Category Archives: Welsh Affairs Committee

Ill-tempered outburst

Posted on April 4, 2009 | 3 Comments

elis_thomasI say it with sadness, but it is now very clear that Lord Elis-Thomas, the presiding officer of the Welsh Assembly, is  deliberately acting as a roadblock to the development of a more mature relationship between the Assembly and Westminster.

At the Welsh Conservative party conference in Cardiff last weekend, David Cameron, Cheryl Gillan and I made announcements of Conservative plans to move the devolution settlement onward.

Cheryl announced that Wales Office ministers would visit the Assembly to take questions on the floor of the chamber on three additional occasions every year.  At present, the Secretary of State visits only once.

I made the announcement of a new committee of Welsh and English MPs, who will report to the Secretary of State on any problems with the delivery of cross-border services, now one of the principal causes of dissatisfaction with the settlement; the neurosurgery episode was a prime example of this.  The committee’s work will assist the Secretary of State in performing her important role of acting as a bridge between Westminster and Cardiff Bay and should result in the better delivery of services to the citizen.

David Cameron announced that, as Prime Minister, he would visit the Assembly once every year to take questions “on any subject from Wales to the wider world”. 

The announcement was a mark of respect to the Assembly on David Cameron’s part, recognising it as an important British political institution, and has been generally well received; except, predictably enough, by Lord Elis -Thomas.

For months now, Dafydd Elis-Thomas has been using his platform as presiding officer, which one might have thought would constrain him to observe the utmost political neutrality, to snipe at Westminster institutions and Members of Parliament.  The Welsh select committee has been a particular target for his criticism.

Now David Cameron has incurred Elis-Thomas’s very public wrath. The presiding officer  has, in remarkably bad-tempered terms, attacked David Cameron’s polite and respectful offer as “preposterous”:

“It’s our own First Minister who answers questions here and the relationship is between the UK Government and the Welsh Government. It isn’t between the Prime Minister and the Assembly.

“That’s demeaning to our National Assembly and turns it into some kind of Grand Committee (of the House of Commons) equivalent…

“The idea that the Prime Minister of the UK can breeze in for a Q&A isn’t allowed under our standing orders and I have no intention of changing it.

“He is the first minister of another Government in terms of our constitution. I would think if those people were serious they would have looked at the constitution. It smacks a bit of paternal unionism.”

No statement could make it clearer that Lord Elis-Thomas, notwithstanding his position as presiding officer of the Assembly, is egregiously seeking  to advance his personal political goal of an independent Wales and to distance the Assembly from Westminster.  It is not, with respect, up to him to decide whether the standing orders should be changed; it is up to the Assembly as a whole. 

Section 32 of the Government of Wales Act clearly contemplates the participation of ministers other than the Secretary of State in Assembly proceedings:

(3) The standing orders may make provision for-

(a) the participation of the Secretary of State for Wales in proceedings of any committee of the Assembly, or any sub-committee of any such committee, and

(b) the participation in any Assembly proceedings of other Ministers of the Crown and of persons serving in the department of the Secretary of State for Wales or of any other Minister of the Crown.

So all that is required for David Cameron to make his annual visit to the Assembly is a simple change in standing orders.  Given that the majority of Assembly members represent unionist parties, which are supported by the majority of the Welsh people, it is inconceivable that they would display the sort of political immaturity that Lord Elis-Thomas has shown by his ill-tempered outburst. 

I have no doubt that they would welcome David Cameron’s annual visit as a visible, tangible token of the maturing relationship between Westminster and Cardiff Bay. 

And if Dafydd Elis-Thomas, as presiding officer, wants to stand in the way of that process, it is a very sad state of affairs indeed.

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Cheryl Gillan, Dafydd Elis-Thomas, David Cameron, Welsh Affairs Committee

Tagged

Opposite sides of the planet

Posted on March 28, 2009 | Leave a comment

In Cardiff, for the Welsh Conservative party conference, which is being held at the Swalec cricket stadium.

I drove down from North Wales yesterday afternoon, through a sunny spring landscape of greening hedgerows, lamb-filled fields and verges of jostling daffodils.  

Idyllic countryside, but the journey took over four hours, as it always does, and that in a small, agile, reasonably powerful car.  Imagine, I pondered, how much longer this would take in an ambulance.  And how uncomfortable it would be in the back of that ambulance.  Particularly if you needed a brain operation. 

