call that irresponsible; I call that reckless in the extreme. [Interruption.] I hear the leader of UKIP—we’re entering the pantomime audition season—entering the fray from the side, but the point is that he too would have signed off this project in a demonstration of huge irresponsibility.

The fact is that we took responsible action on what was a controversial subject, which did fire up passions and beliefs in the Valleys, but we are now moving on with a clear vision for the Heads of the Valleys and we will deliver. The people of Ebbw Vale, Blaenau Gwent and the Heads of the Valleys have waited long enough. We are here to deliver and we will do just that.

You didn’t answer the question.

Conservative spokesperson, Russell George.

Thank you, Presiding Officer. Cabinet Secretary, infrastructure projects have too often been delayed by short-term political considerations, and this has often led to spiralling costs and the cancellation of projects altogether. In addition, where high levels of uncertainty hang above infrastructure schemes, potentially, private sector investors are often deterred from providing financial backing for these kinds of projects. When infrastructure is planned and delivered within the context of a secure, credible and long-term view, these projects often secure a greater level of private sector interest and investment. So, can I ask you, perhaps in the light of recent events as well, to reconsider putting the national infrastructure commission on a statutory footing? I would also suggest that it will be a missed opportunity for you not to do that. I think what the Government needs to do is to demonstrate a genuine commitment to creating a stable and long-term approach to infrastructure development in Wales.

Can I thank the Member for his question and also for the work that he led in assessing the establishment of the national infrastructure commission of Wales? Of course, we already utilise innovative forms of funding. We are doing that with the dualling of the A465, and we will continue to do so. The work that’s taking place on the infrastructure commission is taking place at speed. We are now looking at the appointments of the chair and the members of that commission in the early autumn, and as I’ve said on previous occasions, we will review the operations of the commission before the end of this Assembly term. I have given my undertaking to do that. As of yet, we have received no compelling evidence for putting it on a statutory footing. However, we will be reviewing the effectiveness and the delivery of the commission by the end of this Assembly.

Well, I would put it to you, Cabinet Secretary, that we do need a more long-term and stable approach in Wales—more than ever before. Over the last number of years, the Welsh Government has presided over a number of significant major project failures, I’m afraid to say. That has created confusion and uncertainty for potential private sector investors, and the failure and the process with regard to the Circuit of Wales—as Adam Price has mentioned earlier—is one example where we see, potentially, a reduced confidence amongst investors that Wales is indeed open for business. Do you, Cabinet Secretary, acknowledge that the creation of the infrastructure commission should be followed up by the introduction of legislation to equip the commission with the extra weight and clout it needs to do its work?

As I’ve said, we will be assessing the effectiveness of the commission by the end of this Assembly term. We will be establishing it by the end of this year. I must disagree with the assertion made by the Member that Wales may appear not to be open for business given the latest results for inward investment, which show, I believe, that it was the third most successful year. Indeed, investment from within the UK into Wales reached a record high. We are continuing with our efforts to bring in major projects. Just last week we were able to announce the investment by Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles—a huge investment that will bring monumental change to Newport and the economy of south-east Wales, creating 300 jobs, but also, crucially, offering enormous potential for expansion. That’s something that we will build upon. Since May of this year, we have announced, through our support, the creation of more than 500 jobs in this current year, and we are also working to establish many more jobs across—and that’s just in Wales in this past eight weeks. But we are also working with a pipeline of interests at the moment to create further employment opportunities in the months to come.

And finally, Cabinet Secretary, if I could perhaps pursue an issue that Adam Price raised in his first question, there’s still some confusion for me in this regard, certainly when it comes to your publishing of ‘prosperous and secure’ and your economic strategy. I’m aware that you did tell the External Affairs and Additional Legislation Committee that you’d publish it this term; I’m aware that last week, in the Economy, Infrastructure and Skills Committee, you said it would be the autumn; however, in the Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister on Friday of this week, I asked the First Minister and put it to him, and he said that ‘prosperous and secure’ would be published this term. So, I have to say I am a little bit confused. So, reflecting on what the Presiding Officer said at the beginning of proceedings today, who is right? Is it yourself or the First Minister?

I can assure the Member—I can assure the Member because we were all there at Cabinet—that ‘prosperity for all’ was approved, was signed off by all members of the Cabinet on Tuesday, and will be published as soon as we return.

UKIP spokesperson, David Rowlands.

Diolch, Llywydd. I’m not sure whether the Cabinet Secretary recalls it, but as long ago as yesterday I questioned you on the availability of funding, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises in the research and development sector. In evidence to the EIS committee last week, you indicated that the development bank of Wales would be moving away from direct grants to repayable loans. Do you not think that this would present a particular obstacle to such companies, as these may not see the financial benefits of their research for many years?

Well, there is a need to balance direct support in the form of grants with repayable loans, because repayable loans offer an evergreen approach that can recycle investments into other businesses, but I do take the point that the Member raises, which is that a repayable loan is not the answer and not the best means of supporting all businesses. For that reason we will maintain other forms of direct support, be it grants or indeed advice through Business Wales and the development bank itself.

Well, forgive me if I show some continuing frustration, Cabinet Secretary, but I have personal involvement with a constituent who is seeking funding for what seems to be a project that fits all the Welsh Government criteria, in that it involves cutting-edge nanotechnology, will have a hugely beneficial environmental impact and has massive growth potential, and yet although some funding has been made available through his engagement with both Bangor and Swansea universities, I have seen at first hand how difficult it is to access further funding to take this product to fruition. Surely, Cabinet Secretary, if Wales is to succeed in its aspirations to become a world leader in this environmentally friendly technology, we have to have the funding processes that will allow this to happen.

We do, indeed. Research funding is absolutely crucial, and that’s why we’ve been very clear that any research funding that could potentially be lost when we exit the EU is made good by the UK Government. In terms of the specific company that the Member mentions, it’s not clear whether they have an account manager within Business Wales to support them, but I would gladly make contact with the company if the Member can provide details of it and ensure that Business Wales are there to give support and signpost the company to the best method of financing their product so it can reach market.

Thank you.

Yes. Tomorrow we will publish ‘Our Valleys, Our Future’, a high-level plan for action, building on the work of the Valleys taskforce, and in addition to this, we will continue to invest in infrastructure improvements and skills and the general environment for business across the south Wales Valleys.

I thank the Cabinet Secretary for his answer. I’m sure he would agree with me that the industrial and manufacturing heritage of the Valleys is not something that should be confined to its past, but should be central to its future as well. We’ve got particular challenges facing us in terms of research and development and productivity, and I hope he won’t underestimate the potential for Welsh Government to make meaningful interventions that can transform the economic prospects of that region. Last month, the Scottish Government announced that it was going to create a national manufacturing institute in Scotland, based on the very successful advanced manufacturing centre in Sheffield. The one in Sheffield has 100 private partners plus, and it supports very highly skilled and highly paid jobs in that region. So, now that he’s got a little bit more time to tinker with his economic strategy over the summer, I wonder if he will look into the merits of creating a niche manufacturing institute, and of course that that should be located in the south Wales Valleys.

I’m very pleased to say to the Member that I’ve already done it. In fact, I announced last week that an advanced manufacturing institute based on the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre in Sheffield, which will be delivered with the University of Sheffield and universities in Wales, is being built. I approved the funding for the first phase of the institute just last week.

It’s also my vision that, as part of the technology park that we’ll be developing in Ebbw Vale, we will see an advanced manufacturing centre of excellence configured there as well. The model of the AMRC is already proven. Institutions and businesses have access to £0.5 billion-worth of research equipment. That’s why the model is so attractive. The advanced manufacturing and research institute in north Wales will build on that model, and I was also able to reveal that, according to the business case, the AMRI in north Wales will have an economic impact of up to £4 billion on GVA in the next 20 years. I want to make sure that we replicate that sort of model of success in the south Wales Valleys.

I look forward to scrutinising in this Chamber ‘Our Valleys, Our Future’, because we certainly need a transformative vision for the Valleys. I’m not sure the Valleys landscape park would constitute a hub, but it would be a transformative vision, potentially. We’ve got to start to recognise the real potential of this resource. The Valleys were once amongst Britain’s most beautiful spots, and travellers from all over the UK would come and paint pictures and write poetry about this wonderful landscape. They should come again, and more of them. I commend the sort of vision that your colleague Huw Irranca-Davies has for a Valleys forest, for instance. There is great potential there, and now we need to match it with vision.

Can I thank David Melding for his question, and also for, once again in this Chamber, touching on the importance of well-being to the economy, and the contribution that the natural landscape can make to our well-being? My colleague the Minister for Lifelong Learning and Welsh Language will be making a statement in the Chamber concerning the idea of a Valleys park. I’m sure that it’s an idea that you will very much welcome, and will incorporate, I am sure, a good degree of forestry and outdoor health activities.

Cabinet Secretary, given the contribution that tourism is making to economic development across the country, I’m pleased to note the tremendous success that we’ve seen with the tourist investment support scheme across Wales. But I am concerned to note that, of the 205 schemes that have received offers of grant support under the tourism investment support scheme since April 2011, only four of those were located in the south Wales Valleys region. I’m very pleased to say that Rock UK in my constituency was one of them. Given the beautiful countryside that David Melding’s just been talking about, and the rich industrial and social heritage of the area, do you share my concern at this limited take-up in the Valleys, even given that TISS is a funder of last resort? Could I ask you if you’d consider undertaking some research into why businesses in this area are reluctant to take advantage of this specific source of funding and whether in fact there is scope for extending the scheme—for extending the scope of the scheme?

Can I thank Dawn Bowden for her interest again in the visitor economy? Dawn has recognised regularly in this Chamber the value that tourism can make to communities in her constituency. I do share her concerns about the number of projects funded through TISS that have actually been delivered in the communities that she’s spoken about. For that reason, we carried out a piece of work to understand why fewer businesses come forward in the Valleys than in other areas of Wales.

As part of that work, we’ve also secured tourism funding from the rural development programme, which will enable us to deliver a higher intervention rate to businesses, and my officials will be undertaking a scoping study and an engagement programme, with a view to being able to develop more reputation-changing, interesting, innovative, creative tourism attractions in the Valleys communities.

I think the Member’s already identified one particular attraction that has proven to be quite game changing within her community. There are many others. There are, for example, activities based on biking and mountain biking, such as Bike Park Wales, that have proven enormously successful and have changed perceptions of the area.

Yes. This year we are supporting a range of sporting and cultural events in north Wales, including FOCUS Wales, Hijinx Unity Festival, RawFfest, the Good Life Experience, and Wales Rally GB. We wish to attract more major international events to Wales and are in ongoing discussions with partners in north Wales to identify new opportunities.

Thank you, Cabinet Secretary. I’m pleased to hear of the ongoing discussions to identify opportunities. You’ll be aware that, in the past few months alone, north Wales has successfully hosted a number of high-profile stadium concerts, from Olly Murs at the Racecourse, to the now annual epic Access All Eirias at Eirias Park, and Llanfest in your own constituency, which had the Manic Street Preachers there this year.

Flintshire is also home to the national Wales rugby league team, the only national team to actually be based in north Wales, and who later this year will compete in the Rugby League World Cup in Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea, supported by a lot of local organisations and businesses in my constituency, including being suited and booted by Vaughan Davies of Mold.

I’m sure the Cabinet Secretary and other colleagues will join me in wishing the Wales rugby union—rugby league team, sorry, every success in the Rugby League World Cup, but I’m also aware from constituents and others that there’s growing public support for us to be able to host major events and teams in north Wales, along with the investment in infrastructure that is needed to expand our offer.

So, can I urge a further commitment from the Welsh Government to further invest in our area, to show we have the greater capacity to host events, whether that be in iconic and historic locations like Flint Castle, existing stadiums, or perhaps one day looking at a future stadium or a location in the Flintshire area of north-east Wales?

Yes, very much so. I’m looking forward to being at Flint castle this very Friday, where we’ll reveal a world-class arts installation design, which I’m sure will capture the imagination not just of people in Flint but the people of north Wales and beyond. I’d also like to extend my best wishes to the Welsh team as they go out to the Rugby League World Cup. I’m sure that they will perform magnificently and do us proud and I wish them all the best.

Officials recently engaged with 30 events organisers in north Wales to scope out further opportunities. We currently spend around about £1.7 million in supporting major events in north Wales, but we want to build on the reputation that north Wales now has globally as one of the best destinations to visit for a holiday and for outdoor adventure. So, our investment must continue in those innovative products such as Surf Snowdonia, as well as the innovative major events, which can attract new and existing visitors alike.

The Member may also be aware that a sports facilities study has been commissioned. Work is under way to assess what facilities are needed for future major events to be hosted in Wales. That study will look at all parts of Wales and will assess existing infrastructure as well as the demands for new sports stadia. The Member may also be interested to know that I did recently meet with the Welsh Curling Association to discuss the building of a bespoke facility in the adjoining constituency of Alyn and Deeside.

On 9 July, I had the pleasure, with many others, of watching Bryan Adams at Eirias Park in Colwyn Bay who was, of course, preceded the night before by Little Mix, and I’m looking forward, as you may be, on 4 to 6 August, to one of the highlights of my year, which is the Mold Blues and Soul festival—absolutely wonderful: great music, great local ale, great food, and, hopefully, fantastic weather, fingers crossed. Recognising that research and practice show that major popular music events are a fantastic way of stimulating the visitor economy in north Wales, what role is or could the Welsh Government play in helping to promote that within the wider regional offer?

Can I thank Mark Isherwood for his question? I’m looking forward to joining him at Mold Blues and Soul Festival in August. Perhaps we could share a pint at the Alehouse or the Glasfryn afterwards. I’m sure it will be a magnificent event. Mold has carved out an enviable reputation in the region for hosting cultural food and drink and sporting events, and I’m sure that the Blues and Soul Festival will prove hugely successful. We fund, through the tourism product innovation fund, a number of regional and local events and activities that are designed to align with the thematic years, and in north Wales this year there have been a number of events that we’ve funded to capitalise on the Year of Legends, most notably in Conwy, where an incredible festival recently took place based on what was called ‘the tournament’ and included jousting. We work with local communities, with tourism providers, and with events organisers through Visit Wales to promote all activities that are taking place, but particularly with those that are aligned with the thematic years. We noticed that, in rallying the entire sector together by using the thematic years, we’ve been able to gain added value in terms of our offer, and that’s what’s lead to a significant increase in the marketing spend that’s been generated as a consequence of the thematic years, up by around about 18 per cent, we believe, just last year.

One of the centres trying to establish itself as a venue for events with some of the major bands is the Racecourse. I have regularly raised the need to invest in the Racecourse with you, because it needs to be—and it should be—an important centre for entertainment, but also an international standard sport stadium. We constantly hear this Government making very proactive statements about conference centres and so on. When will we see the Government being as proactive in ensuring investment in the Racecourse?

Can I thank Llyr for his question? I know he shares a very keen interest in this subject with my colleague Lesley Griffiths, and with the local Member of Parliament, Ian Lucas. I’m sure all of you would like to see, as I would, the Racecourse receive investment to become a more active and vibrant hub within the Wrexham community, but, indeed, in the wider region. My officials, I’m pleased to say, recently met with Wrexham football trust. They discussed the vision for the stadium, but of key significance will be the role that the local authority plays in devising a masterplan for the town to ensure that any future investment in the stadium is aligned with other facilities and other services that are being developed in Wrexham, but, to my mind, there is no doubt that the Racecourse deserves to have investment to make sure that it can go on being the oldest international stadium in Britain, in Europe, and possibly the world. To do that, it will need further investment, and the further investment will only come as a consequence of a sound business case and a very clear vision, and that’s exactly what, through my officials, we are now trying to draw together.

Well, on measures of household incomes and wealth, Wales is not the poorest part of the UK. Nonetheless, we do need to improve wealth and well-being considerably. Therefore, we are taking a range of actions to deliver prosperity for all in Wales, including investing in skills and infrastructure and creating an environment where businesses can start up and grow.

Well, thank you for that answer, Cabinet Minister. I asked the question because it appears that, after many years of this institution, we are now relatively poorer than we were at the start of devolution. Why, after billions of pounds of so-called European structural funding, do we find ourselves in such a position? Surely, it is time to address this situation with fundamentally different solutions than those applied before. It is time for Wales to turn away from an economy dominated by the public sector to one that is a dynamic industrial powerhouse that competes with the best in the world. We have the resources, skills, hard-working, industrious population, to make this happen. I know the Cabinet Secretary possesses those very same attributes, so will he apply them to drive this new industrial revolution in Wales and put a stop to this endless cycle of poverty?

Can I thank the Member for his question, the keen interest he shows in this area, and the passion with which he speaks about the need to grow wealth in the aggregate as well as at a community level, making sure that we spread prosperity more evenly across Wales? In terms of activities since devolution, Wales has had the fifth highest increase in gross value added per head compared to the 12 UK countries and English regions. We’ve seen a record number of people entering into work, unemployment is consistently at a very low rate, and we’ve seen the number of business births now rise to record levels.

We know that there are almost—we’re just about touching on 100,000 businesses that are headquartered in Wales. But what we wish to see take place in the coming years is a move towards strengthening regional economies in Wales so that we can decentralise and deconcentrate investment. For that reason, I’m reshaping my department so that we have strong regional units that can work with the city regions, and with the growth region, and with local authorities on a regional footprint, to assess what the key sectoral strengths are across Wales, and then to hone in, develop them, and, during the fourth industrial revolution, make sure that people are skilled and make sure that businesses are futureproofed in order to create a higher-value economy, one that benefits the whole of Wales.

Cabinet Secretary, one of the best ways out of poverty is through work, and that means creating an efficient integrated transport network to allow people, particularly young people, to access jobs within a reasonable distance of their homes. However, the cost of fares can often be a deterrent to young people being able to access jobs. Given that the Welsh Government’s mytravelpass scheme, offering young people a third off bus fares, ended in March this year, what plan does the Cabinet Secretary have to assist young jobseekers with their transport costs when looking for work across Wales? Thank you.

Can I thank the Member for his question? He is absolutely right in that the lack of affordable, reliable, and frequent public transport is a major barrier preventing many people from gaining work. We know, based on all available statistics, that in the Growth Track 360 region of north Wales and the Mersey Dee area approximately a quarter of people who receive job interviews are not able to go to them because they cannot get transport to those interviews. That is an appalling—an appalling—statistic, which must be addressed.

We have piloted the mytravelpass. It’s continuing whilst we consult with young people and with the bus sector on a sustainable replacement scheme. It’s my view that there are current schemes operating in the UK that are sustainable that we could look to to learn from. I was recently, with colleagues, in Liverpool learning about the Merseytravel scheme for young people, which I believe operates on the basis of £3 can get you anywhere anytime, as many trips as you want per day in that region. That’s the sort of model that’s innovative, it’s sustainable, and it’s fair, and that’s the sort of development I’d like to see in Wales.

But, fundamentally, we need to reform the bus sector itself—modernise the bus sector, get better-quality buses being utilised, and change perceptions of bus travel as well, so that people access bus services not as a last resort but because they are of a sufficiently high quality to experience an enjoyable trip. I think in terms of rural communities especially bus services are absolutely vital. We’ve maintained the bus services support grant of £25 million for several years now, because we’ve recognised the value of bus services in rural communities. I’m keen to make sure that we work with the sector and with passenger groups to find more sustainable ways of growing patronage on bus services so that the level of public subsidy can be reduced without affecting the attractiveness of transport on buses.

Cabinet Secretary, I’m sure you’d agree with me that the recent announcement by CAF of the 200 to 300 jobs in Newport—quality jobs building the trains of the future to help take that integrated transport system forward—is very valuable, and I’d be very interested to know how we can capitalise on that investment by attracting further investment and, indeed, making sure that local suppliers and local firms benefit from this very welcome development.

Can I thank John Griffiths for his question? I know that he’s warmly welcomed the announcement by CAF of £30 million in his constituency, which will lead to the establishment of a fairly major manufacturing facility, employing 300 people. It’s worth saying that we managed to beat more than 100 locations around the world to secure this investment for Wales, once again stepping up and beating our competitors around the planet. Now, the facility will enable the company to assemble, test and commission new vehicles in Wales. It will have the capacity to undertake future manufacturing projects, as well as maintenance and servicing activities. When you align that to the development of the metro and investment in the next franchise, I think there are huge opportunities for us to grow a skills base in this particular sector that will maintain people in employment for a generation.

Yes. Tomorrow, we will publish ‘Our Valleys, Our Future’, building on the work of the Valleys taskforce chaired by my colleague Alun Davies. In addition to this, we’ll continue to invest in skills, in infrastructure and in the right business environment for companies to flourish.

Cabinet Secretary, the proposals put forward by the Department for Work and Pensions over the future of their estate in Wales will see a relocation of some 200 skilled staff out of Cwmbran town centre. Not only would this have a devastating impact on the local economy in Cwmbran, but would pose enormous difficulties for staff with caring responsibilities who are unable to travel to the location that’s been proposed, which is the Treforest area. The fact that that location has been chosen suggests that the DWP have little or no understanding of the geography of Wales. I know that the Minister for Skills and Science, Julie James, who’s been incredibly helpful, was meeting with the UK Minister last Thursday, and I’d be grateful if, as a Government, you could provide an update to Members. But can I also ask you for your assurances, Cabinet Secretary, that you will do all you can personally to work with Julie James to represent the staff affected by these proposals, which will have a devastating impact on one of the poorest parts of Wales?