Almost two years have passed since the Welsh health minister, Edwina Hart, made the spectacularly silly announcement that she intended to divert all elective neurosurgery generated in Wales to hospitals in Cardiff and Swansea.  The plan caused outrage in North Wales, followed by a high-profile campaign, including a gratifyingly well-attended public meeting at Colwyn Bay.  Mrs Hart went into reverse thrust, and, after commissioning the usual inquiry, concluded that North Wales patients should continue to be treated at the Walton centre in Liverpool. 

Yesterday, the Welsh select committee published an important report on the issue of cross-border health provision.  I’d urge everyone interested in this important issue to read it.  It is highly critical of the absence of coordination between the Welsh Assembly Government and the Department of Health.  It speaks of longer waiting times for Welsh patients seeking treatment in English hospitals, which are not paid for treating Welsh patients at the same rate as English patients.  

It talks of the Welsh NHS putting up “bureaucratic barriers which stand in the way of patient needs being met swiftly and efficiently” and concludes: 

It is unacceptable that individual providers and commissioners have been left to negotiate ad hoc solutions to problems caused by government-level decisions, apparently taken without regard for their impact on crossborder commissioning. Even where local arrangements work well, patients should not have to rely on the good will of those involved to ensure that their health care pathways are coherent. A solution must involve a sustainable and enforceable long-term agreement between the relevant Ministers and Departments so that future disputes will be avoided. The key test must be whether all parties demonstrably have as their highest priority the need to secure the best possible service for patients. 

The lack of coordination of policy between Whitehall and Cathays Park does not end with healthcare.  The select committee has noted similar problems in education, and only this week we heard from the Welsh transport minister, Ieuan Wyn Jones, that the “all Wales” freight transport strategy is not coordinated with policy in England.  This is a bit odd, given that it is there that most freight journeys in Wales either start or finish. 

Over the years, devolution has resulted in inevitable divergence of policy between Cardiff and London.  This is understandable, but it should not impede the efficient delivery of public services, which is what is happening at the moment.  Administrations at either end of the M4 sometimes behave as if Wales and England are on opposite sides if the planet. 

This problem needs to be tackled before it gets any worse, and that is what the next Conservative government will do.  I’ll be speaking about this at the conference this afternoon.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Edwina Hart, neurosurgery, Welsh Affairs Committee, Welsh Assembly Government

Tagged

Fashion notes

Posted on March 24, 2009 | Leave a comment

desperate-danThe Welsh select committee today heard evidence from the Legal Services Commission on the issue of the downgrading of their Cardiff office, following reorganisation.  The committee was not best pleased to hear that neither the commission nor the Ministry of Justice, to which it is answerable, had thought to discuss the proposal with the Wales Office. 

The commission officials were accompanied by Lord Bach, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, who apologised in fulsome terms for the omission and assured the committee that the Ministry had (inevitably) “learned the lessons”.  Blessedly, he didn’t add that they were now moving on. 

I was somewhat distracted by the Minister’s socks.  They bore a cartoon design – an interesting choice for a select committee appearance – and a slogan that I couldn’t read without getting closer to the noble Lord than either he or I would have liked. 

I wouldn’t swear to it, but it looked very much like Desperate Dan, which was perhaps appropriate in the circumstances.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Welsh Affairs Committee

Tagged

So irritating

Posted on March 19, 2009 | 5 Comments

Speaking of language (which is probably the most appropriate thing to do with it, really), I wonder if readers have also noticed the increasingly prevalent  use of the word “so” at the beginning of a sentence. 

This new grammatical quirk came to my attention only about twelve months ago, but since then it seems to have become more frequently and widely used. 

The word “so”, when not used as an adverb, is a coordinating conjunction: it is employed to link two clauses, the second of which is dependent on the first.  It therefore belongs, strictly, in the middle of a sentence, not at the start.

Of course, coordinating conjunctions frequently are used at the beginning of a sentence, notwithstanding the purist’s view that this is a solecism.  My grandmother, who taught English, used to drum it into me that one should never start a sentence with “and” or “but”.  Nevertheless, I do.

So I have no huge objection (as you can see) to starting a sentence with “so” if it acts as a coordinating conjunction with what has been said in the previous sentence.  But (there I go again) I can see no grammatical or logical justification for using a coordinating conjunction when nothing has been previously said at all.

Recently, the Welsh select committee heard evidence from a senior executive of a huge international corporation.  She was smart, manifestly highly intelligent and clearly a native English speaker.  However, she insisted on prefacing her reply to almost every question with the word “so”.  Because the word was so incongruous (she having said nothing previously to justify the use of a coordinating conjunction), it detracted considerably from the impact of what she was actually saying.  No doubt it will be edited out of the transcript.