The Member is absolutely right, and I’ll just reiterate our strong disappointment that the DWP did not consult with Welsh Government ahead of the decision being made, without any alternative solutions being considered. And I know that the Minister has now met with the UK Government Minister, and I’m sure will be providing a written update to Members in the coming days on the discussions that took place and the further activity that will now be undertaken. And I can assure the Member as well that if any workers take redundancy, then we will offer ReAct as a means of ensuring that people can get back into work without a lengthy period of unemployment. It’s absolutely crucial that anyone affected by this who is left without work does not stay in unemployment for a long period of time, and we will help in every way possible.

Minister, you just said that the strategy will be unveiled tomorrow. The Minister, Alun Davies, made a statement last week. I did press him on his statement to try and explain what the hubs economically are going to achieve. He talked that there would be six hubs. One of those six is the automotive enterprise park—call it what you will—in Blaenau Gwent that has been allocated £100 million over 10 years. He was unable to give any information at all; I’m not sure whether that was because he didn’t know what they were going to do, or whether he was just being guarded because, obviously, there was so much focus on the Circuit of Wales concept that, obviously, sits in his constituency. I’d be grateful from your perspective if you could enlighten me as to exactly how these hubs will operate. Will they be merely just small enterprise zones? Will they be themed? Geographically, where will they be located? And what budget lines are going to be allocated to them? Given that we know £100 million has been allocated to the one in Blaenau Gwent, are we talking similar sorts of moneys for the other hubs that will be dotted around the rest of the Valleys as part of the strategy?

Can I thank Andrew R.T. Davies for his questions? Very important points were raised—the need to ensure that hubs operate in a way that generates sustainable growth. I envisage the hubs developing as opportunities for clustering and agglomeration in certain specialisms. So, it may be, for example, in Ebbw Vale, automotive. It may be, in another hub, based on house building. So, my view is that the hubs have the potential to become recognisable clusters of specialisms that, again, can enable skills partnerships across the Valleys region to home in on opportunities that are emerging through the pipeline of interests that we already have, and the pipeline of interests that we already have will lead funding to be delivered on an on-demand basis. So, any funding requirements will be drawn down from my department, and potentially other departments, if it crosses subject boundaries.

In terms of the further detail that the Member requests, this is something that Alun Davies will be revealing tomorrow, but the aim of the clusters, the aim of the hubs, is to make sure that there is a concentration of activity in certain areas based on emerging economic and manufacturing trends and to take advantage of the theme of better jobs closer to home, offering people access into work and then career progression in areas of economic activity where we know there is a sustainable future.

Yes. Can I thank the Member for this question? It’s very exciting. We are currently running a procurement exercise on Sell2Wales to appoint a contractor to complete a feasibility study on the football museum. The study is set to commence around the end of August and will be completed within six months.

Well, thank you for your answer, and I welcome, obviously, the commissioning of this study as a consequence of an agreement between the Government and Plaid Cymru, of course. But some people are asking the question of whether there’s a slight change in direction here because the original commitment was to look into a football museum located in the north, whereas the feasibility study looks at a more general sporting museum, which, potentially, could be anywhere in Wales. Now, some people are worried that north-east Wales might lose out.

Okay. Can I just assure the Member that the specification does state that the preferred location is in Wrexham or elsewhere in north Wales? I think it’s well recognised that north Wales would do well to have a sports museum or a football museum—a specialist football museum. It could potentially complement the football museum that exists in Manchester. Given that it’s a live procurement, there’s a limited amount that I can say on this, but we have honoured the agreement that we reached, and I’m excited about this piece of work. I think it could produce a very, very enticing idea that we would be keen to deliver, provided the feasibility study makes it an affordable one.

On a similar theme, I’ve also had similar concerns raised with me regarding the feasibility study—the procurement document you refer to—which does, I’m told, talk of there being a sports museum in Wales, so I’m reassured by your comments. But do you agree that it is important that what comes out of this ensures that the north-east is recognised for its pioneering role in promoting what’s become, for many, the national sport—some might argue it’s rugby union but, for many others, it’s football—recognising that this club started in 1872, that it’s where the first international match was played in Wales, where the Football Association of Wales was formed, and that it’s home, of course, to one of the world’s oldest football clubs?

Yes, absolutely. Wrexham Association Football Club have an incredible history that deserves to be recognised and promoted. I can also assure Members, because I heard on the opposition benches concerns expressed about whether this would be a national museum of Wales or just a football museum. We will be engaging the National Museum Wales in discussions and deliberations as part of the feasibility study. As far as Wrexham AFC and football as a whole are concerned, north-east Wales has a very proud heritage in the sport. Many of us from that part of Wales would consider it to be certainly one of the national sports—probably the one that was most widely played by us when we were growing up—and we’re keen to make sure that any investment in a facility such as this serves to inspire people as well as to capture the past and to inspire people to go on to be very successful in football in the future.

Thank you, Cabinet Secretary.

The next item, therefore, is questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport, and the first question is from Rhun ap Iorwerth.

Thank you for the question. There has been a significant increase in orthopaedic referrals in Betsi Cadwaladr over the last four years and capacity has not met demand. The local health board is taking a range of measures to deal with the increase, including the use of various triage services such as physiotherapists in general practitioner practices and lifestyle and weight management clinics, in line with recommendations of the planned care programme.

More than 1,200 patients are waiting longer than a year for treatment in north Wales and that is unacceptable. I hope that you would agree with that. A recent paper from the board on developing orthopaedic services emphasises the need for more training places in order to provide the necessary workforce to create a sustainable service that can meet reasonable targets. Isn’t the statement that you made yesterday that there is no case for establishing a medical school in north Wales entirely contrary to the spirit of that paper and runs contrary to what was said in the recent health committee report? Of course a medical school cannot be established overnight, but your pledge to have more students spending more time in the north, as if it were some far-flung country, clearly isn’t enough. So, when are you going to show some ambition on this issue and set a target so that we can start to move towards it?

Thank you for the follow-up questions. I do agree that long waits are unacceptable. There’s a real challenge for Betsi Cadwaladr in actually delivering property capacity and demand within its services. We know that there’s likely to be more demand as we move forward and that’s why they have to take a range of measures. The initial orthopaedic plan they had at board wasn’t endorsed because there’s still further work to do on it.

There’s a challenge here about a range of our services, not just specialist services but elective services as well, in understanding how we use properly the capacity we have and in reconfiguring that capacity to make better use of it. I think the link that you attempt to draw between a decision over a medical school and the ability to recruit enough staff to work within a different model—I don’t accept that there is a direct link in the way in which you try to present it.

The decision that I announced yesterday was meeting the commitment that I gave to the Assembly to give that indication before recess, and it was deliberately done before questions today to make sure there are opportunities to have this debate within the Chamber. But the health committee report did not say that there should be a medical school in north Wales. It made a number of points that I do take seriously about the case being made to make sure that training across the country takes place, and where those medical education places are actually provided. That includes a proper conversation with the two medical schools about where their students are housed and where they undertake their medical education, and, as I indicated in my statement yesterday, I do think there is a proper case to take forward to ensure that more people undertake medical education within north Wales.

So, there has to be a proper partnership carried forward between Bangor, Cardiff and Swansea universities and the national health service to make sure we do deliver more places for medical education to take place. That must take place regardless of any expansion in numbers, because if I were to try and tell you and other people this will only take place if there is an expansion in numbers in medical education, it would be the wrong signal to give. I think it’s important with our current cohort we think about how we provide the opportunity for more of those people to undertake their education in different settings. That does tie in with work already in place, and I’m committed to doing that and to having and open and a sensible conversation with stakeholders, not just across the national health service but in this Chamber and beyond to deliver on that ambition, because I do think there will then be a greater prospect of people either staying in north Wales or returning to north Wales to undertake further periods of medical education and actually staying to work within the national health service thereafter.

Thank you to the Member from Ynys Môn for raising this once again in this Chamber. Now, according to the latest Welsh Government figures, the number of patients left waiting over 36 weeks, which is twice as long as long as in England, for trauma and orthopaedic treatment in north Wales now stands at 3,336. This is the highest it has ever been. Anecdotally, an 84-year-old female constituent of mine waited 103 weeks—84 years old—that’s over 720 days, almost two years, for their surgery. And a male constituent waited three years for hip operations. In response to my correspondence, you state that you expect all patients to be seen at the earliest opportunity. That is a laugh. What are you going to do about your failure to deliver for these 3,500 patients in north Wales? It’s your Government—you hold the brief and portfolio for health. And I have raised this question time and time again, and we get very, very waffly answers. Tell the people in north Wales—the 3,336 who have been waiting over 36 weeks, twice as long as in England—tell them when are they going to have their operations.

I can assure the Member this is not a laughing matter and it’s certainly not something that I find amusing at all. The challenge always is, whether in relation to an issue where we understand there is more than one reason for a rise in demand, and the inability of the health service to meet that demand—. The demand for a simple answer, to flick a switch and deal with it—that’s unlikely to be the case. And I would much rather be honest and deal with Janet Finch-Saunders saying that I’m waffling by explaining honestly and clearly the challenges we face and what is being done about them, rather than pretend that there is a magic lever within Government to make all of this go away. I think that is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

But I am clear—I do expect people to be seen at the earliest opportunity. And that is why I’m very clear, not just to her, but to other Members in the Chamber, across other parties too, that I do think that waiting times within north Wales are unacceptable. That’s why I expect the health board to improve. That’s why I expect to see a real plan for orthopaedic services in north Wales to make a real difference, not just at a long point within the future, but progressively over the rest of this term as well.

There are a range of measures in place. The Welsh Government remains committed to supporting and retaining the existing NHS workforce. We have an open and constructive dialogue with trade unions and other staff representatives and we’re determined to create a supportive learning environment for our staff to work in and deliver high-quality care with and for the people of Wales.

There’s a link between waiting times and the number of staff that you’ve got working in the service. Recent figures have shown that the number of nurses and midwives in the UK leaving the profession has risen by 51 per cent in four years. Within these figures, released by the Nursing and Midwifery Council, home-grown nurses have been found to be leaving in the largest numbers. Now, the Royal College of Nursing and the Royal College of Midwives have both called for the pay cap to be scrapped to prevent this situation from getting worse. Do you not agree that it is time for you to fulfil the Welsh Labour manifesto pledge to scrap the cap, to ensure that nurses remain in post in Wales? Secondly, by ensuring that you stick to your manifesto commitment, you will help to prevent further damage to people’s trust in politics.

There is a real issue about staff within the service, and the pay cap is not just about people’s financial means—there are real issues about value. And that was set out very clearly in the last NHS pay review body report. It was set out again, not just within the health service but across the public sector, in a report from the senior salaries review body, issued this week and in the armed forces’ pay review body as well. There is a real issue about the continuing pay cap, and the effective approximately 14 per cent drop in real-terms income.

This Government wants to see the pay cap removed. We’ve been very clear about that. I’ve discussed that with both the RCN and other trade unions as well. And trade unions themselves understand very well that this requires the UK Government to shift its position. The remit that is given to pay review bodies essentially comes in the financial envelope from the resources available. And that means that if the UK Government do not shift their position and provide resources to deliver a real-terms pay increase, what we could do is give them a remit to give a bigger increase to staff, and we’d then have to fund that increase for national health service workers on the back of redundancies in other parts of the public service.

That is the reality of where we are. And it’s no use the leader of Plaid Cymru saying that isn’t true—we need to deal in reality, because people in our public services are facing the reality of a pay cap. They face the reality of the Tories continuing that pay cap. You may think the right way to approach this is to give the Tories a free pass on the issue. I think all of us who want to see a real-terms pay rise for public service workers need to identify the real cause of the problem, and make sure the Tories do not get away scot-free—that we do make sure that the UK Government deliver on the signals they give and actually make sure that the pay cap is ended. That is what trade unions want; that is what our staff want; that is what this Government wants.

The concern raised with me in mid Wales is not so much about retention, but about the recruitment of health professionals in the first place. There are concerns raised with me on a regular basis about the severe shortage of the recruitment of dentists in mid Wales. So, can I ask: what is the Welsh Government doing to incentivise the recruitment of dentists, GPs and other medical professionals to take up positions in mid Wales in particular?

In terms of reviewing and understanding the recruitment across mid Wales and, in fact, every other part of Wales, health boards themselves, within their integrated medium-term plans, are supposed to be able to plan for the workforce. We are taking forward measures to more properly understand the needs of the workforce and our training and education requirements. That’ll get taken forward with the introduction of Health Education and Improvement Wales—that’s part of the picture.

But the general picture of recruitment is also affected by the issue that we’ve just discussed with the leader of Plaid Cymru, about the continuing pay cap—that is a real issue about how people are valued. The way in which our services work is also a particular challenge for us. To try to pretend that there is one single issue to resolve all of these just means that a politician may have an easy answer to give, but will not deal with the issues that public servants face or that our communities face.

The other aspect in the recruitment that none of us should forget is the onrushing juggernaut of Brexit. If we don’t have a proper deal about what this will look like, those European Union staff who have already left all parts of the service that you refer to, and those who are already considering leaving as well—that will make it worse, not better. If we can’t understand that all of those issues have an impact in every single part of Wales, then we will fail to not just understand the challenge, but to actually have a proper answer to make sure that we have a well-funded and well-resourced public health service, including, of course, the staff to actually undertake the work.

As has been pointed out in this Chamber on numerous occasions, there’s a nurse shortage in the NHS. This shortage has been getting progressively worse for years, and that’s basically because both UK and Welsh Governments have failed to ensure that there are sufficient nurse training places being funded to provide care for an ever-increasing population. What measures are you taking to increase the number of nurse training places in Wales?

I’m happy to confirm that this Government has progressively increased the number of nurse training places within Wales. I announced in February this year another significant increase on the back of increases in the previous two years. If you went and spoke to the Royal College of Nursing, or to Unison, as the trade union representing the largest number of nurses in Wales, they would recognise that this Government is increasing training places, in addition to the ‘Train. Work. Live.’ campaign that we’ve introduced, working alongside stakeholders within the service, and in addition to keeping the NHS bursary that we are proud to have kept, unlike the decision made across our border.

This is a Government that is serious about workforce planning, serious about working alongside staff representatives and serious about having the staff to undertake the job to do. But that does require a different conversation about resources, and Members from any party cannot simply point the finger to this Government and say, ‘Make more resources available to the national health service’ without then setting out which other parts of public service spending in Wales will have further cuts imposed upon them to do that. We already make incredibly painful choices to put extra resources into the national health service. I think that our staff and our public deserve honesty in this debate and that is what this Government will do.

Questions now from the party spokespeople. Welsh Conservative spokesperson, Angela Burns.

Diolch, Llywydd. Cabinet Secretary, the interim parliamentary review on health and social care has highlighted that there remain significant barriers for good ideas and policies to translate fully throughout the whole of the NHS due to cultural resistance and a fear of failure. There’s a recognition, evidence based, that a significant proportion of the public sector are often doing things without understanding what really works, and it stresses the need not to be afraid of failure, but to learn from it, because this approach will allow for a far more innovative and open approach to change that can only have positive outcomes.

Cabinet Secretary, I’m sure you’re aware that the Behavioural Insights Team, which works very closely with the Westminster Government, sets out to encourage the public sector to address change in a more similar way to the private sector. I was wondering, and what I would like to know is: have you engaged with or considered engaging with organisations such as the Behavioural Insights Team so that we can fully engineer effective and sustainable change throughout the Welsh NHS?

There is a serious point in the question that the Member asks about our ability to change and reform public services by choice, and understanding the choice we’ll be making in delivering a different service. There are arguments that we want the service to be broken before we fix it. And I accept that there are significant cultural challenges within every public service, including the health service. So, part of our challenge is, as you correctly identified, looking at where that experience exists. We have work ongoing, and I am certainly prepared to listen to and for the service and to engage with a range of different people, because, actually, delivering significant change in a large private sector employer isn’t easy, necessarily, and so there are insights to be gained in the private and the public sectors too. That does not mean we surrender the values and the ethos of the service, but we do need to understand how we deliver the change that is plainly required.

Business process re-engineering is never easy to deliver, but the tactics of nudge and leading and culture change are very well evidenced and have been used successfully in the private and public sectors. And I would urge the Cabinet Secretary to engage with organisations like that, because we can all learn, and there are good practices to learn from these kinds of organisations. Whilst the parliamentary review team are also going to be working, over the next few months, to develop more of a detailed map to aid the identified direction of travel for the NHS and social care sectors, do you think that these sectors should continue with current plans for structural reform? If you do, is there any Government-led work to ensure that any divergence is minimised between proposed structural reform now and what the parliamentary review may say in the longer term?

This goes back to the conundrum that we discussed in actually setting up and agreeing the terms of reference for the parliamentary review. Not just yourselves, but the spokesperson for Plaid Cymru also raised the point about, ‘Will the review mean that you will stop doing things you need to do now and kick things into the long grass?’ You have to look at the balance, in saying, ‘Do we want to put something off until the review comes up with their recommendations?’ There’s a balance to be struck, but I still think that where there is a clear case for services needing to change, and there is a clear case for different parts of the service needing to work more closely together, then that should happen. So, for example, on elective care, Hywel Dda health board and Abertawe Bro Morgannwg have had a joint planning meeting. I expect those to be a regular occurrence. The health boards in south-east Wales—Cwm Taf, Aneurin Bevan and Cardiff and Vale—are having joint planning meetings as well. So, there has to be an understanding of what needs to take place now under that, and not simply waiting and putting everything off for the parliamentary review to report. Because the challenge you raised in your first question about the cultural challenges—they exist among clinicians, they exist among the public and, indeed, politicians in our ability and our willingness to support and get behind change. So, I don’t think there is a need to put off the drivers to try and discuss and talk about change, but there is a need to properly understand what the parliamentary review will come forward with in a number of months—and I think they will go quite quickly—and then to understand how we do what they suggest and understand what we think works and then to do so rapidly and at scale across the national health service.

I think that the parliamentary review interim report is very clear on the direction of travel, and my understanding is it has buy-in from not just the health and social care sectors, but also political buy-in in terms of that direction of travel. The question I actually asked you was: is there some kind of oversight going on to ensure that any structural reforms that are currently being undertaken or currently being proposed by health boards have got some kind of backstop review to ensure that they are going in approximately the right direction of travel? Because, like you, I do not think we can just stop everything until we have a nice fat report in our hands that we can all study.

And, of course, one of the areas that has been highly identified by all of us here, by the health boards, by the parliamentary review, is that mental health services in Wales need, to be frank, to be totally overhauled for both adults and children. I do appreciate that there is work ongoing, and, indeed, I was pleased to sponsor and chair a session arranged by the NHS Confederation in which initiatives were outlined as to what we’re going to be doing to—or what they intend to do to improve and deliver transformative change within adult and child mental health services. And it is obvious that some areas in Wales have made outstanding progress. So, again, I ask you: whilst we’re not going to wait for this report to deliver all, what will you be doing to drive and to identify those initiatives that have delivered some outstanding changes, transformative changes, to child and adult mental health care? What will you be doing to identify those and to try to ensure that they are consistently and quickly applied throughout the rest of Wales? Because this is one area where we as a nation are not doing so very well.

I thank the Member for the question. In the general sense, about the backstop and the ability to think about whether we’re delivering change and making sure it’s going in broadly the right direction, that’s why there’s an NHS collaborative, bringing chief execs together to discuss and review evidence for changes that are proposed. That’s why we have integrated medium-term plans to try and set up the direction of travel for each health board—to have a plan, moving forward, about the changes that are being contemplated and delivered. It’s why health boards themselves [Inaudible.] they have processes that return a capital investment as well. There has to be a business case, and then there’s an investment board that looks at all-Wales capital bids, so, where capital is being used to try and re-engineer a service.

There are different layers of oversight about some of the plans and challenges over service reformation. In the particular area you raise about children and young people, I would not be quite so pessimistic about the need for a total overhaul. There are challenges in different parts of the country, of differing scale, but that’s part of the reason why, in recognising, if you like, the short-term, significant build-up of pressure that came in, we made the choices to start the Together for Children and Young People exercise with the NHS, working with the third sector, working with statutory partners, and, indeed, with young people themselves having an engagement in it, and it’s then about delivering a service model they recommend. That’s also why we invested the additional sums of money. We are seeing waiting times come down in this particular service area, and we are seeing faster access to therapies, backed up, of course, by tougher standards on waiting times in this area. But this is not a position where any of us should say we now have the perfect solution and the answer.

The progress we’ve made is real. The reality is that it’s also real that there are still too many children and young people and their families who wait too long, and it’s a constant process of reviewing where we are and what we need to do next, and that is already delivering transformative change within our service. But it isn’t just the specialist end; it is about the wider, broader services that wrap around families, and you’re right that it is about the consistency of the ability to do that. That’s why being reflective, having a national mechanism as well as a local mechanism to do so, really matters, and it’s also why we take the third sector and the voices of children and young people themselves seriously in designing and delivering our services.

Plaid Cymru spokesperson, Rhun ap Iorwerth.

Diolch yn fawr. On Monday, the auditor general released a critical report about the behaviour of Cardiff and Vale regarding procurement and recruitment. Now, I understand that. In response, NHS Wales’s chief executive has written to LHBs to seek assurances about their processes. What’s your hunch? Do you think that this was a one-off?

I think it is likely to have been a one-off, but part of the point about the chief executive writing to all health boards is to ensure that it has been a one-off. If there are other issues, then we want those to be uncovered and dealt with, because the Wales Audit Office investigation revealed a picture that is simply not acceptable and not in line with the established processes and recommendations, and, again, the chief executive’s letter to every chief executive in NHS Wales makes very clear that we expect those standards to be strictly adhered to.

The report itself highlighted what I think we’re justified in calling ‘nepotism’ when it came to procurement and recruitment. The auditor general also noted it proved extremely difficult to obtain a clear position of the facts relating to the matters subject to audit. UHB officers and former officers provided conflicting and inconsistent accounts. There was a tendency for them to blame each other for the failings identified in the report. I could go on.

Cabinet Secretary, we have some excellent—many excellent—managers and officers in the NHS in Wales, but I’m sure you’d agree that, in this case, behaviour has been unacceptable. We have a GMC for doctors, an NMC for nurses and midwives, so where is the body for regulation of NHS managers? Of course, managers can do just as much damage to patients from poor decision making. Is this something that you would consider?

I’m always open to considering whether our accountability framework is in place as it should be, but this should work by the proper challenge of the board itself—those independent members, the non-exec members. And that’s part of the challenge here in understanding what information was provided, how information was not provided to the board, and I think the honest truth is that the people responsible for the choices in this particular report, as has been revealed by the Wales Audit Office’s report, which is an unusual step—. It is unusual for a report to be provide all of that and I do not think the auditor general has provided a report like this before about NHS Wales. It’s a bit more common in England, where procurement is a different beast. The challenge here is to make sure that we are clear about our expectations, clear about the accountability that must flow where people do get this wrong, and that that is proper accountability. I think, actually, the health board now—and I was encouraged by the response from the new chief executive, who, again, made clear that what had happened was not acceptable and won’t be defended, and it’s important that there is confidence amongst the staff and the public about the processes in place today, and the expectation of behaviour today as well.

You mentioned their accountability within the NHS and how the NHS itself seeks to better itself through its own governance. You have recently published a White Paper on reforming NHS governance, and real concerns, actually, have been brought to my attention about some of the suggestions that have been made, certainly in relation to the replacement of community health councils with new arrangements and, in particular, the potential erosion of local knowledge, and also a lack of assurance that there will be a continued, real, strong patient voice in any new proposals. But, would you accept that a better way forward perhaps, rather than reforming NHS governance now, would be initially to have an independent review of management across NHS Wales, highlighting and seeking to promote the undoubted good practice that we have, whilst at the same time trying to root out the bad and using that as a basis for new legislation?

Well, the White Paper is a genuine consultation. So, it really is only for people to express their views and, if they don’t support the proposals, to think about alternatives to improve the quality and governance and direction of the national health service. So, this is not the Government saying, ‘We’re asking you, but we’ve already made our minds up’. It is a genuine consultation.

On the point about whether there is now a case for an independent review of managers and management within the health service, I would need to be persuaded that that’s the right thing to do, but if you think there is a compelling case to make, I’d be happy to consider representations that you provide on how that can add value over and above what we already have in place, and over and above the professional expectations we could and should properly have of NHS senior managers and the operation of boards within the national health service.

The UKIP spokesperson, Caroline Jones.

Diolch, Llywydd. Cabinet Secretary, the second Wales cancer patient experience survey has, once again, highlighted the fact that many cancer patients still do not have a key worker. While we have made progress, 14 per cent of patients still don’t have a key worker, and more than a quarter of patients said it was often difficult to contact the key worker. The survey also highlighted the benefits patients found in having a clinical nurse specialist, with the majority of the 81 per cent of patients who had one stating that their treatment was greatly improved due to this. As a result, Macmillan Wales is calling for every person with cancer in Wales to have access to a clinical nurse specialist. Cabinet Secretary, do you support this view and do you agree that the clinical nurse specialist should act as a key worker for Welsh cancer patients?

We certainly want every patient, where a clinical nurse specialist is appropriate to provide care, to have one. The challenge about whether the clinical nurse specialist is the key worker, I think, is different, because, for some people, it need not be the clinical nurse specialist who acts as the key worker, although, in practice, in the great majority of cases, it is the clinical nurse specialist who undertakes that role. There’s been a significant improvement on people knowing who their key worker is. In the previous cancer patient survey, in 2013, 66 per cent of people knew who their allocated key worker was. In this survey, that’s gone up to 86 per cent. Again, this is a significant undertaking. Over 6,700 staff have given up their time to provide their view on a wide range of their own experience of cancer care, and it’s as a result of this wide-ranging survey that we’re able to understand the state of our current services, the areas where we’ve improved, and, equally, those areas where we still need to improve further in the future.

Thank you for that answer, Cabinet Secretary. Staying with the Wales cancer patient experience survey, nearly a quarter of patients said that the GP didn’t take their symptoms seriously before their diagnosis. In fact, 6 per cent of patients stated they had to see their GP at least five times before being referred to hospital. As stated in the cancer delivery plan, detecting cancer earlier makes it more likely that treatment can be curative, less intensive and less expensive. It is therefore vital that, when someone presents with symptoms that could be caused by cancer, they are taken seriously. Unfortunately, we seem to operate in a model where we rule conditions in rather than out. We work up to the most serious rather than working back. So, Cabinet Secretary, what more can be done to improve early cancer diagnosis in primary care?

I don’t think the way in which you’ve characterised the way that general practitioners approach their job is particularly fair. I do think there is a serious case, though, about improving the number and the quality of referrals. This is a really big challenge for the health service, because the overwhelming majority of people referred in with suspected cancer are actually given the all clear. So, we already have a significant undertaking where we’re looking for the minority of people who are referred in and who are then told that there is a form of cancer to be treated.

It is also the case that cancer referrals have gone up significantly in this last year. They’re up 12 per cent within this year alone, and it is about how we continue to improve the rate of referral, but also what the conversion rate is as well, because, within health boards, there are different referral rates, but also different conversion rates. So, for those who aren’t aware, the conversion rate is the number of people who are referred in and then go on to be told that they have a particular cancer. That may be about the communities themselves. It may also be about the numbers of people and how and why they are being referred in. It’s really important again that we have a properly reflective approach where general practitioners are able to talk to each other, and other actors within the service, to understand what is happening and the outcomes they’re delivering for their patients. I think there’s got to be a properly reflective and supportive approach as opposed to looking to say that there will be blame apportioned to GPs, who are being told that they are doing their job in their wrong way. I think that’s unlikely to see the sort of reflective and positive approach that people want to take. Let’s not forget that people make a choice to go into medicine to care for people and to help improve lives, and we need to help them to do their job as well as being properly reflective of where that improvement is required.

Thank you, Cabinet Secretary. Finally, less than half of cancer patients have the opportunity to discuss their needs, and only 18 per cent of patients were offered a written care plan. Care plans are not only focused on healthcare needs, but they also pick up on emotional, financial and practical support. Less than half of Welsh patients were given information on financial support and benefits or had the impact their cancer would have on their day-to-day life discussed with them. We need to improve the way we deal with the impact cancer has on the patient, not just on their physical health, but the broader aspects. So, what is your Government doing, Cabinet Secretary, to ensure that all patients are offered a written care plan that incorporates a holistic needs assessment?

We’ve set out clearly our expectations for improvement in the cancer delivery plan. There’s no dispute within the wide range of healthcare professionals in tertiary, secondary and primary care services of the need for improvement, or in the real value of having written care plans. It is indeed because people see the whole person, so not just the particular direct impact of cancer in treatment terms, but what that means for that person—their ability to work, their ability to live their life, to make different choices and, actually their prospects for the future. So, it is really important to have that wider discussion and to understand that it will be at different points in time for different people. Some people, at the point of diagnosis, may want to know everything. Other people may want to get out of the room as soon as possible. It’s understandable why that happens, and that’s why a service cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach; it’s about being more agile and for it to be wrapped around that person. It also reiterates the need to have not just primary care and hospital-based care in a proper and constructive relationship with each other, but actually the real value of people in the third sector being able to support people in a different way, in a non-medicalised setting.

But I do think that it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that more people are being referred for cancer, more people are being treated for cancer, more people are treated in time for cancer, and more people have better outcomes. More people survive now than ever before, and, actually, on the experience of care, 93 per cent of people have a good experience of cancer care here in Wales. So, more improvement required, I accept that completely, but let’s not try and say that everything is bad here. We have many things to be very proud of.

The latest published information for 2015-16 shows 525 hospital admissions across Wales for patients bitten or struck by a dog.

I thank the Cabinet Secretary for that information. I understand from the Communication Workers Union that there’ve been 1,750 days lost by Royal Mail staff across the UK during the last year due to dog attacks. There’ve been some terrible injuries to postal staff including fractures, tendon damage, and even amputations. So, I’m grateful that we have those Wales-wide figures, because would he agree that having the figures from the health service will be a help in contributing to assessing the overall picture and informing the view of what actions need to be taken in order to address this growing problem?

Yes, I do agree, and I want to pay tribute to both Julie Morgan and her constituent Councillor Dilwar Ali, for the approach they’ve taken, not just for the individual that’s affected and his family, but actually in seeing a wider issue to campaign on and improve, both for members of the wider public as well as, in particular, postal staff who are largely members of the CWU.

This is not, if you like, a laughing matter, where the postie gets a nip and that’s just part of the job; actually this is a real and serious issue. People have real harm caused to them, and not just physical harm, but actually it affects someone’s willingness and ability to do their job. I know that the postal service spend a significant amount of time in trying to identify where there are likely to be dogs that are not controlled and the ability to provide mail to that house and to make sure that workers are properly protected.

So, I’m happy that the health service has provided information to help understand the scale and the nature of the problem, the cost to the public purse, the cost to the individual, and the improvement that all of us need to be a part of making. I know that politicians who wander around the country in elections have a small example of what postal workers undertake and the difficulties they face on a regular basis.

Indeed, Cabinet Secretary, you’re talking to one of the politicians who suffered so only last May. I had a very bad bite on my hand, thanks to a random dog, and had outstanding service at Withybush hospital A&E, who performed a lengthy but significant operation to repair my hand. But above all, I was able to return home and, for the rest of the week, I received treatment three times a day from the acute response team. Indeed, many of my constituents have had the acute response teams respond to them. This is a time-limited, acute nursing intervention for patients within the community to prevent them from having to stay in hospital. One of my constituents had septicaemia and had the acute response team come out to him and look after him, I think, four times a day actually.

Cabinet Secretary, could you just give us an overview about the acute response teams and what we might be able to do to promote their use throughout Wales? Because they are a very good way of ensuring that people are not having to stay in beds, freeing up beds for other people, and giving them community treatment in their homes, where they want to be, and they wouldn’t be able to stay there without such a great initiative as an acute response team, such as the one in Hywel Dda.

Well, it’s a good example of the fact that within each of our health boards there are examples of real excellence, and the drive is to have more care delivered closer to home, which means people don’t need to stay unnecessarily within a hospital setting. Again, the point is that significant areas of activity that would previously have been undertaken by doctors are now undertaken by different staff. Having a nurse-led intervention is a good example of, and another example of, the sort of reform we want to see in our service, delivered progressively, that isn’t about bricks and mortar, but is about how we make better use of our staff in different settings. I think it’s what we need to do, and there is an expectation within the public, and I think there’s a real desire amongst the staff themselves to design new models of care to do just that.

Thank you for the question. The Welsh Government’s intentions were set out in November last year in the updated ‘Cancer Delivery Plan for Wales’. Through the national implementation group, there will be a focus on early diagnosis and health boards will continue to prioritise cancer waiting times.

Thank you very much for the reply, Cabinet Secretary. During the general election in 2010, Labour promised to provide every cancer patient in Wales with a key worker by 2011. However, the recent Wales cancer patient experience survey found that 14 per cent of respondents still do not have a key worker. Also, it is not mandatory for Public Health Wales to collect data on key workers. What action will the Cabinet Secretary take to ensure that these vital data are collected and when does he expect that cancer patients in Wales will receive the level of care promised back in 2010? I think six to seven years is much longer than our term and the promise should be fulfilled. Thank you.

Well, in answer to the question from the UKIP spokesperson, I again indicated that, from 2013, 66 per cent of cancer patients had a key worker, and, okay, that’s risen to 86 per cent in the most recent survey. So, significant progress and yet more to do, as I previously indicated. Currently, the key worker information’s held within the cancer information system, otherwise known as Canisc. And we do know that needs to be replaced, and so it should then make it easier to understand a range of these areas. Rather than asking health boards to do it manually or to invent a different system to collect the information on key workers, I’m interested in getting a proper approach to collect and allow us to interrogate those data in a meaningful way, not just about key workers, but on a number of other areas. So, that work is being undertaken by the Wales cancer network and by officials across the Government. So, this is an area where I think we can be proud of the progress we’ve made, but as I say, and I regularly say, we still recognise there is more for us to do.

Cabinet Secretary, the cross-party group on asbestos received a presentation at its meeting in May on immunotherapy as a potential treatment in mesothelioma, including the SKOPOS trial at Velindre, looking at how a vaccine called TroVax may work alongside chemotherapy for those who suffer from pleural mesothelioma. Funding for this research runs out in August of this year and there’s concern that the immunotherapy research being carried out in Leicester university, which is heavily dependent on the trial work carried out by the Cardiff research group, could be compromised. Do you agree with me, Cabinet Secretary, this is pioneering work being carried out in Velindre, and is key to identifying new ways of treating mesothelioma? And can you assure me that you’ll look at what funding can be provided to ensure that this work can continue beyond August?

I thank the Member for raising the issue. Mesothelioma is something that I’m particularly interested in. Without wishing to go over my previous role, somebody else in the Chamber and I were lawyers before coming to this place and we actually dealt with and worked on a number of mesothelioma cases. Meeting members of the family and having to witness appeals was particularly striking at times—a very difficult experience to go through, because mesothelioma is, to date, always fatal. The path to the end is a quick and a distressing one. So, I’m particularly interested in research to potentially not just extend life, but save life as well. I’d be grateful, actually, if the Member would write to me. I’d be happy to discuss the matter with her in more detail—I understand you are the chair of the cross-party group—to understand where we are now and the approach that we’ll take with other parts of the UK in helping to improve outcomes in the future.

Thank you for the question. Research and innovation are key criteria for university health board designations in Wales and form part of the NHS Wales planning framework. As a Government, we have committed over £29 million in this financial year to continue our investment in high-quality research and technology-focused innovation within the NHS.

Thank you, Cabinet Secretary. The clinical research innovation centre at St Woolos Hospital is an excellent example of investment by Aneurin Bevan health board that allows researchers and staff to participate in groundbreaking research in areas including dementia, diabetes and cancer. Last year, over 17,000 participants participated in nearly 480 clinical research studies, which helps researchers develop new treatments and ensures that patients have access to those closer to home. What plans does the Cabinet Secretary have to work with the centre, health boards and others to ensure that support and encouragement of patients, carers and staff fully embrace research and make it a core activity within the NHS in Wales?

I thank the Member for the question. I enjoyed our visits—well, my visits—to your constituency to meet staff within the Aneurin Bevan university health board. I was struck by the range of activity that was being undertaken. That’s part of the £21 million that we fund through Health and Care Research Wales. The additional £8 million, when I refer to the £29 million, comes from the Efficiency Through Technology fund. There’s a range of different routes to getting there. But, actually, this is really important for not just having staff who are committed and who want to understand what more they can do, but actually to improve outcomes and the quality of care that is delivered. As I said, it is a key part of university health board designation and status. It also forms part of the criteria for approving or not approving an integrated medium-term plan. So, this is embedded within our planning framework, and I expect to see it in our regular meetings with chairs, in their appraisals, to make sure that research and innovation are a key part of what the health boards are actually undertaking today, to ensure that we improve healthcare for tomorrow.

Cabinet Secretary, it was a pleasure accompanying you to the turf-cutting ceremony at the new critical care centre, now known as the Grange university hospital, on Monday in Cwmbran. I did tweet a nice picture of us, with you with a shovel digging the foundations. This new hospital has been a long time in the pipeline, as we know, and you have the virtue of being the Minister who actually got to cut the turf—many of your predecessors didn’t get around to doing that. But, would you agree with me that it’s more than just about the building? We want to see that the new hospital develops into a world-class centre of excellence and innovation. I know it was once considered as a possible centre for neuroscience, but I think that fell by the wayside. So, what work are you doing, and is the Welsh Government doing, to ensure that when the new hospital does finally open—hopefully in a few years’ time—that it really will be a hospital that will be world class, that will be something that the people of south Wales can be really proud of, and that will attract the brightest and best medical staff?

I think it should make a real and significant difference in remodelling healthcare right across the Gwent area and beyond. It’s due to open, as you know, in spring 2021, when the Grange university hospital should be open for business. It’s important, in terms of the question that Jayne Bryant asked and the point that you make, to understand that the way in which we deliver services isn’t simply about delivering excellent healthcare—research and innovation have to take place alongside and through that as well. So, I do expect there to be a keen focus on research and innovation when that hospital opens, not just at the point of opening but throughout the period of time, because that is part of attracting and retaining staff there.

So, for example, the moves that have already been made to have a hyperacute stroke unit, currently based in the Royal Gwent—a lot of that is actually about having a different service model that has allowed it to attract, recruit and retain high-quality staff who would not otherwise have come into an old model of care. The research that is already ongoing there should be carried forward within a new model of delivering healthcare as well. So, for me, it’s a key part of what we’re investing in for the future, not just the bricks and the mortar.

Cabinet Secretary, what are you doing to promote clinical research in rural health here in Wales?

Interestingly, I’ve had a range of conversations with people in the mid Wales collaborative, with Aberystwyth University and with Bronglais hospital, but also I attended last week the research and innovation day at Trinity college Carmarthen, which looked at a range of research and innovation activities right across the Hywel Dda health board area. There’s a very clear signal from this Government that we expect that work to continue, because there are a number of people who want to undertake activities in areas where they know they’ll have to work, effectively, in an urban area or in a city-based service, but there are lots of other people who specifically want to work in rural medicine. We need to make sure that our service doesn’t just provide the services people who live in rural communities want to undertake, but that we understand the best-quality evidence that is available about how to deliver that service safely and securely in a way that values the choices people make to live in rural communities so that they receive high-quality healthcare too.

Thank you. We are committed to high-quality general practice as a core part of a modern primary care service. Investment in general medical services will increase by £27 million in this financial year. This, together with £40 million for primary care estates and our £43 million primary care fund, supports the ongoing provision of sustainable and high-quality general practice.

I’m grateful for that reply, but the Cabinet Secretary will know that the national survey for Wales found that 39 per cent of respondents find it difficult to make a convenient appointment to see a GP, and 62 per cent overall were not satisfied with the service provided by the NHS in Wales. Since 2004, as a proportion of NHS funding, general practice has declined from 10 per cent of the total to 8 per cent—admittedly, that’s gone up recently—but the British Medical Association say that in order to get to a satisfactory position, this should be 12 per cent of what we currently spend on the NHS. Can the Cabinet Secretary give us an idea of what response he would make to the BMA about that figure?

To be fair, this is the general practice committee of the BMA. I’m robustly confident that clinicians in secondary care would not wish to see a significant resource transfer between secondary and primary care. That is an honest part of our challenge: as we increase the money going into the health service—as I said earlier, at a painful and significant cost to other parts of public spending activity here in Wales—when you think about how and where we’ll invest that money, the honest truth is that delivering services in secondary care is more expensive than delivering services in primary care. So, even as we invest in trying to deliver more care closer to home—the example that Angela Burns gave earlier—that doesn’t always have the same cost attached, for example, as the significant capital you need to invest in a new generation of radiologists. So, there are honest choices to make here. What I’m determined to do is, as services move and are reconfigured, that funding is provided to make sure that that service is properly and adequately resourced. I don’t think it’s helpful to try and stick to a percentage figure within the NHS budget as the aim and the objective. The aim and the objective must be to deliver the right care at the right time in the right place, and with the right resources to allow people to do so.

Cabinet Secretary, when it comes to mental health services, there is evidence that good counselling services can prevent repeat GP attendances, and they have a proven track record of helping and managing and even alleviating mild to moderate symptoms. I do think this sort of innovation is something we need to see more of in the NHS, particularly if we want to retain more GPs, perhaps some of the older ones who are thinking about retirement, of which there are quite a large number in Wales. This is just an example of how we can help balance the workload and use GPs at their best for the actual sharp end of the service that’s required.

I agree that we need to consider how we make best use of professionals within the service, and outside the service as well. It’s a significant part of a GP’s caseload, actually, those sort of moderate to lower level mental health challenges that bring people through their doors. And it’s part of the reason why lots of primary care clusters are investing in counselling services with the resources that we’ve made available to them. Mental health and therapy services are some of the more significant and consistent areas, together with pharmacy, for that cluster investment. And it is about that general sense of well-being and how we actually address that as well. Sometimes, that is not a medical intervention. So, for example, when we think about social prescribing, much of that is actually about improving mental health and well-being as an alternative to, if you like, a formal talking therapy or, indeed, medication. That’s also why this Government has recommitted in our programme for government to undertaking a significant social prescribing pilot that we think will provide us with significant information on how to develop a service for the future that should make a real difference to mental health and well-being. And, obviously, we’ll look again, in a year or so, at the practice of Valleys Steps, which we think has made a real difference in this area already.

The Dolwenith surgery in Penygroes is closing at the end of the month and nobody will replace the GP who’s retiring. He was the only one providing Welsh-medium services in an area of 5,000 people where three quarters are Welsh speakers. The valley will have fewer doctors per head than the Welsh average and yesterday, in a very poor statement, you said that you wouldn’t be establishing a medical school in Bangor. How many other surgeries have to close? How many other locums will you have to pay a great deal for before you realise that a medical school is the only sustainable way of resolving the health crisis that faces us in north Wales?

Well, I don’t share the points that you make, and I think we could either have a conversation where we’ll continue to talk about how we deliver more medical education and training, and more healthcare professionals in every part of the country that needs them—north Wales, mid and west Wales and south Wales, too—or we could go through a rather formulaic, ‘You are responsible, it’s all your fault and I’m disappointed’. I don’t think that gets us very far. I’m happy to have a row if there’s a need to have a row, but I don’t think this is the area to do that. I actually think that the decision that we made yesterday was based on a proper evidence base about the right thing to do. I am concerned about our ability to recruit, retain, and attract people to work within the health service in Wales. That’s why the incentives, for example, on GP training in north-west and north-east Wales—we’ve filled those areas that were hard to recruit to previously. So, I do take seriously the whole model of care that we provide, but I don’t share the tone or the content of the remarks you make. I’m committed to delivering a proper health—[Interruption.]—a proper health service for communities right across Wales, including north Wales, and I resent the implication and accusation that I do not care about one part of Wales.

Thank you, Cabinet Secretary.

The next item is topical questions. Steffan Lewis.

Will the Cabinet Secretary make a statement on the decline in safety in youth jails in light of the publication of the HM Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales’ Annual Report 2016-17? TAQ(5)0172(CC)

Thank you for the question. Whilst the Welsh Government takes the safety of young people in custody very seriously, responsibility lies with the Ministry of Justice and the youth justice board. I have previously visited Parc prison and will raise the issue the Member raises with the UK Minister.

I thank the Cabinet Secretary for his response, and I’m sure that he shares my horror at many of the findings found in this report. Indeed, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons has concluded that not a single establishment inspected in Wales and England last year is safe to hold children and young people. Rates of self-harm have doubled since 2011, 46 per cent of boys feel unsafe at their establishment, assault rates were 18.9 per 100 children, compared with 9.7 in 2011. There has been a decline in the conditions in which children are detained, and levels of violence are high—both assaults on staff and on other young people.

We’ve gone beyond the crisis point, I think. I acknowledge, as the Cabinet Secretary said, that this is not due to Welsh Government policy, but Welsh children are being put in danger and are being failed by the current regime. The Cabinet Secretary for Communities and Children is responsible for children and young people’s rights. Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says that Governments must do all they can to ensure that children are protected from all forms of violence, abuse, neglect and bad treatment by their parents or anyone else who looks after them. Article 37 reads: children must not suffer cruel or degrading treatment or punishment. When arrested, detained or imprisoned, children must be treated with respect and care.

Given this crisis, Cabinet Secretary, will you agree that, as an immediate step, you will demand access from the Ministry of Justice to the prisons estate for Welsh Government to inspect the plight of Welsh children for itself? And, secondly, will you seek the swift devolution of youth justice to this country so that Welsh children are not further failed by the current broken penal system?

I think the Member raises some really interesting and important points about the state of the nation and particularly young people and how we have to ensure that they are protected at all costs in terms of where they are within the sector. I can say that the youth justice board relationship with Wales is very good, and there has been an inspection prior to the release of that report, and action has been taken, particularly on the secure estate here in Wales.

I can inform the Member that the published outcomes of the inspection of 2016-17 for Parc prison under ‘Safety’, ‘Respect’, ‘Purposeful activity’ and ‘Resettlement’ were all ‘reasonably good’. Arguably, that should be better, but it certainly is in a better place than all the other establishments that are secure across the country.

My whole ethos, and my department’s ethos, is, actually, that, when people end up in the secure estate, we’ve actually failed the system. We should be much further up front in making sure we have prevention in place to support young people. That’s why we’re investing in the adverse childhood experiences hub here in Wales to protect individuals from stacked ACEs. We’re working with Public Health Wales across the departments to make sure that we can help young people—prevent entering into these systems—but I’ve taken the points that the Member raises and will look carefully at the recommendations in the report, and, if there’s any more we can do, I will keep the Member informed of this.

Thank you to the Cabinet Secretary. The next question—David Melding.

Will the Cabinet Secretary make a statement on current guidance for the management and removal of dangerous structures, following yesterday’s fatal building collapse in Splott? TAQ(5)0166(ERA)

Thank you. Local authorities may enforce action in relation to dangerous structures through the Building Act 1984. Section 77, ‘Dangerous building’, is used where there is the potential for a dangerous structure; section 78, ‘Dangerous building—emergency measures’, is used when immediate action is required to remove the danger.

I thank you for that answer. Can I express my sympathy, Presiding Officer, to the family of the man who was killed yesterday? I do think there’s a need to take prompt action when buildings are identified as high risk. We have quite a large number of Victorian public buildings that are not in regular use, as this building was not, and at risk of deterioration. I think particular care needs to be taken where buildings are a further risk to local neighbourhoods or adjacent infrastructure. I do hope that you will be able to use the planning system to emphasise the importance of these matters.

As I said, this is a responsibility for the local authority, and planning would not cover dangerous structures. The legislation is the Building Act 1984, which is England-and-Wales legislation. So, it’s England and Wales, so it’s not our legislation. We are hoping to see a transfer of powers via the Wales Act 2017, from next April, and it’s certainly something that we can look at. But I absolutely agree with you that prompt action should always be taken.

This isn’t a time for politics. A man has died, and our thoughts go out to his family and the community in Splott. I do think, though, that questions must be asked as to how it came to pass and if any other buildings in Cardiff are in a dangerous state. On behalf of my group, I would just like to offer the family our condolences again and offer any support that we may able to give, and that goes for the Cardiff council group as well.

I thank Neil McEvoy for those points, and we’ve certainly heard the leader of Cardiff city council say that there are questions to be asked. My officials have been in contact with Cardiff city council officials and, of course, we will do anything that is required of us. But, as I say, this needs to be looked at very carefully, obviously. The Health and Safety Executive are involved, so I don’t think it would be appropriate to say anything more.

Obviously, as it is the matter of a possible criminal investigation, we need to be very careful what we say here, but my understanding is that the building had already been identified by Natural Resources Wales as being in an unsafe state, and that is why the owner had been directed to demolish it. But, clearly, the issue that arises here is the quality of the risk assessment that needed to be carried out to ensure that the building was demolished safely. Obviously, that is one of the issues we need to await the inquiry for, but I don’t think there’s any reason to assume that just because a particular building has tragically collapsed that therefore other buildings are about to collapse. One doesn’t follow from the other.

I understand from press reports that a survey had been undertaken, I thought by Network Rail, in the area a couple of years ago. I think it’s really important that local authorities have resilience within their planning and building regulations department, and I think that’s a piece of work I can do with my colleague Mark Drakeford, the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government. But, as I say, it is now with the Health and Safety Executive, so I don’t think it’s appropriate to make any further comments.

Thank you, Cabinet Secretary.

The next item is the 90-second statements. Ann Jones.

Thank you, Llywydd. The Assembly term has come to an end and the school term has finished as well. Sixty years ago, Rhyl became the home of the first bilingual school and that then led to a growth in Welsh education throughout Wales. So, congratulations to Ysgol Glan Clwyd. I am very pleased to be Assembly Member for the Vale of Clwyd, the birthplace of bilingual education.

Well done. Hannah Blythyn.

I’m proud to serve an area with a rich industrial heritage, whether that be steel, coal, or manufacturing. This coming weekend, a major piece of that industrial heritage will be unveiled at the grand opening of a restored pit wheel and pony structure at the Point of Ayr colliery. The site was the last deep mine in north Wales, and, whilst the memories live on for those who worked there, the monuments and structure of this pit have faded with its demolition. But now work to transform this key site is well under way. The Point of Ayr Then and Now team, led by passionate chair, John Wiltshire, have worked tirelessly to see memories brought back to life for the restoration and return of parts of our industrial past, including an original pithead that now has pride of place on the edge of Ffynnongroew. The project was awarded over £40,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund, which has provided the financial support to deliver this ambition. John shared the story of this project here at an event in March, and the following month saw the opening of the Point of Ayr trail, the first stage of this exciting project.

Celebrating our industrial heritage is an important part of understanding and recognising our past, and essential in shaping our future. On Sunday, I have the privilege of officially unveiling the restored pit wheel and pony structure, marking the start of a journey of discovery for many families, local people, and, importantly, future generations, as part of our history is brought back home.

This will be a special day for the community, the former Point of Ayr workers, their families, and the committed team that have worked to make this happen. It will not only be a proud moment for me as the Assembly Member for Delyn, but for me personally, as my taid, uncle, and many members of my family worked at the Point of Ayr.

Thank you. Dawn Bowden.

Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. Last week I was delighted to attend Fochriw Primary School’s red kite celebration fair-trade coffee afternoon. The red kite project at the school is designed to develop the pupils to be ethically informed and to hold strong values about the environment and the nature that is around them. For the project, the school formed an eco-committee, which came up with a range of ideas, including a pupil voice and ownership of the project, three school rules, which were to be respectful, to be responsible, and to be safe, and, as part of this, pupils were encouraged to be even more respectful to wildlife, both in and out of school, to develop their digital and real-life skills, and to promote Cwricwlwm Cymraeg, with the story of the red kite in Wales. The project gave pupils a realisation that nature is all around us, if only we open our eyes. As they said, it is really special, and we need to be responsible in looking after it now and for future generations.

Arising from their activity, the project has not only raised awareness of the red kite, but has also raised money, enabling the school to make a donation to the Gwent Ornithological Society, which uses the money to replace nest boxes in the Goytre House wood. The pupils embarked on an intensive social media campaign to share their experiences of the project and provide information on the red kite, which is regularly seen in the area around Fochriw, and in the wider Rhymney valley.

The project received its well-earned recognition when it recently won the 2017 Young People’s Trust for the Environment’s Better Energy School award, for the Wales and west region. Can I ask Assembly Members to join me in congratulating Fochriw Primary School on its award, and applauding their fantastic work on the red kite project, and in raising awareness of the environmental issues amongst young people, whilst at the same time developing their digital skills? Diolch.

Forty years ago to this week, in 1977, I left Ysgol Gynradd Llanwnnen, at 10 years old, to go to high school in Lampeter. Forty-nine years ago to this week, my fellow Member, Dai Lloyd, left ysgol Llanwnnen too, also to go to secondary school.

This week, every child will leave ysgol Llanwnnen, and the school will close its doors forever. The schools at Cwrtnewydd and Llanwenog will also close their doors, and in September, all the pupils will commence their education at Ysgol Dyffryn Cledlyn, a new area school.

More than 400 years of education has been provided between the three schools—Llanwnnen, Llanwenog and Cwrtnewydd—to generations of children. My grandmother, and my father, before me, were at ysgol Llanwnnen. But this is no time for feeling disheartened, but rather a time to look forward enthusiastically for another century and more of education for children of the area at Ysgol Dyffryn Cledlyn.

A fortnight ago, I walked into ysgol Llanwnnen to the sound of the children singing, ‘Rwy’n canu fel cana’r aderyn’—a song that I sang 40 years ago and more at the school. Therefore, yes, things do change but some things remain. The buildings and the facilities do change, but the education, the singing, the playing and the Welsh language go on.

Thank you, therefore, for the excellent start to life that Llanwnnen, Llanwenog and Cwrtnewydd schools gave to so many of us. I wish Ysgol Dyffryn Cledlyn a long and happy life.

Thank you.

We now move on to item five, which is the statement from the Chair of the Finance Committee on fiscal reform—lessons from Scotland.

Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer, and I am pleased to be making this statement today, to share the lessons we learnt from our recent visit to Edinburgh to discuss the Scottish experience of fiscal reform.

During our visit, we met with representatives from the Finance and Constitution Committee of the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish Fiscal Commission, and Revenue Scotland. One of the main roles of the Finance Committee is to consider the draft budget and how fiscal devolution to Wales is going to impact on how we do this. Members will be aware that the revised Standing Orders, and the associated protocol, have been agreed in preparation for this year’s budget, which will be the first to take place within our new funding arrangements. However, the committee is also considering a legislative budget process for the future.

In Scotland, where there is already a legislative budget process in place, a budget review group was set up to evaluate the Scottish budget process, specifically looking at public engagement, in-year scrutiny, fiscal framework, multi-year budgeting and scrutiny based on outcomes. The Scottish budget review group was made up of officials from the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government, as well as external public finance experts, including leading academics and stakeholders with extensive experience of fiscal and budgetary arrangements. The group published its report at the end of June and included a number of recommendations, with the aim of improving financial scrutiny in Scotland. I hope that the Scottish experience, and this report, will be useful tools for us as we prepare to implement our new arrangements, and as we go forward to consider a possible new process.

The establishment of this group in Scotland demonstrates the importance of building expertise in devolved fiscal arrangements, and it is imperative that the same level of support from experts is provided to develop our scrutiny arrangements so as to ensure that they are robust and effective.

Fiscal devolution and the changes in the Assembly represent an exciting and challenging time for Wales. As a committee, we have shown great interest in the preparations for the establishment of the Welsh Revenue Authority. Given that Scotland has already established its equivalent organisation, which has been operating since 2015, we feel that it’s important to learn from those experiences to ensure a smooth transition when the WRA is operational from April next year.

We heard from Revenue Scotland about the importance of stakeholder engagement when developing the website and promoting its role. Extensive engagement with stakeholders when designing the interface for the online tax system led to a high number of digital submissions. The Cabinet Secretary has previously committed to ensuring that this interaction with stakeholders is part of the process, but it’s still not too late to learn from the Scottish experience to ensure that any issues, however small, are ironed out before next April.

We met also with representatives from the Scottish Fiscal Commission, which has been operating on a statutory basis since April this year. The commission’s responsibilities include producing independent forecasts for Scotland, including forecasts for tax revenues, expenditure on social security and onshore gross domestic product. We learned that the commission and the Office for Budget Responsibility will provide fiscal forecasts for Scotland, but that the commission will be using data specific to Scotland rather than UK data that the OBR uses, which should make the commission’s forecasting models more accurate.

Rather than establish such an organisation here, the Welsh Government has appointed a team from Bangor University to undertake scrutiny of its budget forecasts. It appears that the key lesson from Scotland is the need to develop Wales-level data that are specific and timely beyond the data provided at a UK level by the OBR. Personally, I also believe that we will require a body such as the Scottish Fiscal Commission ultimately, as tax devolution is implemented. I note that the Cabinet Secretary has issued a written statement very recently, indicating that the establishment of such a commission is one of the options he is considering. The Finance Committee will examine this issue as we scrutinise the draft budget.

This work on fiscal devolution is an exciting time for the Finance Committee, and the Assembly as a whole, hopefully, and we hope that we can learn from the Scottish experience to ensure that our scrutiny arrangements are as robust as they can be. Thank you very much.

Can I thank the Chair of the Finance Committee for his statement today? As one of the three members of the committee who visited Edinburgh, and the only one who unwisely took the train and ended up taking a lot longer than everyone else, I found it extremely useful when I got there, particularly the meetings with the Scottish Parliament’s Finance and Constitution Committee, the Scottish Fiscal Commission and Revenue Scotland. I think it’s worth stating as well that the Chair and myself—I think we were the only ones—also visited the Auditor General for Scotland, Caroline Gardner, who had an invaluable insight and oversight into the way the different organisations worked together in the new fiscal landscape that is developing.

As you said, Simon, Scotland demonstrates the importance of building expertise in devolved fiscal arrangements and we can learn from both good practice and, indeed, mistakes that have been made north of the border.

So, turning to my main question: what role do you see the Finance Committee being able to play in aiding in this process over the rest of the Assembly term as fiscal devolution progresses? It strikes me that, never in the history of the Assembly has the Finance Committee really been potentially in such a pivotal and influential role in terms of deepening devolution and I think there’s a chance for the committee to really come into its own during this process.

In terms of the development of the Welsh Treasury and economic forecasting capacity, these are huge areas, and although Dafydd Elis-Thomas would say that these are issues for the Welsh Government primarily to be concerned about, I think it’s a huge task for any Government to have to deal with. So, I think there is an important role both for this Assembly and the Assembly committees, including our committee, to do what we can to influence, to provide guidance and to feed back to the Welsh Government on where we think that good practice can be built upon.

The Chair mentioned Revenue Scotland and the importance of stakeholder engagement in framing the system to the benefit of the Welsh taxpayer. Our committee has a wealth of experience in stakeholder engagement, so, again, it can play a valuable role in engagement and pressing for what I think we need, which is a bespoke Welsh tax-raising framework that people in Wales can feel comfortable with and can be proud of. We’ve spoken about this in committee, Chair, but we don’t want an adequate WRA; we want a world-class Welsh Revenue Authority. We want something that really can pave the way—not an easy goal, I know, but I think that’s what we should be aspiring to. Personally, I would have preferred the organisation to have been ‘revenue Wales’, a point that I made in the previous Assembly. I think I was outvoted by every other Member in this Chamber. But I think that, certainly looking at the way that Revenue Scotland has developed, then ‘revenue Wales’ can certainly learn from that organisation north of the border.

Just briefly, Deputy Presiding Officer, and turning to the Scottish Fiscal Commission, I tend to agree, the evidence that we took seemed to suggest that it wasn’t necessary for Wales, or it wasn’t the best value for money for Wales to necessarily go down the route of having a fiscal commission. However, we do need to make sure that the Welsh Government does have access to the best possible and timely data. That has not always been the case in the past, but in the case of fiscal devolution, it’s going to be really important that we get up to speed on that area as quickly as possible, and I know that the Chair of the Finance Committee will say that the committee wants to assist the Welsh Government and the finance Cabinet Secretary as much as possible in this process.

I thank Nick Ramsay. Can I assure him that I took the train back to Aberystwyth, so I’m sure I suffered alongside him, and a very pleasant journey it was as well? I think the key point that he was making around the role that the Finance Committee can play, and one of the reasons, he’ll be aware, that I wanted to bring this statement to the Chamber, was that, in the Finance Committee, we don’t want this just to be a debate in the Finance Committee, but something that involves all Assembly Members, and vibrant to be aware that this is a pace of change that we haven’t seen for some—well, we’ve never seen before because we haven’t seen fiscal devolution before. The pace of change around our scrutiny of the budget, around the budget process itself, will be enormous in these next two or three years, and I think everyone needs to get across that, and that’s one of the reasons, I hope, for bringing the Finance Committee’s own deliberations out into the open, into the whole Chamber, as well. So, we do have that important role to play, and I think our most relevant role at the moment is to look at and examine very carefully what the lessons are in places like Scotland, what the lesson is of a legislative approach to budgeting, and to try and apply those to Wales.

But I would agree with the point that he makes around a bespoke arrangement in Wales. I’m not—. I would not advocate—and I don’t think he does, either—just copying from Scotland or copying from other parts of the United Kingdom, or, indeed, other devolved legislatures elsewhere. We do want an arrangement that is bespoke for Wales and suits not only our scrutiny arrangements, but also the ability of the Welsh Government to propose budgets that are based on the most available and best data and the best information possible.

In that regard, as well, I would take up his point, really, around where we go further forward. What we have in place, I would agree with him, is robust enough for the current arrangements, but as we have future devolution, I think the example of the fiscal commission in Scotland is an interesting one to look at and examine. We don’t need it today, but maybe in two or three years, particularly, perhaps, in the next Assembly when we have fuller exercise of the income tax powers, when, perhaps, we will have had an election where people will have pitched an election debate around raising or lowering income tax. Then we will need a very clear pair of independent eyes on proposals coming forward from whichever Government, whichever party they are. So, I thank the Member for his company in Edinburgh as well, but just to say that we did learn a lot there, but we also learnt that, though we sometimes look elsewhere and think that they’re doing much better than us, when you get down to some of the detail, I think we don’t do quite so badly ourselves either.

I warmly welcome the statement made by the committee Chair, and, as he said, I think it’s important, as we consider the changes that are to happen over the next few years, that the work of the Finance Committee isn’t restricted to that committee but is part of a national debate even outside the Welsh Parliament. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the opportunity and the honour to visit our colleagues north of the border with the committee, but as a former Scottish citizen, I follow developments there very closely. It’s clear, having spoken to fellow committee members who did go on that fact-finding mission, that the visit had been very worth while.

My questions today will focus mainly on participatory budgeting. Now, perhaps it’s an area that Scotland hasn’t been in the vanguard on, on the international level. As part of the agreement between Plaid Cymru and the Welsh Government on the budget, the Government did commit to carrying out research on participatory budgeting and looking at other models and, also, as I understand it, to have a pilot scheme following on from that. Unfortunately, as a committee, we can’t make decisions on behalf of Government—I’m sure that’s not unfortunate for the Government, however—in terms of the process that they use in drawing up their budgets. We can only make recommendations for improvements. I am very grateful that the Cabinet Secretary is open to new ideas. In terms of our work as a committee, we can adopt the principle of participative budgeting in terms of our scrutiny process of Government budgets, and this is perhaps something that the committee Chair might be eager to look at.

As part of our scrutiny process of the budget, we as a committee already invite organisations and stakeholders to provide evidence and there’s also an opportunity for organisations, businesses and individual citizens to provide written evidence. But we could be more proactive in including citizens in the process more and more effectively. So, my question to the Chair is: how can we enhance the opportunities for individual citizens, and communities too, to participate in that process of drawing up budgets in a more proactive way? In terms of good practice from other committees in the Assembly, for example, the Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee held a survey into what they should inquire into, with 2,700 people participating and voting for their preferred option from a list of different options. This is important, because given the pressures that we face in terms of the Assembly’s budgets because of the way Wales is funded at the moment, there are some major questions that we as a nation will have to face in terms of prioritisation of the block grant. Even with the partial devolution of some taxation, that block grant is central and there are restrictions in terms of the options. Perhaps the model of participatory budgeting gives us an opportunity to have a real debate with the people of Wales on what the reality is, because many of them perhaps don’t consider that once the funding has been passed from Westminster to the Welsh Government.

Also on this issue, the Scottish Government is funding Glasgow Caledonian University to lead on an evaluation process over a period of two years to look at the impact of participatory budgeting on communities and democracy, with a specific focus on the relationship between these budgets and equality. Now, would the Chair consider carrying out a similar study through the Finance Committee, perhaps looking at legislation in Wales related to equality and the well-being of future generations, perhaps? Just to echo what Nick Ramsay has said on the importance of data, as the nation matures as a democracy and as new powers are accrued and new fiscal powers are accrued, then it’s crucial that we do have economic data in order to consider the link between fiscal policy and economic policy. So, I’d appreciate the Chair’s view on how we can enhance the data available at the moment.

Thank you, Steffan Lewis. First of all, just on that final point, I agree entirely that we need more timely and more appropriate data for Wales, that is more robust, in order to make some of the decisions that we ask the Government to make and then, in turn, the Assembly to approve. I hope that the process that the Government has commissioned—that Bangor University will start on that. He will know, as a member of the Finance Committee, that we’re about to look at the draft budget ourselves and we’ll be inviting in a number of organisations and other people who take this overview of budgets, not just in Wales but also more broadly internationally as well. Perhaps we will learn some good practices from that. What’s important, I think, is that we are ready for the challenges facing us, particularly when income tax comes, and that we don’t sit on our hands and think, ‘Well, this information will come’. We have to be in the vanguard. We have to break new ground, and very difficult ground at times.

Could I just turn to the broader point that you were making about participatory budgeting? It’s right to remind the Assembly about the agreement between Plaid Cymru and the Labour party in terms of looking at that. It’s not my role to answer for the Cabinet Secretary this afternoon, but I know that he is looking at this issue and is looking for opportunities to learn about work that’s being done in this field, and I hope very greatly that we will hear how that is happening. But it’s important to say that the Finance Committee itself is part of the process, although we don’t want to cloud what the Government is doing and what the Finance Committee is doing; our role is to scrutinise the Government and it’s the role of the Government to do the budget.

We were in Beaumaris last week having a stakeholder session with the public, and we have also had, I remember, a very successful session in Bassaleg School near Newport where we did a participatory budget session. Very interestingly, after allocating all the Monopoly money in the classroom, very broadly the budget looked very similar to the budget that we have from the Welsh Government. That is, people do prioritise health, then they prioritise education, then they share the money out amongst other things. It was a very interesting exercise, and I would especially like the committee to do more of that with young people, particularly with the proposal that young people start voting at 16. There is a role for us there, and I’m sure that the Finance Committee would be pleased about a day out from the Assembly from time to time to be part of that process. [Interruption.] Nick Ramsay is very happy to do that.

I wasn’t aware of the work that he referred to at Glasgow Caledonian University. I wasn’t aware of that, so thank you for that, and I’ll make sure that we do draw the attention of the Finance Committee team to that and that we look at that as something that can enrich our work in this area.

Thank you very much. And finally, Mike Hedges.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. It’s very difficult being fourth to speak and the third person who went on a visit and trying to say different things. I will endeavour to do so, and if I don’t I’m sure you’ll tell me. Firstly, can I thank Simon Thomas for his statement on the Finance Committee’s visit to Edinburgh? I think the one thing we’re going to have to start getting to grips with now is that finance is not something that is only dealt with by the finance Minister and the Finance Committee and a quick political argument once a year in the Chamber, where I can tell you what’s going to happen in the future—what each party’s going to do. We’re going to have to have a much more grown-up approach to it, and we’re going to actually have to come to terms with raising money as well as spending it, and I think that that’s going to have a change of mindset for Members across the Chamber, and I include my own party as well as the others in here.

I’d like to make two quick comments. Asymmetric devolution, with Wales continually playing catch-up to Scotland, is not acceptable. The second point is: the Finance Committee in this Assembly is more thorough in its budget scrutiny than its equivalent in Scotland. We spend a lot of time being told how wonderful Scotland is in a whole range of areas, but I’m sure that the Chair of the Finance Committee would agree with me that our scrutiny is more robust here than that that takes place in Scotland.

I have two questions. Should the budget review committee report to the Assembly or Government or both? And the final point is—and it’s really carrying on from something that’s been raised by both Nick Ramsay and Steffan Lewis—the importance of accurate and timely data. Does the Chair agree with me that it’s really important that we do ensure that we get accurate and timely data? And as we get more resources allocated to us to be got from our own taxation system, it’s going to be even more important to realise exactly how much money is coming in. Otherwise we’re going to be spending money without actually knowing we’ve got it coming. So, this timeliness and accuracy, however it’s done—. And I’m not somebody who says, ‘It has to be done by a university; it has to be done by a group that’s been set up,’ but that accuracy and timeliness, however it’s got, is incredibly important. Does the Chair agree with me that that is probably the most important thing if we’re going to start dealing with raising money—that we’re going to need accuracy and timeliness in order to ensure that what we do, we get right?

I thank Mike Hedges, and I completely agree with his final point there that robust data is essential for the Government’s own forward planning and its own tax plans, and it’s essential for us as an Assembly, then, in holding the Government to account and scrutinising those. I share, I think, his implicit concern that we don’t have that data at the Wales level enough, and certainly not timely enough. It lags behind enormously. So, in the current situation, we will be trying to scrutinise the Welsh Government plans around the economy, around investment, on data that dates back 18 months or even further, and that is not good enough. There is a lesson from Scotland there about working to get more data that’s up to date and is Scottish-specific.

We also know, from the examination of the two tax Bills that we’ve taken through as the Finance Committee, that as you look at the data, and as you get more Welsh data, the picture changes. It changes enormously. It changed for landfill tax; it changed enormously for stamp duty. So, that is a lesson for us all. It changed for the border as well, but Mike Hedges will recall that.

I have to say, Deputy Presiding Officer, although we’ve had a conversation between members of the Finance Committee in the Chamber here, I’d still want to agree with Mike Hedges’s basic point, which is: this isn’t just for the Finance Committee now; this is 60 Members raising income tax for Wales. The way we go about that, at the end of the day, is going to be essential for everyone. So, if you like, I’ll make no apologies—I’ll come back again with further statements, I’m sure, with the permission of the Chair and the Business Committee, just for everyone to have the opportunity to know what we’re doing in the Finance Committee and how that is actually moving on apace, really, with not only the scrutiny but the way we build a parliamentary approach to financial legislation, whatever that might be—budget Bill, finance Bill or whatever we end up with. Just to say on that point, I would see that as a piece of joint work. I want the Welsh Government to be part of that; I want the Finance Committee to be part of that. Our job here is surely to build the parliamentary process, and that’s not a question that the Government proposes, we criticise and we come up with an alternative, and then they criticise us and so forth. That’s a joint piece of work, I would hope, and certainly, as Chair of the Finance Committee, I’d want to take it forward with that spirit, and I sense that the committee wants to do so as well. We have to work with asymmetric devolution, although my criticism of it would be the same as Mike Hedges’s.

Finally, I was more subtle than Mike Hedges when I said that not everything in Scotland is better than we do it here, but the fact is that the finance committee in Scotland didn’t scrutinise their draft budget. It was done in a much more political way, if you like, between party deals and party agreements. We have party deals and party agreements here, but it does not stop the Finance Committee scrutinising the draft budget thoroughly. This year, we’ll be doing it even more thoroughly than ever before, and there’ll be an opportunity for all committees to do that as well, and I hope they’ll join with us and that this will be a learning process for us all.

Thank you very much. Perhaps there might be more Members who will go on your next trip, and then we can all hear what happened when you were on your trips, and more of you perhaps will go, and then we’ll have more time to debate what’s gone on elsewhere.

Item 6, then, on our agenda is a debate on the report by the Public Accounts Committee on Natural Resources Wales and scrutiny of the annual report and accounts for 2015-16. I call on the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, Nick Ramsay, to move the motion.

Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today about the Public Accounts Committee inquiry arising from the Natural Resources Wales annual report and accounts 2015-16.

As Members will be aware, the Public Accounts Committee has a crucial role in ensuring the efficient expenditure of public money. As part of this role we routinely scrutinise the annual reports and accounts of publicly funded organisations, as well as considering issues of value for money, and organisations’ governance and audit arrangements. We had been due to consider Natural Resources Wales’s annual report and accounts for 2015-16 in autumn 2016. However, our consideration was delayed until the Auditor General for Wales was in a position to qualify the regularity opinion of the accounts, which occurred in March 2017.

The auditor general qualified his regularity opinion on Natural Resources Wales’s financial statements in respect of its award of timber sales contracts to a sawmill operator in May 2014. Qualification of this nature is an unusual and rare occurrence, and a matter we believe should be brought to the attention of this Assembly. We found the auditor general’s findings to be most concerning in that he deemed NRW’s transactions relating to a timber sales contract to be irregular and, in his view, contentious and repercussive. Of further concern to us was that the auditor general found there to be uncertainty on whether NRW had complied with principles of public law and state-aid rules.

To assist us with our inquiry we took evidence from NRW on two occasions and from the timber industry sector, represented by the United Kingdom Forest Products Association. I would like to take this opportunity to thank our witnesses for assisting us with our work. Having carefully considered the evidence, we found there to be a number of issues regarding NRW’s handling of the awarding of its timber sales contracts. Firstly, we found there to be a lack of board and executive team scrutiny of major decisions. We were very surprised to hear that the decision to enter into contracts with the sawmill operator was delegated to just one officer at NRW. We were left unconvinced by NRW’s assertions that the decision had not been taken in isolation and had been supported by a full business case, particularly given that, in later evidence to us, NRW themselves highlighted that the business case could be better described as an ‘options paper’, lacking in essential data and analysis to ensure informed decision making.

We found it to be extraordinary that a substantial contract, worth £39 million, would be awarded in this way. These facts alone demonstrated to us that NRW’s governance arrangements were weak and that their decision-making processes were far from robust. Our evidence also found there to be serious failings in terms of NRW ensuring that a major contract was subject to competition or alternatively being able to demonstrate through market testing that there was only a single possible supplier. Although NRW told us that there was only one sawmill operator able to meet their operational requirements at the time, we heard no evidence to support this case, and in the absence of a tendering exercise, there is no absolute certainty that there was only one operator able to meet NRW’s requirements.

Of further concern to us was that one of the key reasons NRW entered into the contract with the sawmill operator was to create additional capacity in the timber industry by building a new saw line. However, we heard from NRW that sufficient capacity was later achieved without the construction of a new saw line, which raised questions for us about the decision to award the contract to the operator in the first place. We later heard that the sawmill operator had indeed breached its contractual obligations in respect of building an additional saw mill. We were extremely disappointed that a firm that was awarded with a £39 million contract, for which no other company was able to bid for, had failed to fulfil such a pivotal element of that contract. Our evidence led us to conclude that a serious error of misjudgement was applied in awarding the contract to an individual sawmill operator without a full and open re-tendering exercise or robust market testing.

We heard that the auditor general had concluded that transactions relating to the timber sales contracts were ‘contentious and repercussive’ and that under the provisions of NRW’s framework document and the provisions of the Welsh Government publication, ‘Managing Welsh Public Money’, which constitutes ministerial directions, NRW was required to refer contentious and repercussive proposals to the Welsh Government. NRW did not refer these contracts to the Welsh Government and therefore acted outside the framework of authority to which it is subject. The auditor general also considered that there was significant uncertainty as to whether NRW complied with the principles of public law within the decision-making process for the contract award, and whether the award of the contracts complied with state-aid rules. In view of this uncertainty, the auditor general was unable to positively affirm that the transactions with the sawmill operator conformed to the framework of authority that governs NRW.

In evidence to the Public Accounts Committee, NRW informed us that it did not believe that advice on state aid was necessary at the time and that they had no awareness of state-aid issues and neither sought advice on it. We were further concerned to discover that NRW’s awareness of state-aid issues was only initiated as a result of the auditor general’s findings. Given that state aid is, or at least should be, a clearly understood risk for those responsible for the expenditure of public money, we found it unacceptable that NRW did not feel it necessary to seek legal advice on this matter. In light of this, we recommended that NRW review its delegation arrangements alongside its awareness raising of state-aid law, public law and the processes for awarding contracts. We also recommended that the findings of this evaluation are shared with the Public Accounts Committee to enable us to monitor implementation and progress against identified changes.

As a committee, we believe that NRW could and should have ensured that there were good governance arrangements in place for its contracting process, and in failing to establish such arrangements were unable to demonstrate how it acted lawfully or whether the contracts represented value for money. As such, we recommended that Natural Resources Wales undertake a full evaluation of its governance arrangements relating to contracting processes, clearly setting out lessons learned with specific reference to the timber sales contracts in question.

We note that NRW’s accounts 2016-17 were laid yesterday at the Assembly and the auditor general has qualified his regularity opinion on these accounts for the same reason as the qualification of the regularity opinion on the 2015-16 accounts—the award of a series of timber sales contracts. The opinion on the financial statements is unqualified.

The auditor general’s report of the accounts, which is included in the audit certificate of the accounts, notes that, since the date of his 2015-16 report, Natural Resources Wales have put in place an action plan to address the issues identified in his report, progress against which will be overseen by Natural Resources Wales’s audit and risk assurance committee on behalf of its board. We’re pleased with the actions taken by NRW since the publication of the auditor general’s report and that NRW have fully accepted all three recommendations made in our report. We also welcome that NRW have provided us with a copy of an action plan, showing how they intend to take forward each of our recommendations, including timelines. We note that these actions are due to be completed by the end of October 2017, and we look forward to NRW providing us with an update on progress in November 2017.

Central to all our work is driving forward improvement in the efficient delivery of public services and ensuring value for money with regard to the expenditure of public funds. We hope that NRW will work to secure the necessary improvements to ensure its good governance going forward, and that the issues arising from its handling of these timber sales contracts are never repeated. We trust that the Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Rural Affairs will work with the new chief executive of Natural Resources Wales, once they are appointed, to ensure that this is the case.

I’d like to thank the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee and members of the committee as well for their diligence this year, but also the auditor general for shining a democratic light in some pretty dark corners. The Assembly year has ended as it began, with damning reports from the auditor general into Labour Wales. In this instance, we’re here to talk about the actions of Natural Resources Wales.

It really comes to something when a timber contract is contentious. A £39 million contract given out without the company even tendering for it and, as the Chair said, state-aid rules may also have been broken, so now NRW may be open to legal challenge, and the accounts have not been given a clean bill of health. Thirty-nine million pounds without competition—it’s good work if you can get it—and no proof of value for money either. No proof of value for money. No business case. No business case. Thirty-nine million pounds, and no business case.

The chief executive of Natural Resources Wales told the Public Accounts Committee in the first meeting that a full business case had been provided. Then, in the following meeting, the same chief executive conceded that there was no business case in fact, but there was a briefing paper with not a single financial figure in it. That’s worth repeating: a £39 million contract given out, with no business case, and a briefing with not a single figure in it. And then suddenly we hear that the chief executive of NRW is riding off into the sunset and taking early retirement without questions being answered.

It feels like I’m in this Chamber every week almost, pointing out a new waste of money. Just a few months ago, the chair and deputy chair of Sport Wales were sacked after a Deloitte investigation showed some companies were given specifications for tender before other companies, and those privileged companies were then given the contracts. You’ve had the issue this week as well of the health board, very similar things there.

Will the Member give way?

Yes.

In introducing this debate, the Chair of the committee said that he found this quite extraordinary: what had happened at NRW. Is the Member saying that, conversely, in his view, he thinks this is fairly normal behaviour across the public sector in Wales?

Well, it’s extraordinary, but what is even more extraordinary is it goes on all the time. You know? The next thing I want to talk about is the Lisvane land deal. It’s a similar culture that there is in this building and with this Government, and I’m not alone in suspecting that criminal action may have taken place. I want the South Wales Police to reopen the investigation into the Lisvane land deal, as do some police officers, in private—none of whom are my acquaintances. [Interruption.] I’ve given way once; no, not again. The First Minister won’t comment on the Lisvane land deal because of some legal proceedings which are ongoing, but he did say that it was an episode that did not reflect well on those who were a part of it. I hear colleagues in the Chamber saying this isn’t about NRW. What we’re talking about here is the culture of this Government and the culture of the Wales we live in. [Interruption.] We’re living in a one-party state, one facet of which is, in my opinion, incompetence or corruption. Now, what is destroying—[Interruption.]

You may not have been in the Chamber when I made my deliberation earlier on, but I am guiding Members to think carefully about throwing about allegations in this Chamber and to think carefully of the words that you use. So, if you weren’t in the Chamber earlier, I ask you to read the nature of my statement earlier and to carry on in language that is appropriate to this Chamber.

I think it’s very appropriate, Presiding Officer, because we are repeating. In the opinion of many, this Labour administration is either incompetent or it’s corrupt, one or the other and—

Your microphone has been turned off and you are out of time. David Melding.

Thank you, Presiding Officer. I welcome the Public Accounts Committee’s report into the accounts of Natural Resources Wales, and specifically in respect of the timber sales contract. Given the scale of the expenditure of public money in this particular scheme, it is no surprise that detailed scrutiny has followed, and a very apt and focused report has been published. As we’ve just heard, the sum of money involved is very, very considerable at £39 million. I think it does lead us to ask questions, but I think they are more policy focused than anything else, and that will be the tenor of my remarks this afternoon, Presiding Officer.

Only a year after NRW were set up, several bodies criticized NRW’s management of the forestry estate in submissions to various Assembly committees and their proceedings in the fourth Assembly, Presiding Officer. For example, in the submission that Wales Forest Business Partnership made, they complained that there’s a ‘complete lack of transparency’ in NRW in this area, and that the private sector had to rely on, and I quote, ‘hearsay and the published accounts.’ It was not an open channel of communication. I mention these because it’s quite clear that similar examples have been identified in the Public Account Committee’s report. So, I do think it’s an issue for the scrutiny of the Welsh Government and the role they have played in the general policy setting and the organisational decisions they’ve made.

Originally, when the board of NRW was appointed by the environment Minister, it did not include any representatives from the forestry sector, and the Forestry Commission Wales chairman, Jon Owen Jones—a respected former Labour MP—raised concerns that the forestry industry’s voice would not be adequately heard in the new organisation. Again, a similar issue has been highlighted by the Public Accounts Committee’s report, when they quote—. And I quote directly from their report: the auditor general added his

serious concerns about the very significant loss of forestry expertise within NRW which was extremely worrying.’

So, I do think we have to ask the Welsh Government, Presiding Officer, whether the organisational merger is on track and is to achieve its intended purpose.

Back in 2011, when the details of the planned merger of the Countryside Council for Wales, the Environment Agency, and Forestry Commission Wales was first announced, the environment Minister said that the move would ensure more sustainable and effective management of our natural resources. Now, I grant you that three into one was never going to be easy—a very, very challenging situation for the management team at NRW—but, as we’ve heard, that team itself has undergone a shock and there will now be a change in its leadership. So, I do think the Welsh Government has to take more responsibility in this area—I know it’s arm’s length, but at the moment it’s an arm’s-length organisation that seems unclear of its direction of travel.

Would the Member give way?

Yes.

I just wondered, listening to the Member explain the problems that have arisen with this merger of three organisations, how much he felt that some of this actually stems from the fact that we didn’t have an Act that was scrutinised here in this place. It was done by a ministerial Order, in effect, using the regulation powers of Westminster, and, really, this Assembly has never had a really good look at the governance of Natural Resources Wales.

Can I say, Presiding Officer—? I know you’re the guardian of our procedures, and the greatest procedure is to take a Bill through, because it helps the Government sort out some of its thinking, and a wiser Government pays heed to the discussions and, indeed, some of the amendments that come from other parties. A lack of that process I do think has had a big impact on this unfortunate situation.

Can I just conclude just with this issue? Presiding Officer, I think we need to see robust contingency planning in public bodies and arm’s-length organisations, and that seems to have failed in this case. NRW simply cannot continue to operate in a manner as it has done, or it appears to have done, in this particular case.

I do acknowledge the success of NRW in controlling the tree disease in question, but I don’t believe such times of crisis justify irregular procedures—you have to have planning and protocols in place. Sadly, diseases and adverse natural events do occur, and it was for Natural Resources Wales to have been aware of that, and it does seem to have failed in this case. Thank you.

Thank you, David Melding, for your historic perspective, which is very useful. I think that the specifics of this contract, and the failure of NRW to see that there was anything wrong in the way in which they proceeded, have been very well covered by the Public Accounts Committee report. I just wanted to add my voice to why the failure of NRW to understand that the way in which they were proceeding was inappropriate has some bearing on the wider issues of the importance of forestry and the timber industry in Wales.

Because during the Climate Change, Environment and Rural Affairs Committee inquiry on forestry, we went out and met, obviously, many members of the industry, and I certainly remember going to the Crumlin sawmill and being told that they were extremely upset that the contract for the larch had not been put out to public tender, and, indeed, were extremely surprised that it had not been put out to retender after the auditor general had raised his original concerns. So, I think, if you like, the crime was committed twice, in that not only was the original contract not put out to tender, but then, when the error was pointed out to them, they dug an even bigger hole.

I think it’s very concerning, because NRW plays a very strategic role in controlling the price of wood in Wales, and understood that role because they used to release wood onto the market to stabilise it. So, I find it inexplicable that, for example, the contract that they said they offered to tender between May 2012 and May 2013 wasn’t taken up. It’s very difficult for a lay person to understand how it was that the industry didn’t take it up at the time, because they’re today saying they’re very upset that they weren’t given the opportunity to bid for it.

I suppose the second point that is difficult for me to understand is why it was not possible to deal with the diseased larch on a more moderated basis, rather than push the whole lot onto the market, which, obviously, was going to suppress the price of the wood; that’s completely obvious. I don’t understand why—if you fell the wood, is it not possible to leave it and then clear it as required? Because there’s a huge market for larch. It’s used for cladding, it’s used for flooring, and it’s used to substitute for oak. And, given that we’re the third largest importer of wood in the world, there has to be a market for domestic wood. I just don’t understand it; it simply add doesn’t add up—

Will you give way?

[Continues.]—that there was such a rush on—. Yes.

Yes, you’re totally right on that; the way that the larch was marketed was a big problem. It should have been marked in smaller, manageable lumps of larch that could have been more easily absorbed by the market. So, there were serious failings in that regard.

So, I just simply wanted to add my concern to the way in which this contract has been handled, and the delay in NRW putting its house in order, if you like, because the initial evidence-giving sessions with the chief executive of NRW were of somebody who was in denial that there was a problem. So, I’m glad to see the action plan that has now been produced as a response to the latest PAC report does put in place the action required, but I think it does ask some questions for the Welsh Government as to whether NRW any longer has the capacity to play the strategic role in the wood industry in this country that we desperately need, both as a form of import substitution and as a way of ensuring that the raw material exists for us to substitute other more carbon-damaging products with wood. So, I hope that the Cabinet Secretary will give some reassurance on that point, because I think that that is—. Quite apart from the actual specifics of the contract, I think the strategic issues are also very important.

Although this debate relates to issues on the awarding of a contract by NRW, the Finance Committee wishes to contribute on one issue, briefly, to this debate, because there were delays before the auditor general laid the annual accounts of NRW, and this is a cause of concern to the Finance Committee.

The background to this is that the auditor general is required to report on the accounts within four months of the date of NRW laying the accounts, but in this instance this wasn’t possible due to the auditor general investigating the issues associated with the awarding of the contract. That’s the purpose of the Public Accounts Committee’s report. On this occasion, the auditor general didn’t meet his statutory deadline in terms of laying his report of the accounts.

This situation has highlighted the lack of provision for the auditor general to request an extension to the statutory four-month deadline should any issues arise with the audit of accounts. This situation is not unique to NRW. In fact, in recent years the Assembly has passed various pieces of legislation establishing bodies such as the Welsh Revenue Authority, Social Care Wales, and Qualifications Wales, which all include this four-month statutory deadline with no provision whatsoever for extension. We believe as a Finance Committee that this is a clear oversight in Welsh legislation. I’ve written, therefore, to the Chair of the Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee and the First Minister regarding the establishment of bodies generally by the Welsh Government. This is particularly important when bodies are created through establishment Orders, as was the case with Natural Resources Wales, rather than through primary legislation.

I’m pleased that the First Minister has confirmed that Welsh Government officials have started to discuss the technical and legislative implications with the Wales Audit Office, and that they will be working together in order to arrive at a way forward. We look forward to receiving more information from the First Minister on the actions being taken once these officials and the Wales Audit Office have undertaken this work. Thank you.

I call on the Cabinet Secretary to reply to the debate.

Diolch, Llywydd, and thank you for the opportunity to respond on behalf of the Welsh Government on the Public Accounts Committee report on ‘Natural Resources Wales: Scrutiny of Annual Report and Accounts 2015-16’. Whilst delivering value for public money, it is the role of Welsh Ministers to ensure its public bodies in Wales maintain the appropriate standards. We need to be robust in our scrutiny and, indeed, the PAC, in undertaking this scrutiny of Natural Resources Wales’s accounts, has highlighted the importance of robust governance for public bodies and how proper process must be followed.

The reason for the WAO qualification of the 2015-16 accounts was, as we’ve heard, the award of a timber contract to a sawmill operator in May 2014. I am pleased that NRW have conceded, with hindsight, they would have handled things differently. The recommendations within the PAC report are primarily a matter for the accounting officer and board of NRW. NRW have assured me that they’ve already put in place an action plan to address the issues raised by the Auditor General for Wales. The Welsh Government’s role will be to support NRW in the work they need to undertake to ensure robust procedures are in place for the future.

Prior to the PAC scrutiny, the First Minister had already commissioned Welsh Government officials to review the governance arrangements for arm’s-length bodies in Wales. Much work has already been undertaken, and I’ve been interviewed by the official leading the review. As an arm’s-length body, NRW is governed by a robust framework agreement that reflects the principles set out in ‘Managing Welsh Public Money’. During their PAC appearance, NRW requested a more precise definition for the terms ‘novel’, ‘contentious’, and ‘repercussive’ in their current governance framework. This request was made specifically to address the WAO recommendation that the contract was novel, contentious, and repercussive and hence they should have submitted their proposals to their sponsoring department in line with the current governance framework. I understand that, as part of the current arm’s-length bodies review, consideration will be given to providing greater clarity around these issues.

Davies Melding asked was the purpose of NRW on track, and I think it’s worth reflecting that, since the creation of NRW, they’ve had to deal with many unique issues, and that includes the outbreak of P. ramorum across the Welsh forestry estate, the worst storms in living memory over the 2013-14 winter period, and the implementation of the Well-Being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 and the Environment (Wales) Act 2016, which have impacted on their purpose and day-to-day activities and seen the organisation take on additional statutory responsibilities.

Would the Minister give way?

Yes.

I note your comments that NRW said they required further guidance on what was meant by ‘novel’ and ‘repercussive’. I found this argument entirely unconvincing in the committee. It seemed clear to the committee that what they were proposing was so obviously falling outside of the accepted understanding that it was hard to understand that that was a serious argument. It spoke to a broader arrogance of the leadership team that not only did they legally challenge the auditor general’s advice before it came to committee but gave a performance utterly lacking in humility. Does the Government review the Minister talks about—does that include the efficacy of the current board of NRW to hold the management team to account?

Well, as I say, the First Minister had instigated this review prior to PAC scrutiny, and I mentioned that I’d been interviewed by the official responsible for the review. Obviously, NRW is a very large organisation and body within my portfolio, so, obviously, I have had discussions around the issues that you’ve raised in the Chamber.

Despite the issues that I’ve just mentioned around NRW’s—what they’ve had to deal with over the past few years, I think they have absolutely sustained their level of service. Also, since it was formed, they’ve been subject to three formal reviews, all of which were published last year. Two of these reviews were undertaken by the WAO. There was a probationary report, which was undertaken on behalf of Welsh Ministers, examining the first two years of NRW. It found that NRW had adopted a sound approach, establishing key systems and controls to enable its smooth creation. We had a probationary report into value for money and that report concluded there had been a sound and well-structured approach to establishing NRW and thus had given NRW a solid platform for continuing to realise the intended benefits of its creation, and for tackling the future challenges it will face.

A third review was undertaken by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s Better Regulation Delivery Office—that’s now Regulatory Delivery—and a regulatory competence review, which recommended the use of civil sanctions in a way that is compliant with the principles of good regulation. Taking into account the context of a newly formed organisation going through a very radical transformation and having to manage some unique issues during its first few years, I do not believe the PAC scrutiny has revealed any wider systematic failing by NRW. However, the awarding of the timber contract is an issue that must be addressed, and it is being addressed. It’s something that I have reiterated in my discussions with the chief executive and chair.

NRW’s success to date can be measured in its delivery of their statutory duties and Welsh Ministers’ aspirations in their annual remit letters. In my view, this shows how committed its workforce is to achieving the best outcomes for Wales, and whilst the PAC report, of course, highlighted some weaknesses, I do want to take this opportunity to thank the NRW staff for their commitment during a period of change, which, of course, is still under way. So, on behalf of Welsh Ministers and the Welsh Government, I would like to thank PAC for their report.

I call on Nick Ramsay to reply to the debate.

Diolch, Llywydd. Can I thank all the Members and the Cabinet Secretary for contributing to today’s important debate? As I said at the start of this afternoon’s debate, the Public Accounts Committee has a crucial role in ensuring the efficient expenditure of public money in Wales, so it was very important that the committee had an opportunity to bring this issue to the Assembly, and I’ve appreciated that today.

It is not every day that a major public body such as NRW has its accounts qualified in this way and for the reasons that have been set out today. If I can just turn briefly to some of the contributions. Firstly, Neil McEvoy, you referred to the lack of a proper business case. Initially, NRW told us that there was a business case. When we questioned the veracity of the business case, we were then told that it was not a business case, it was an options paper or some similar language. We found that absolutely extraordinary, as Neil McEvoy said, that a £39 million contract was awarded without a proper business case, and without any financial background. I think, when we asked for further financial data to support the decision, they weren’t forthcoming, so there was clearly a major flaw there.

David Melding took the wider view and questioned the whole merger process, which ended up in the creation of NRW, I think during the last Assembly, and the merger of the previous three separate bodies into that. You questioned whether that process had actually worked and whether this problem that we’re discussing today actually highlighted a major flaw in the way that that process had happened, and whether, when you merge together separate bodies in this way, it will almost inevitably lead to wider problems. That’s probably a debate for another day, but I think it was important that you brought that perspective to the Chamber today.

Jenny Rathbone, I liked your expression ‘the crime that was committed twice’: no tendering process at the beginning and then no real re-evaluation or remediation later on when there was clearly a problem that needed to be dealt with. And, yes, there was a problem with the way that the larch was going to be marketed. You can’t simply flood the market with a huge amount of larch in one go. That hasn’t happened in the past. Evidence we took from the forestry organisations that we spoke to said that it was unusual that that approach had been taken, and we never got a satisfactory answer from NRW as to why that approach had been pursued.

Simon Thomas gave us the Finance Committee perspective. I sit on the Finance Committee as well, so I’ve seen both sides of this, and, yes, I know that for the Finance Committee, the primary issue was the failure of the auditor general to lay the NRW accounts in a timely way and according to his statutory obligation. We know that there was a conflict between, on the one hand, his statutory obligation, and, on the other hand, applying his own code of conduct, and he had to wrestle with that. But you’re quite right, that shouldn’t have happened, it shouldn’t happen in the future, and we need a wider discussion with the Welsh Government or within this Assembly about how the system can be changed so that, in future, either the current auditor general, or a future auditor general, as the case may be, is not put in such a difficult position and has to take a decision that both sides are going to be unhappy with.

As the Cabinet Secretary has said, Natural Resources Wales should have viewed the contracts and the awarding of the contract as novel, contentious and repercussive. It was very hard for the Public Accounts Committee to see why a recognition of the contract awarding as being novel, contentious or repercussive hadn’t happened. There was some flaw in that process, and Lee Waters—well, you referred to a broader arrogance. Yes, that’s a very strong term, I know, but I think that you said that for the right reasons, and NRW certainly showed, in the evidence they gave to us, whether it was a broader arrogance or complacency—I’m not quite sure how you would describe it, but there was certainly a problem with the attitude, I thought, in the way that they felt that we considered the sale of the larch had been dealt with and the contract that had been awarded. Thirty-nine million pounds, at the end of the day, is not a small amount of money, and it’s something that really does need to be done with a proper business case and a proper strategy behind it.

In light of all this, we recommended that NRW review its delegation arrangements alongside its awareness of raising state-aid law, public law and the process for awarding contracts. We’re pleased that, as the Cabinet Secretary, has reported, an action plan has been put in place. We, as the Public Accounts Committee, will be watching that closely, and I’m sure the Assembly will be interested in how that pans out. But let us be quite clear in this debate today, Presiding Officer, that this situation shouldn’t have happened, and we need to make doubly sure that it doesn’t ever happen again.

The proposal is to note the committee’s report. Does any Member object? The motion is therefore agreed in accordance with Standing Order 12.36.

That brings us to the next item, which is a motion under Standing Order 10.5 to extend the appointment of the chair of the Wales Audit Office board. I call on the Chair of the Finance Committee to move the motion—Simon Thomas.

Thank you, Presiding Officer. From one Wales Audit Office issue to another, but I am pleased to move this motion today on behalf of the Finance Committee, and I ask the Assembly to agree to extend the contract of Isobel Garner as chair of the Wales Audit Office board in accordance with the Public Audit (Wales) Act 2013. Isobel Garner has been chair of the board since her appointment in October 2013 and has made a valuable contribution during her time in post. That appointment was made for four years in the first place, with the Act including a provision for extending the appointment. The committee believes that there is merit in extending Isobel Garner’s contract, particularly as the organisation of the governance arrangements of the Wales Audit Office under the Act is still relatively new. The committee proposes that her contract is extended for a period of three years.

I’d also wish to draw Members’ attention to the committee’s report on the appointment of the non-executive members and chair of the Wales Audit Office board, which provides further details on the recruitment process, including the appointment of Bill Richardson, Alison Gerrard and Steven Burnett as non-executive members. I ask the Assembly to agree the motion.

It’s a pleasure to respond to the penultimate motion of the term. Given the importance of the Wales Audit Office and its board and robust governance, I think it’s important we give this consideration. I am pleased that the Finance Committee hasn’t just nodded through the reappointment of three members and a chair. The legal provision for the members is that they’re allowed two appointments only, and it specifies a fair and open recruitment process, and it’s welcome that the Finance Committee did take note of that and put that process into action. I understand it’s now completed and only one member has been reappointed and then only for a two-year term. But I think we would want to put on record our thanks to those members who are retiring.

Unlike the other members of the board, there is express provision allowing the chair’s term to be extended, and, given the turnover of members, I do agree it is appropriate for that chair’s term to be extended, and also note that it’s only been extended for three years, rather than four. So, nothing is taken for granted, and that also ensures an appropriate rotation of members of the board, which I think will assist its governance going forward. I’d like to congratulate Isobel Garner on her contract extension, subject to only a pending vote. Given the relatively small population of Wales and the importance of having qualified and capable people taking these public service roles, there will at times be conflicts of interest, but what is important is that those conflicts are disclosed and that they are properly managed, and I think we look to the Wales Audit Office board and to its chair to lead by example in that, and the Conservative group will be supporting this motion.

May I respond briefly to Mark Reckless’s comments, and firstly say that I would agree? Of course we would want the Wales Audit Office and the board to be the gold standard in public accountability and in public governance in Wales, and as a Finance Committee, I can confirm what Mark Reckless said. We appointed three members—non-executive members—of the board through an open recruitment process, and in doing so, in fact one member was reappointed but two new members joined the board, and I’d like to put on record my own thanks to those members who have served the board for four years and have now not been reappointed but have served well. It’s no reflection on them, it’s simply that we have an open process and that we have new ideas and new people able to take up that role, and that means that the board itself is refreshed and reinvigorated. I think it’s particularly important, as we are appointing a new Auditor General for Wales sometime in the next 12 to 14 months, that there is consistency and some continuity with the chair and the leadership of that board, which has been successful to date, which is why the Finance Committee is very content to recommend to the Assembly today that Isobel Garner is reappointed for the three-year period.

Thank you very much. The proposal is to agree the motion. Does any Member object? No. Therefore, in accordance with Standing Order 12.36, the motion is agreed.

We now move on to the UKIP debate on Brexit and rural areas. I call on Neil Hamilton to move the motion. Neil.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I see from the number of empty seats in the Chamber today we’ve reached the dog days of summer, but we are left, at least, with the cream of Assembly Members to listen to this debate. The essence of this motion is localism and devolution, and that’s what the Brexit process enables us to extend.

I want, before going on to the motion, to address the amendments. I don’t know why the Conservative group always has to delete everything in our motion and then put down something that is almost identical. This kind of predatory behaviour of gobbling up our motion is most reprehensible, I think, but there is nothing that we can disagree with in the Conservative amendments apart from the words ‘Delete all and replace with’ And, of course, I do understand that Plaid Cymru has a different view about the EU withdrawal Bill from us, but I do think, for reasons that I explained yesterday, that those fears are misplaced.

The First Minister chided me yesterday as having changed my view in some shape or form, that as a result of Brexit all the powers currently enjoyed in devolved areas by Brussels shouldn’t come to the Assembly. I still believe that very strongly, and I do repeat what I’ve said many times before, that Wales should not be a penny worse off as a result of leaving the EU, in terms of public funding, and therefore that every penny of what the EU now currently spends in Wales should be added to the Welsh Government’s block grant, so that we can then as an Assembly decide on our priorities. Of course, this is vitally important to rural areas in particular, because agriculture and the environment are those areas of policy where there is greatest scope for devolution from the European Union.

Although I’m not inclined to trust Theresa May on much, I do think that it would be very difficult to imagine circumstances in which the Government could resile from such categorical statements as the one that I quoted yesterday, where Theresa May said in the House of Commons that,

no decisions currently taken by the devolved administrations will be removed from them’.

And, indeed, the Secretary of State, Alun Cairns, said as recently as 23 June, when asked by Paul Flynn in a written question in the House of Commons whether any additional legislative competencies will be devolved to the National Assembly as a consequence of leaving the EU—he responded:

The Government expects that there will be a significant increase in the powers devolved to the National Assembly for Wales as a consequence of the UK leaving the EU.’

And as the Government has already said that it will seek a consent motion in this Assembly as part of the process, clearly, we do have a lever there to ensure that those categorical statements are delivered upon. So, I have no fears about the EU withdrawal Bill posing, in any way, a threat to our powers, and there will be no land grab. The Government would be very foolish to try to do so. There’s nothing in it for them to gain from that.

But we have to accept, I think, that Britain is part of the United Kingdom, and negotiating international trade agreements is a UK competence. The Government can’t put itself in a position where, say, for example, Nicola Sturgeon would seek to hold them hostage pending the actual exit process. So, it’s clearly vitally necessary that there be this kind of transitional stage, but at the end of it, when all those powers have been restored to the United Kingdom from the EU, that our fair share of what we’re due under the existing devolution settlement should be brought here to Cardiff, so that we can take the important decisions for ourselves.

As a representative for Mid and West Wales, of course, I’m acutely aware of the importance of this to our constituents. I believe that the opportunity to devolve most agricultural decisions, despite the fact there will inevitably need to be significant agreement between the various nations of the United Kingdom on certain frameworks, to mutual advantage subsequently—. Nevertheless, it’s vitally important that we should be able to make our own priorities for ourselves. And I don’t have any fear, also, for farmers and others involved in agriculture that markets are going to disappear and their livelihoods are under threat. We have a massive deficit in trade with the EU on food and drink, and if the EU were to be so foolish as to refuse to enter into some kind of free trade successor agreement with us, then we would be able to expand our home market very significantly for most agricultural products. Lamb is the only significant problem in my opinion in this respect, but the figures involved are relatively small as part of the total budget. So, whatever the outcome, whatever the difficulties—and there are bound to be pluses and minuses in any huge change of this kind—we should be able to accommodate them comfortably from within the Brexit dividend. For every £5 that farmers currently get from the EU, we pay £10 to Brussels in order to get it. So, there’s plenty of scope there for us to tweak the system. So, I’m not pessimistic about that at all.

The advantage of more localised decision taking is that we’re no longer making these important decisions on a continental scale. That’s the big problem with the CAP. There are 28 countries and we have to have an agricultural policy that works all the way from the North Cape down to Greece and Gibraltar. And with climatic and topographical conditions being so varied, inevitably Wales gets the short end of the straw. But when we’re in charge of our own agricultural policy, we’ll be able to tailor-make an agricultural policy specifically to the needs of Wales, and a very good thing that will be too. And we’ll be able to make our own decisions on matters like herbicides, for example, and animal welfare, and we’ll be able to—[Interruption.] Sorry?

Animals are animals across Europe.

They may well be, but if decision making bodies are over-regulating, that’s a matter of significant concern to us. The EU wants to ban Asulox, for example, which is very important in the control of bracken on the hills. And we’ve had an annual exemption from what they want to do for the last six years. We’ll be able to decide for ourselves whether that’s a sensible policy or not, which it isn’t. The EU may want to get rid of glyphosate as a weed killer, which we buy in supermarkets as Roundup. This is not a sensible decision, but we’ll be able to take that decision in future rather than unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. Farmers have enormous problems with cross-compliance because, at the minute, they have to dot every i and cross every t of the complicated regulations that the EU imposes upon us, and we’ll be able to go through the whole gamut of such regulations for ourselves to decide which of those we want to keep, which are excessive and which we can dispense with altogether. So, all in all, bringing decisions down to the lowest sensible level is, I think, a vitally important and valuable thing for us to be able to do.

The other parts of our motion, which refer to other areas of that kind, unrelated to the EU—for example, consultation on the closure of rural schools or decisions about the siting of windfarms, for example—are vitally important, I think, in terms of maintaining the purity and integrity of our wonderful landscapes in mid Wales. I don’t like to see forests of windmills popping up on the hilltops and, of course, they’re deeply unpopular in the communities that have them plonked upon them. We don’t have to get into arguments about climate change and man-made global warming in order to advance this argument, because even if you accept the theories of man-made global warming, it must be obvious that the contribution that can be made to the solution of problems of climate change by having an extreme view of siting windfarms in inappropriate places—it makes no real contribution to the solution of the problem at all. But people’s lives are wrecked, and if we had some local means of control, then we would be able to block such decisions. So, it’s vitally important to us that we take proper cognisance of the special problems that exist in areas where we have sparse populations and difficult transport links, and we have the constitutional means of addressing them in the most efficient way. I believe that leaving the EU contributes to that process, although it’s not the be-all and end-all of the entire thing.

If we take fishing, for example—again, very important to us—Mid and West Wales has probably about 75 per cent of the coastline of Wales. The common fisheries policy has absolutely devastated the fishing industry in the whole United Kingdom. It’s been an ecological disaster as well, as we all know, with the policy of discards.

Will the Member give way?

I give way happily, yes.

I remember, a few years ago, going to visit the Welsh sea fishermen’s association, when, at one point, the Spanish—there was a big issue about the Spanish in Cornwall, and they were burning Spanish flags in Cornwall. I went to visit the sea fishermen’s association of Wales, which was led by one Mr Gonzalez. What had actually happened is that the Welsh fishermen had sold their quotas to the Spanish. So, to blame the EU for that, I think, is disingenuous.

Well, that, of course, is a distraction from the real issue: that, before 1973, the EU had no effective fishing waters and, as a result of our joining, the CFP was cobbled together in order that British waters could be plundered, the result of which has been that our fishing industry is now substantially smaller than it was 40 years ago. The number of fishermen is down by 40 per cent, the number of vessels is down by 28 per cent, and we’ve lived through an ecological disaster in the North sea and elsewhere, which is widely recognised.

I’m not going to take a second intervention, I’m sorry. [Interruption.] The Member can make her own speech, and I hope she does. But it does give us the opportunity to revive the Welsh fishing industry, and not just inshore fisheries, of course, which are not affected by the CFP, but to go further afield. I don’t think you’ll find many people involved in the fishing industry who think that the common fisheries policy has been the boon that some Members seem to think it is. The result has been industrialised fishing on a massive scale, which has put small fishermen out of business, and we’ll be able to make significant changes to that.

So, there are many reasons why we should support this motion, but as I said right at the start, this is all about bringing down decision making to the lowest possible level so that ordinary people can feel that they have a real role to play in the processes by which their lives are to be controlled and representative bodies such as this, elected by the people, ultimately bear the full responsibility for taking those decisions, and we are accountable to the people. That doesn’t happen at the moment.

Thank you very much. I have selected the two amendments to the motion. If amendment 1 is agreed, amendment 2 will be deselected. I call on Paul Davies to move amendment 1, tabled in his name.

I move the amendment tabled in my name. The decision by the people of Britain to leave the European Union last year will have a significant impact on rural communities across Wales, as well as the industries that are based on rural communities. As we all know, rural Wales is home to 33 per cent of the Welsh population and the vitality and future of those communities must be placed firmly on the agenda of the Welsh Government. It is therefore essential, as we leave the EU, that the powers to better support rural Wales are transferred directly to this Senedd.

I fully accept that there is a need to do much more work on the UK Government Bill that deals with exiting the European Union, so as to ensure that the existing powers of this place are safeguarded and that the responsibility for devolved matters entirely lies here and not elsewhere. Indeed, I hope that the intergovernmental negotiations that will take place to repatriate powers from Brussels will devolve greater powers to this place so as to provide better support to rural communities. This would confer even more resources and responsibilities on the Welsh Government, and as a result, the Government should bring forward policies that address the specific challenges facing rural Wales.

Of course, a central part of our rural communities is the agriculture sector, and as Britain leaves the European Union, the Welsh Government has an excellent opportunity to examine the current regulatory landscape for farmers and establish better ways of supporting farmers. Exiting the European Union means that we now have the opportunity to revamp the regulatory burdens for Welsh farmers to ensure that more voluntary means are adopted, and that when regulations are introduced, they are introduced because of clear evidence. It is absolutely essential that the level of support available to Welsh farmers puts them on a level playing field with their competitors, and that is why establishing a permanent agricultural framework on a British level is so important.

Of course, today’s debate is not only about the impact of Brexit on agriculture; it is also about the provision of services in rural areas. The Welsh Government must recognise that having one governance model for all of Wales is completely unacceptable, and that the needs of rural communities are very different from those of urban communities.

In my constituency, we have seen a number of important health services at the local hospital shut down and centralised, forcing patients to travel further for treatments and services. This is completely unacceptable and shows no regard whatsoever for the wishes and needs of those living in rural communities in west Wales. Even as we debate these issues this afternoon, Hywel Dda health board is again consulting on the removal of services in Pembrokeshire; in this case, it is seeking to centralise mental health services.

As Britain prepares to leave the EU, there is now an opportunity for the Welsh Government to pause and rethink the way it manages the delivery of services in rural areas. Unfortunately, since 1999, 227 schools across Wales have closed, with rural areas being worst affected. Government figures themselves tell us that 41 schools have been closed in north Wales since devolution. Although I accept the current Cabinet Secretary for Education is finally strengthening measures to protect schools, this will be of no comfort to those communities that have lost their schools and who have lost a vital community hub. These services provide a vital link for rural towns and villages, and they help to deliver much needed services, as well as tying communities together.

Members will be aware that we on this side of the Chamber are still calling for an independent panel to be set up, comprising representatives of rural communities and industries across Wales, which are much better placed to scrutinise the impact of Welsh Government policies on local environments, in order to ensure that Welsh Government policies do not negatively impact rural communities. I hope that the Government will now consider this. The Welsh Government must send a clear message to rural communities that they will have parity with urban parts of the country in terms of the development and funding of policies.

Today’s motion explains that Brexit could lead to significant opportunities for rural Wales, but it fails to recognise that there are significant challenges as well. The Welsh Government needs to better engage with rural Wales to meet those challenges. So, in closing, Presiding Officer, I wish to reiterate the importance of our rural communities, not only to our economy but also our culture. The Welsh language is is an integral part of our rural communities and our rural economy. For example, we know that agriculture has the highest proportion of Welsh speakers of any sector. Therefore, it is essential that the Welsh Government does much more to support our rural communities. The Government must use current and new levers to secure the future of our rural communities, and I urge Members to support our amendment.

Thank you very much, and I call on Simon Thomas to move amendment 2, tabled in the name of Rhun ap Iorwerth.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and I move the amendment. It is the end of term, but there’s no excuse for groundhog day once again. I have to say, we have been around these issues a number of times over the year and twice this week, so I will be very succinct and I won’t reiterate too much of what I said yesterday.

It is quite simple, Plaid Cymru is clearly of the view that the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, whatever the correct title in Welsh is, is a Bill that rolls back powers from Wales, from the people of Wales, the Assembly and the Parliament, which incorporates the sovereignty of Wales. Of course, I will have an entirely different perspective on this to UKIP. UKIP believes in the sovereignty of Westminster. UKIP believes in the sovereignty of the UK being over and above the sovereignty of the people of Wales. We as a party don’t accept that. We don’t accept that as the party for independence for Wales.

We also see this as an entirely cynical move by the Tory party—that they are using a vote in one referendum to overturn the decision that they didn’t like in another referendum. In 2011, there was a referendum result that wasn’t 52 to 48 per cent, but was 66 to 67 per cent, at least, in favour of this Parliament legislating in fisheries, agriculture, environment, health and education, and so on, too. The fact that this Bill now and the fact that the Conservative Government in Westminster now wishes to use the excuse of Brexit to hold the devolution process back is one of the most cynical things that I have seen recently, certainly since 2011. If there was any doubt—if there was any doubt—that the Conservatives weren’t willing to do this, and if we could join Neil Hamilton in believing the fine words of Theresa May, we saw just last night, with the trade union Bill, that it was the Conservatives’ intention to overturn any Bill passed here that they don’t agree with or aren’t content with. It is utterly antidemocratic and it clearly shows that they are using the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill in that same way.

I have listened very carefully, for over a year, to Neil Hamilton and I’ve been waiting for the florid rhetoric to disappear and for some ideas to be brought forward as to what the future of agriculture is after Brexit and after we have left the European Union—but not only the European Union, but according to his aspiration, the single market and the customs union too. So, what is the vision? I have seen nothing of that vision, just a pipe dream. That’s all I’ve seen.

Today, we were given some insight into that nightmare: the lands of Wales washed with chemicals, polluted, contaminated and totally overused. The only thing he’s proposed is the use of herbicide to kill ferns on our hillsides. There is not any sort of future for the marketing of lambs who eat on the hillside, no sort of future for the farmers who depend on suckler cows, and no sort of future for the farmers who depend on a market worth millions of pounds. It’s no sort of vision at all.

I can go to the Royal Welsh Show in Llanelwedd next week and speak with some sort of credibility, but I wish him luck if he tries to do that. I will stick to my views as an Assembly Member who represents the same region as him, but also as an Assembly Member for Plaid Cymru. We believe most strongly that we need to retain that relationship with the single market for farmers, retain that relationship with the customs union and, more importantly, that we need to safeguard the environment that we have—the clean environment that supports food of the highest quality and animal welfare of the highest standards. That is what is special about Wales and the Welsh language is part of that too. Anything that UKIP portrays here is going to destroy the nation as we know it, and I’m not content with that. That’s why we entirely reject the motion before us today in the name of UKIP and have put an alternative amendment in its place.

The last thing I will say is that we truly need to see the continuity Bill from the Government. It is too late in the day now to hope—as the First Minister said yesterday—that amendments will be tabled in Westminster. We cannot trust the Conservatives or Westminster on this. I know that in your hearts, Labour Members, you know that you can’t trust the Conservatives on this. So, bring forward a continuity Bill and stand up for the rights of the Welsh Parliament.

We’re bringing this debate today because we are interested—as, I expect, are all Members—in reviving the rural economy. We have related today’s motion to the subject of Brexit, not to needlessly cause a commotion in the Chamber on the last day of term, but rather to look at the opportunities that might flow from Brexit. Now, I know that we have had a few minor disagreements in this place over the pros and cons of Brexit, and we are still having a certain amount of cordial discussion here over what precise form Brexit will or should take. Well, I don’t want to go into the form of Brexit too much as that is, I feel, a debate we had yesterday—as Simon Thomas alluded to—to some extent, and one that we will probably resume once we get back here after the recess in September—and the debate will probably be going on for some time after that. What we perhaps can agree on is that some kind of Brexit is going to happen, so we need to think about what opportunities Brexit might offer us and how some of those opportunities can aid the rural community.

In addition to opportunities flowing from Brexit, there are also levers that already lie within the legal competence of the Assembly that can be used to help the rural economy. Also, there are powers that have recently flowed into, or are about to flow into, the Assembly due to tax raising competence. All of the parties that were represented in the Chamber in the fourth Assembly wanted the tax powers, so now is the time for us to think constructively about how to use them in terms of the rural economy.

One crucial element in all this is housing. I think if we want to retain rural settlements in their current form, we need to act decisively and precisely here. What we don’t particularly need is for rural settlements to lose their character by becoming mere dormitory towns for larger towns and cities; this is not a future we want to promote for them. We therefore need to be wary about unsympathetic large-scale housing developments, and about building on the green belt. Of course, we need rural housing, but it needs to be developed in a sympathetic way and in accordance with the wishes of the local population. With major developments, we think that local people should be meaningfully consulted. If there is a controversial development, then there should be scope for a legally binding local referendum. This means that, if there are enough signatories, a community could have a vote on a development, and the relevant planning authority would be legally obliged to take note and act accordingly. With such legally binding local referenda, the concept of localism would take some kind of meaningful form. There should also be an enhanced role for town and community councils in the planning process.

The other side of the coin is that we also need to stimulate building if the building plan has local consent. And we know that new measures, new levers, are available to the Assembly in the sphere of house building. One of the problems inhibiting house building is the problem of land banking. This is the process whereby a handful of major national property development companies build up land assets, acquire planning permission to build houses, and then simply sit on them, rather than actually building anything. But with the new tax powers available, land banking can be tackled by bringing in a series of charges: a system of land tax on land where planning permission has already been given, but where no houses have been built. This could begin after, say, three years, and then rise year on year until the first shovel cuts into the turf. Finance Minister Mark Drakeford has already hinted at action in this direction, and we in UKIP feel that we should be moving in this direction and the Welsh Government should be empowered to take this forward. In this instance, the powers are coming to the Assembly from Westminster in the form of tax raising competence. Other powers may devolve as a result of Brexit.

For instance, once we are out of the EU, we will no longer be governed by the EU’s procurement rules. Procurement is another lever that can be used to drive economic development. Public sector bodies in Wales must be encouraged, by statute if necessary, to award public sector contracts to local companies. This might entail making the tendering process easier. We need to look at the rules and regulations post Brexit and ensure that some irrelevant regulations are ditched so that smaller firms, which tend to proliferate in rural areas, are allowed to tender for contracts. It might be that we need to bring in clauses so that a certain number of public sector contracts are allocated to Welsh firms, particularly to Welsh small and medium-sized enterprises. This is another tool that might be used to aid the rural economy.

In the rural high street we need to encourage concepts like co-location, so that shops, pubs and, perhaps, post offices can all reside in the same place. We can also use powers over business rates to help rural businesses.

Post-Brexit fisheries policies could help to revive formerly thriving Welsh fishing ports. We have touched on that earlier, and I think this is an issue that possibly needs a debate of its own when we come back next September, but there are certainly opportunities there.

Another crucial factor is the availability of broadband in rural areas. We note that the Welsh Government has consistently missed its targets on the provision of superfast broadband in rural areas, so more needs to be done there.

Will you wind up, please?

Yes, certainly. All in all, there could be a more promising future for the Welsh rural economy, if only we see the coming years as a period that could bring with it some upheaval, certainly, but also a large element of opportunity. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Eluned Morgan.

Can I thank UKIP for yet another debate on Brexit? I’m afraid that as the resolution stands, it’s full of inaccuracies and, once again, demonstrates UKIP’s lack of awareness about how the EU actually works. It paints this idealistic utopian vision of the future in Wales for a land full of milk and honey, where those pesky outsiders can’t tell us what to do and they’ll stop ordering us about.

So, here we go: paragraph 1(a) stipulates that Welsh people will

have more control over their own lives’

and will stop those unelected EU technocrats from ruining everything. Well, that could be true—a woman alone in a desert has absolute total control over her life, but it’s not much value and it’s not much of a life. That’s the kind of control that Neil Hamilton would like to see in Wales.

With the publication of the repeal Bill, now called the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, we know that Welsh people will actually have a quieter voice than the one we had when we were allowed a seat at the table in a rotational system when agriculture and other devolved matters were discussed in Brussels.

What about this ridiculous line about ‘unelected technocrats in Brussels’? The Commission only has the power to propose laws. It’s the European Council—the elected Governments of the EU, overseen by elected Members of the European Parliament—who decide if these laws pass. To be fair, he probably isn’t aware of that, because a lot of the UKIP MEPs don’t even bother to turn up to those committees where those decisions are made.

Right, let’s move on to paragraph 1(b): Brexit will ‘create more prosperity for agriculture’ and the rural community. Well, I’d love to think that that was true, but he must know that of all the sectors in the economy where it’ll be difficult to gain tariff-free frictionless access to the EU market, it’s agriculture that is the most exposed—not even Norway has this kind of access. You know what, you can throw as many subsidies as you want at farmers, but if they have no market for their goods, it’ll be game over if they face anything like World Trade Organization tariffs of 84 per cent for cattle and 46 per cent for lamb. He suggests that we’ll be able to expand into our home market—not if we see a flood of food from Argentina, New Zealand and all these other places he wants to have deals with.

Just as an aside, the Tories are suggesting that they’re going to be able to cut red tape. Really? Do you not understand anything about the customs union? You have to fill in more forms—country of origin forms. That’s your suggestion.

On paragraph 2, empowering local people to make policies in rural areas, perhaps the leader of UKIP might like to read my proposed economic development plan for rural Wales, where we called for that bottom-up approach to economic development. He says that major planning decisions should be decided upon locally, in particular relating to windfarms. But, it must be understood that, for example, in mid Wales, with the development of a reinforced electricity grid to host the windfarms—where that was proposed and effectively rejected by the local population—there are real consequences to these decisions, as the First Minister outlined to Russell George yesterday. There’s no point bleating on about wanting an industrial estate to create jobs if you can’t get power into the area. I think people need to think hard about how they’re going to get around in future when there’s this shift to electric vehicles, but there won’t be enough electricity to charge those electric vehicles in mid Wales.

On paragraph (b), rural schools, the education Secretary has made it clear that she will put measures in place to protect small rural schools.

On paragraph (c), of course there’s a need to facilitate more affordable rural houses, but, having spoken recently to private housebuilders, who tell me that it’s simply not economically viable for them to construct in parts of rural Wales, we need to get a much better grasp of how the market works in rural Wales. The answers aren’t straightforward; they’re complex.

On paragraph (d), giving greater priority to the provision of NHS facilities in smaller rural towns, of course, it seems like a really easy statement to support, but I invite Mr Hamilton to try and find a paediatric consultant to come and work in Withybush hospital, or a GP to become a partner in St David’s Surgery. I am sure that the local health board will bite your hand off if you can find somebody.

Do you accept that one of the reasons why we don’t have sufficient numbers of GPs, consultants, or other health professionals is because of an abject failure by your Welsh Government to properly plan for the Welsh workforce that the NHS actually needs?

No. Do you know what I—? [Interruption.] Do you know what I—? [Interruption.] I’ll tell you what—. [Interruption.] Let me tell you. Let me tell you. The situation is worse now because of the kind of messages that have been sent out by people like Neil Hamilton and his ilk to those people who are supporting our NHS, who are supporting our care workers. They are people who are here from the EU, and they feel now that they are unwelcome because of Mr Hamilton and his ilk.

I think this resolution is typical of UKIP—full of glib, easy answers in a very sophisticated and complex world. They’ve made promises they can’t keep, and they won’t be kept. They have led the people of Wales and the United Kingdom up the garden path, and I predict that he will be safely miles away from Wales in his lovely house in Wiltshire if we fail to gain the promised agreements he’s made when the whole edifice comes crashing down—if we fail to get the kind of agreements that he predicts are so easy to get.

Thank you very much. I now call on the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government, Mark Drakeford.

Diolch yn fawr, Dirprwy Lywydd. Well, yesterday I heard the leader of UKIP refer to soldiers emerging from the jungle to refight battles already long concluded. I assumed he was referring to today’s motion with its sad and tired derogatory opening references to unelected technocrats in Brussels. Does anyone really believe that cheap name-calling can form the basis of a successful negotiation with 27 other European countries? Does anyone really believe that abuse can form the platform from which we can build a successful future for Wales beyond the European Union?

Now, Dirprwy Lywydd, it’s not a message that the movers of this motion are keen to hear, but it is a simple fact that Wales’s receipts from the CAP and from structural funds form a far larger proportion of the UK’s allocation than our Barnett share would ever do. The EU funding for the rural development programme alone is worth around £500 million in the current round, and was worth over £300 million in the previous round, and it has made a real difference to people and communities across Wales. Along with EU structural funds, these have provided hugely useful services and vital incomes to many in our rural communities.

Now, as Eluned Morgan so ably illustrated, this is a motion written by Pollyanna with a dash of help from Mr Micawber. It’s ironic indeed to be debating it today, the day after the publication of an authoritative report that I recommended to UKIP Members, ‘A Food Brexit: time to get real’. And this report, written by Professor Tim Lang, the leading food expert in the United Kingdom, together with Professor Terry Marsden from Cardiff University, concludes that leaving the European Union poses serious risks to consumer interests, public health, businesses and workers in the food sector.

But the motion is not simply flawed in its failure to grasp the reality of its own content, but in its culpable neglect of a context within which the future of Welsh communities and industries is to be shaped. It does not even, Dirprwy Lywydd, call on the UK Government to guarantee replacement funding for Wales at its current level, let alone those promises of a post-Brexit funding bonanza made by the movers of the motion. The motion does not even call on the UK Government to respect the boundaries of devolution so that this National Assembly can continue to respond to the particular needs of rural communities in Wales, and this at a time when those abilities are under such direct attack. Dirprwy Lywydd, it is difficult to take a motion seriously that does so little to take things seriously itself.

By contrast, this Government both continues to make it clear that the UK Government and those who led the campaign to leave the European Union must guarantee that every single penny that flows to Wales from the European Union must flow directly to Wales in the future and, in our recent ‘Brexit and Devolution’ policy document, we set out our thinking on how new constitutional arrangements can be developed. It is intended as a constructive contribution to the important debate needed across the United Kingdom and which is particularly important in rural areas. We will continue to press the UK Government to engage in a discussion on using this document as a starting point for developing any frameworks that are needed post Brexit on the basis of consent and agreement and not on imposition.

Dirprwy Lywydd, the messages we have from stakeholders in rural Wales are very clear: here in Wales, agriculture is not only very different in nature from other parts of the United Kingdom, but so is the role it plays in our communities and in our society, from the management of our water to tourism, and, as Paul Davies set out very clearly in his contribution, in the future of our culture and our language as well. We need to build on Wales’s reputation for high-quality produce, which is founded on our high standards that protect human health, ensure animal welfare, and support vital environmental action. These standards are the key for our future competitiveness in a global marketplace, and there are opportunities there for farmers to diversify and exploit growing markets in areas like energy.

Now, let us be clear, Dirprwy Lywydd, that the approach the UK Government has taken to the withdrawal Bill would see us lose the ability to deliver an approach that rectifies the shortcomings of the CAP and design a better, more tailored approach for Wales. Instead, on the one hand, the withdrawal Bill locks us into an outdated framework and, on the other, it removes our ability to bring forward reforms, leaving us to face Brexit with both hands tied behind our back.

Now, I listened carefully to what Paul Davies said when he spoke about the withdrawal Bill, and I take what he said this afternoon to be a constructive contribution to the way that we can think about these issues in the future—very different, I thought, to the contribution of the mover of the motion who, with typical insouciance, just regards the withdrawal Bill as something that none of us here need to worry our heads about. As we have said, this Government has been clear that we acknowledge the need for common UK approaches in some areas of agriculture, particularly where this is important for trade and for the internal functioning of the UK market, but these must be collectively developed and agreed to ensure that they work for the whole of the United Kingdom, and not imposed on us from London.

These are the important issues at stake for Welsh communities today. It is why, Dirprwy Lywydd, the Government will oppose the motion itself but support the amendment proposed by Plaid Cymru and explained so very clearly here this afternoon by Simon Thomas.

Let me very briefly turn to some specifics of the motion, Dirprwy Lywydd, to put on record the actions being taken by this Government to support all rural communities. As far as planning is concerned, we have developed our national planning policy to take account of local needs in rural areas and, in particular, to address issues around the potential for greater use of our rural areas to generate renewable energy, while addressing issues around visual impacts and amenity on neighbouring communities. Where housing is concerned, bringing forward more affordable housing in rural areas is a priority for the Welsh Government, which is why we commit to providing funding for rural housing enablers in ‘Taking Wales Forward’, and we have already seen successful projects across Wales, including Gwynedd, Ceredigion, Monmouthshire, and the Vale of Glamorgan. We will continue to fund and work with rural local authorities, housing associations, and the rural housing enablers to ensure more affordable housing is delivered in areas of real need.

You heard already from Eluned Morgan how the education Cabinet Secretary is supporting rural schools and allowing communities to have greater scope for decision making in relation to those schools, consulting recently on strengthening the school organisation code in respect of presumption against the closure of rural schools. In health, my colleague the Cabinet Secretary for health continues to work closely with rural areas to tackle the very real issues that are faced by services in remote and rural areas, and the challenges that Eluned Morgan set out in recruiting staff to work in those localities.

Dirprwy Lywydd, let me be clear that we are addressing the specific needs of public services across rural Wales. It’s clear that the benefits of the European Union, particularly through single market access, high social and environmental standards, and significant levels of funding, cannot be easily maintained after we leave the European Union, and that there are big challenges for rural Wales. We will work with our rural communities to help them to face those together.

By contrast, the only contribution to Welsh agriculture from the movers of the motion here will be the industrial-scale manufacturing of pie in the sky, but if the future was left to them then the taste of that pie for people in rural Wales will be very bitter indeed.

Thank you very much. I call on Neil Hamilton to reply to the debate.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I enjoyed the colourful speech from the finance Secretary, but I don’t think it took us a great deal further forward in this debate. What surprises me about Plaid Cymru is that, as a nationalist party, they are afraid of having decision taking devolved from Brussels to Cardiff. I would have thought the first thing that a nationalist party would want is the power to take their own decisions and make the laws that govern their country, and so Plaid Cymru puts itself in the opposite camp: they’re opposed to the principles of nationalism as they apply in our own country.

I, personally, am not afraid of having the responsibility that goes with the devolution of power in this respect, because, generally speaking, decisions are better made at a local level than further up, especially if they’re made further up by unelected technocrats, which was not put into the motion as a term of abuse at all, but merely a statement of fact. The Commission of the European Union is appointed, and the decision-making processes in the European Union are obscure. I’ve been a member of the Council of Ministers: I was the internal market—[Interruption.] I was the internal market Minister in the Department of Trade and Industry 25 years ago. I’ve seen the way the processes work. They’re very far from being democratic and they’re very, very difficult to influence. So, I think that, as a consequence of being able to take decisions at a local level, democracy is enhanced and people will not feel so alienated from the political system.

I thank all those who’ve taken part in the debate and, indeed, Paul Davies’s contribution contained a great deal of good sense, in particular his proposal for a scrutiny panel for rural areas in Wales and the fact that a one-size-fits-all-policy, applied by the Welsh Government, doesn’t necessarily suit rural areas in Wales.

I know Eluned Morgan goes around carrying that sign saying ‘the end of the world is nigh’, and her contribution today was no different from usual, talking about the desertification of mid Wales as a result of leaving the EU. She keeps talking about falling off a cliff. Actually, the worst we can do is fall off a kerb, because only 7 per cent of our GDP is accounted for by trade with the EU, but, of course, I don’t believe that there’s any reason for that to fall subsequently.

Yes, there will be difficulties in the process of negotiation, and there are uncertainties in the future, but I, personally, believe in our people, in the enterprise of this country and our capacity to make our way in the world as we always have done, by our own efforts and our own ingenuity.

Thank you very much. The proposal is to agree the motion without amendment. Does any Member object? [Objection.] Therefore, we’ll defer voting under this item until voting time.

Unless three Members wish for the bell to be rung, I am going to proceed directly to the voting time.

I call for a vote on the motion tabled in the name of Neil Hamilton. If the proposal is not agreed, we will vote on the amendments tabled to the motion. Open the vote. Close the vote. For the motion five, no abstentions, 46 against. Therefore, the motion is not agreed.

We now go to vote on the amendments. If amendment 1 is agreed, amendment 2 will be deselected. So, I call for a vote on amendment 1, tabled in the name of Paul Davies. Open the vote. Close the vote. For the motion 12, no abstentions, 39 against. Therefore, amendment 1 is not agreed.

I call for a vote on amendment 2, tabled in the name of Rhun ap Iorwerth. Open the vote. Close the vote. For the amendment 35, no abstentions, 16 against. Therefore, amendment 2 is agreed.

I now call for a vote on the motion as amended.

Open the vote. Close the vote. For the motion 35, no abstentions, 16 against. Therefore, the motion as amended is agreed.

We now move on to the short debate, and I call on—[Interruption.] We’ll wait a minute. If you’re leaving the Chamber, please do so quickly and quietly. Thank you.

Right, we’ll now move to the short debate, and I call on Darren Millar to speak to the topic he has chosen. Darren.

Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. I want to confirm that I’ve given Simon Thomas, Jenny Rathbone and Joyce Watson a minute each of my time.

This week is Gamble Aware Week. It’s seven days when betting shops across the country are spreading the message to not bet more than you can afford to lose, but I’m afraid that their message is just not hitting home. Thanks to poor public policy decisions from successive Governments of all colours, gambling has never been easier than it is today. No longer are you required to venture into a local betting shop to take a punt, you can now bet on the telephone, via a computer, a mobile phone or even your smart tv. And with almost 400 betting shops and around 1,500 fixed-odds betting terminals in Wales, it’s easy to see how people can quickly get sucked into a gambling spiral that gets out of control.

Gambling, of course, is nothing new. It’s been around for a very long time. But excessive gambling is on the rise, and Wales seems to have a bigger problem with it than other parts of the United Kingdom. In fact, the figures are stark. Gambling Commission surveys have estimated that around 1.1 per cent of the Welsh population are problem gamblers, around 34,000 people, with an additional 118,000 at risk of becoming problem gamblers. You’re more than twice as likely to be a problem gambler if you live in Wales than in England, and a third more likely than if you live in Scotland.

It’s estimated that more than £1.6 billion is staked annually on fixed-odds betting terminals alone, and that’s more than an average of £1 million per machine here in Wales, around £675 per head of the adult Welsh population. It really is eye-watering. And, of course, these machines are so quick that it’s absolutely possible to bet around £100 every 20 seconds. Research, in fact, has shown that it’s every bit as addictive as a class A drug, and it’s no wonder that they’ve been called the crack cocaine of gambling.

What’s even more concerning, though, is that there’s a growing body of evidence that indicates that unscrupulous businesses are locating these machines in deprived areas. More than a third of betting shops with these machines are in the poorest communities across Wales. These are the areas where there’s underinvestment and high unemployment, and making a quick bet and a big win, no matter what the odds, seems an attractive prospect. But the people placing these stakes are very often the ones who can ill afford to lose them. But we know that gambling is not a route out of poverty. In fact, it’s route to breakdown—relationship breakdown, health breakdown and financial breakdown. Thanks to our digital age, even after the betting shops close and the casinos have closed, gamblers can still continue to take their chances online. Online gambling isolates and hides gambling addiction, but it’s also on the increase. More and more people are gambling behind closed doors and in secret. It’s gambling that is happening all around us constantly. Slots can be played in meetings, they can be played in the school car park while waiting to pick the children up from school, and they can even be played on shift breaks. It makes it harder to know about those people who need help and for others to be able to reach out to them before it turns into a crisis.

Some, of course, are underage gamblers. We know from the Gambling Commission that the people most at risk of problem gambling are those between the ages of 16 and 24. People with their whole lives ahead of them are in danger of losing everything. The Gambling Commission’s ‘Young People and Gambling 2016’ report suggests that there are hundreds of child problem gamblers here in Wales, and if you combine that with the fact that 65 per cent of teenagers under 18 have already admitted addiction to their mobile phones, I think it’s very clear to see that there’s a very real public health crisis, which is brewing and playing itself out in young people’s pockets right now.

Often, the money used to gamble is taken out on credit. Many gambling addicts are caught in the catch-22 situation of escalating debt, which they then try to repay through gambling more. Life savings are being wiped out, and credit card limits are being exceeded. Gambling is no respecter of persons. It can affect people from any part of the social stratum and all walks of life, but don’t just take my word for it. I want us to take a few moments to look at the screens to listen to some of the experiences of Sarah and Joseph here in Wales.

So, you can see. We’ve heard from Sarah and Joseph. Gambling isn’t a game, it’s a very real problem. They’re paying a high price for it, and they’re not the only ones. You may have heard about Cardiff postal worker Colin Chapman, who was arrested just last week for stealing parcels worth £40,000 in order to fund his gambling addiction. Or you might even remember Willie Thorne, the former UK snooker champion who went bankrupt after gambling away more than £1 million, but, of course, it’s not just money that’s being lost. People are losing their homes, they’re losing their marriages, they’re losing their health from stress, and they’re losing their place and purpose in society. And, I’m afraid, some have even lost their lives.

On 31 March last year, 18-year-old Omair Abbas from Cardiff put on his work uniform and he said goodbye to his parents and left home, but, unfortunately, it wasn’t a day like any other. Fewer than two weeks later, he was found dead. He’d taken his own life after struggling with thousands of pounds-worth of debt. He’d maxed out his overdraft, he’d taken out credit on his credit cards, and even though he’d confided in close friends that he was depressed and had occasionally thought of taking his own life, unfortunately they were unable to prevent it from happening. I think his story, his death, should be a wake-up call to us all.

Excessive gambling is trapping people into an addictive cycle of losing and winning and losing and losing and losing. As we’ve heard, it can lead to incredibly tough emotional, financial and mental health problems. But the majority of addicts struggle in silence. Many people who struggle with gambling don’t reach out for help until they’ve hit crisis point, and recent research suggests that just one in 10 people with gambling problems actually do seek formal help. But, unfortunately, all too often the help that they need isn’t always available to them.

Now, thankfully, people are beginning to wake up to this public health time bomb, and I was very pleased to hear, from the chief medical officer at the recent Beat the Odds conference, that there is some work that he’s been doing on this subject. We were also hearing, of course, about the excellent work of the Living Room, here in Cardiff, and North Wales-based CAIS, which are helping to raise awareness of problem-gambling and helping to develop services to support addicts, and it’s beginning now, I think, to pay some dividends. The Living Room and CAIS, of course, organise the annual Beat the Odds conference—the Excessive Gambling Wales conference, which is held here in Cardiff, in the Pierhead, and it’s been invaluable in bringing academics, policy makers, public health experts and service providers together to examine the challenges presented by this problem and to work towards solutions. It’s helped dozens of gambling addicts so far, and it’s pioneered and developed new programmes that have helped addicts to turn their lives around. Of course, I mustn’t forget either to acknowledge the excellent work that has been undertaken by Carolyn Harris and the all-party parliamentary group on gambling also.

GambleAware, GamCare, Beat the Odds, the Living Room, CAIS—they’re all doing their bit, but there’s still a huge amount of work to do. So, what can we do? Well, we need to restrict gambling advertising. It’s wrong that every time you click on to Google or you turn on your tv, there’s an advert encouraging you to gamble. We need to change the planning system here in Wales to prevent the proliferation of betting shops in our communities and to stop further fixed-odds betting terminals turning up in our communities. We need greater recognition of the public health risks of problem gambling and significant investment in recovery services such as those provided by Beat the Odds, and we need to take immediate and urgent action to reduce the maximum stake on fixed-odds betting terminals and reduce the number of them across the country. Now, I recognise that some of the powers to do and deliver those things lie in Westminster, but that doesn’t stop us doing our bit with the powers that we’ve already got, such as changing the planning system and developing those universally accessible support services from being delivered.

The stakes are too high to ignore this problem any longer. Gambling is destroying lives. It can affect anyone anywhere at any time, and our young people are particularly vulnerable. So, instead of reading about crises that have happened, I think we all need to work harder to prevent them from becoming a news item in the first place. We owe it to Omair, Sarah, Joseph and the thousands of others in Wales who are victims of gambling addiction, to address this growing problem, and we must act now.

I thank Darren Millar for bringing this debate today. We would not tolerate the promotion of addictive substances such as alcohol and tobacco in modern society the way we have tolerated, due to the lack of regulation, gambling, and we must treat gambling as an addictive pastime in that sense. We’re not talking about banning, we’re talking about regulation and we’re talking about a real approach. I look forward to hearing from the Government—if not today, very soon—how they will use the limited powers they get over fixed-odds terminals to try and address and set the right tone. Because one thing we can do here is set the tone of debate and the tone and approach on gambling, rather than this acceptance that we have at the moment in modern society that gambling is somehow a normal thing to do and something that particularly is rewarded with an element of glamour around it, which I think is particularly concerning. We don’t have Welsh figures, but Living Room Cardiff estimates that there are 114,000 people at risk in Wales, and excessive gamblers, those who have a real gambling disorder, number 12,000. This is a serious medical and social problem that I hope we can address.

Finally, if I may say so, I’d like to thank Wynford Ellis Owen for his work. He’s retiring this week.

Diolch yn fawr iddo fe am y gwaith y mae e wedi’i wneud yn y maes yma.

I’d just like to pay tribute to Wynford Ellis Owen, whose life was nearly completely wrecked by prescription drugs and alcohol. He used that insight into what addiction involves and the lengths that people will go to to promote the cause of the need to tackle addiction in gambling. So, I think it’s really important that we respond to the work that has been done by Wynford Ellis Owen and others by ensuring that we bear down on addiction, which is absolutely wrecking people’s lives. I’ve met constituents who’ve gambled away the proceeds of two houses and a private business, who cannot even dare to get the bus into town because they know that they will stop off at one of these fixed-odds betting terminals.

I think we must change the planning laws so that the presumption where there is an application for yet another betting business—that the presumption will be on refusal, unless we can prove, or it can prove, that it will do no harm. That is my big ask to the Minister today.

I’d like to thank Darren for giving me time to speak in what is a really, really important debate. The issue of gambling that I want to focus on is football games. I am a huge football fan and I’ve noticed recently that I cannot watch a football game without being bombarded on the tv in my sitting room to bet on the next outcome—whether somebody’s going to score a goal, whether it’s with the right foot or left foot, it doesn’t really matter. The point is it is absolutely aimed at the age group that you have just identified as those having the worst problem, or the most significant problem, with gambling. It is invasive, and I think that when we look at preventing gambling, we need to also look at preventing it happening on our tv screens when we’re actually trying to promote a healthy style of living—that is, taking part in sport—and it is completely ruined by offering an alternative addiction that people will find virtually impossible to get out of.

Thank you very much. I call on the Minister for Social Services and Public Health to reply to this debate. Rebecca Evans.

I’d like to thank Darren Millar for bringing forward this debate today and all Members for their valuable contributions. I’m really pleased to see that there is cross-party support for addressing the issue of problem gambling in Wales. Whilst we know that many people participate in gambling activities without any apparent problems, we also know that for some people gambling becomes an addiction that leads to harmful health and social impacts. I think Darren has shared with us some very powerful stories today—the stories of Sarah, Joseph, Omair and others.

Whilst the prevalence of problematic gambling is low, the health and social impact is significant, and it disproportionately affects more disadvantaged people, who are five times more likely to develop problem gambling. The impact of gambling on individuals includes the inability to function at work, and financial problems that can lead to homelessness. The harm from gambling to the wider society includes fraud, theft, loss of productivity in the workforce and the cost of treating this addiction.

It’s estimated that for every person with a gambling problem a further six to 13 people will be affected and this can include family members, friends and work colleagues. I can assure you that, as a Government, we are working across portfolios to identify the actions that we can take to reduce the prevalence of problem gambling and limit the impact it has on the health of people in Wales and on wider society.

Although the regulation and licensing for gambling is not devolved to Wales, the Wales Act does provide for Welsh Ministers and the Assembly to have new powers in relation to fixed-odds betting terminals, and we’ll be exploring this further from April 2018 when we expect the full provisions of the Act to commence.

The Welsh Government’s national planning policy seeks to sustain and enhance vibrancy—

Will you take an intervention?

Yes, of course.

We know that this responsibility is coming to the Assembly as of next year. I hope the Government aren’t waiting to do some of the preparatory work that might be required to put the safeguards in place when there seems to be a consensus around this Chamber. As I said, we know the scope of the responsibilities that we’ll be inheriting come April next year, so can you confirm that the Government is undertaking that preparatory work so that you can hit the ground running when you do get those responsibilities?

I think my statement there was probably poorly worded, because I do reassure you that Government is looking across all of our portfolios in terms of what we can be doing, as I said, to prevent people becoming addicted to gambling in the first place and then to lessen the impact that it might have.

The Welsh Government has a planning policy seeking to sustain and enhance the vibrancy, viability and attractiveness of our established retail and commercial centres, and the effects of problem gambling on health or crime and disorder are material considerations at a local planning authority level, where they may take into account these issues when determining a planning application.

The Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Rural Affairs has already said that she’s reviewing the permitted development granted through use classes and will consult on the proposed changes later this year, and that review is considering whether changes are needed to prevent the overconcentration of betting shops. Like others, I look forward to receiving the outcome of that review.

Public Health Wales has commissioned research to map out all of the gambling venues across Wales and this work will include a visual heat map showing the density of gambling venues geographically. That will enable us to highlight the areas where gambling venues are concentrated and will aid our thinking and discussion on this issue.

In general, there is no medical intervention for gambling, but in some cases psychological interventions can help to support an individual to change their behaviour. In ‘Together for Mental Health’ we have agreed a plan with the NHS to expand psychological therapy services for both adults and children, and we’ve provided an additional £4 million a year to support the delivery of this plan.

Although patients can discuss anything with their GP, for those affected by a pathological or problematic gambling addiction, there are also services such as Gamblers Anonymous or GamCare, which can provide information and support, and we’ve heard from Members about other work, such as the Living Room, CAIS, Beat the Odds and so on.

Other organisations also provide information and advice, including the citizens advice bureaux. The bureau in Newport is undertaking some work to support gambling related harm. It’s funded by Gamble Aware, and they are delivering gambling harm minimisation projects in Wales, aiming to tackle gambling-related harm at its root through education and awareness, working particularly with young people and other vulnerable groups.

Online gambling is of particular concern. Gambling is now more accessible, as we’ve heard, than it’s ever been before—24 hour access available at home, at work, while picking up children from school, and even whilst commuting on your mobile phones. Gambling online has increased significantly between 2008 and 2014, from 9.7 per cent of the population to 15.4 per cent of the population. This is one of the reasons why our chief medical officer is very clear that we should be looking at gambling, or problematic gambling, as an emerging public health issue.

We need to take the new opportunities for action provided by the Public Health (Wales) Act 2017. This will help embed health and well-being in all policies and programmes, and we’ll be consulting on the circumstances in which health impact assessments should be undertaken by public bodies. Comments will be very welcome on how these assessments can address the whole wide range of issues, but also including problematic gambling.

In undertaking such assessments, we have to also recognise that the gambling industry offers employment and leisure opportunities, along with other social and economic benefits. In 2015, there were 3,500 people employed in the gambling and betting industry in Wales, around 0.3 per cent of total employment.

So, I’m therefore keen that we do have a thorough analysis of this issue, and I’m very pleased that the chief medical officer is leading on the work on the harms caused by gambling as part of the development of his annual report, and I look forward, as others will, to seeing his initial recommendations later on this year.

I also welcome the opportunity to have further dialogue and engagement with the Gambling Commission on the issue of problem gambling in Wales when they host their stakeholder reception here at the Senedd in September. That will provide Ministers and other Assembly Members with the opportunity to discuss issues relating to the gambling industry and, in particular, the issues of problem gambling.

It’s clear from all the contributions that we’ve had in the debate today—and I would say also in recent times in the Chamber in First Minister’s questions and on other occasions—that we do agree that we must work together and across portfolios. And it’s clearly not an issue that the NHS can tackle alone. We recognise there’s a real opportunity for other areas of public service, such as education, local government and the third sector to take a leadership role in helping to reduce the number of people experiencing problem gambling. Such a multi-partner approach has real potential to reduce the prevalence of problem gambling and the impact it has on the health of the people of Wales and our wider society. And as part of this work, we will continue to urge the UK Government to do more that it can to tackle the concerns and to maximise the various options that lie within its gift to address the issue of problem gambling. Thank you.

Thank you very much. That brings today’s proceedings to a close. Thank you.