I suppose that “so”, used in such circumstances, is something of a non-word, rather like “well”.  It is probably employed to give the speaker a scintilla of extra thinking time. It is no more irritating than “like”, “you know” or “I mean” (in fact, rather less irritating).  It’s just that it appears to have come from nowhere and to have spread with amazing rapidity.  It also has a foreign, vaguely Germanic feel to it.

If readers can suggest where this strange linguistic affectation has come from, I’d be fascinated to hear from them. 

So please do write in.

→ 5 Comments

Posted in Miscellaneous, Welsh Affairs Committee

Tagged

Bottlenecks

Posted on November 5, 2008 | Leave a comment
Yesterday, the Welsh select committee began the transport section of its inquiry into cross-border public services. We took evidence from the Mersey Dee Alliance, the body established to promote the common economic and community interests of Cheshire and north-east Wales.

Transport is key to maintaining and increasing the prosperity of this dynamic sub-region. However, two crucially important projects remain some years away from completion. Until they are completed, the economic potential of the Deeside hub will not be fully realised.

First is the electrification of the Wrexham-Bidston railway line, which will bring Wrexham within easy commuting distance of the centre of Liverpool. The estimated cost of the project had been some £60 million; now it has somehow increased to £207 million. The Alliance is arranging for a review of the estimate, but the dramatic leap in the project’s cost inevitably means that it will be several years before electrification comes to the line.

The second project is the upgrade of the A494, about which I have previously blogged. According to the evidence we received, the Welsh Assembly Government has confirmed that money is still earmarked for the work, but no “Plan B” exists, and the upgrade will have to be redesigned from scratch.

Even then, the laborious consent and acquisition process will probably take several years, meaning that this crucial section of the link between North Wales and the motorway network will remain a substandard stretch of road, encumbered by a 50 mph speed limit.

The folly of the Welsh Assembly Government in not signing up to the single consent regime introduced by the Planning Bill is becoming increasingly clear.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in economy, Welsh Affairs Committee, Welsh Assembly Government

Calm down, Dafydd

Posted on August 19, 2008 | Leave a comment
A predictably histrionic reaction from the Welsh Assembly’s presiding officer, Dafydd Elis-Thomas, to the select committee’s memorandum to the Secretary of State on the procedure for legislative competence orders in council.

In it, the committee mildly suggests that the Assembly is getting a tad over-enthusiastic in the number of its bids for LCOs and should try to confine itself to four or five a year.

This has prompted an outraged Lord Elis-Thomas to hit the hyperbole button as only he knows how:

“I suspect these objections are coming not from MPs who are concerned about the volume of LCOs, but from those who would prefer there were no LCOs coming through at all.”

An odd criticism, given that his Plaid Cymru colleague Hywel Williams, MP for Caernarfon, is an active and respected member of the select committee.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Dafydd Elis-Thomas, Welsh Affairs Committee

Hasta la vista, Belgrano

Posted on April 19, 2008 | Leave a comment
A bitterly cold morning campaigning in Pensarn was followed by only a marginally warmer afternoon in Gele. Again, was very pleased with the reception, particularly from the kind lady in Belgrano who took pity on us, gave us hot coffee to warm us up and then made our happiness complete by telling us that she had always previously voted Labour but now intended to support the Tories.

David Cornock will be delighted to hear that tomorrow I travel with the select committee to Spain – the final act in the globalisation inquiry. The weather there is apparently cold and wet.

As a consequence of the above, blogging may be light for the next few days.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Council elections, Welsh Affairs Committee

Health Worries

Posted on March 18, 2008 | 5 Comments
The Welsh Select Committee’s inquiry into “cross-border” public services continues to fascinate.

Today, we heard evidence from Mr Tom Taylor, an impressive, bluff northerner who is the chief executive of the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals NHS Trust.

The Royal Shrewsbury hospital (where, incidentally, Sara trained) serves a large area that straddles the border. 60,000 people in Powys are its potential patients.

Mr Taylor explained that English primary care trusts pay on a “payment by results” basis, whereas Welsh commissioners operate a block payment system; the Trust is losing £2 million per annum as a consequence.

He also touched on the theme that has already been repeated by several witnesses: that Welsh-resident patients can expect to wait considerably longer for treatment than English residents, because of less ambitious target waiting times in Wales.

Mr Taylor suggested that an element of the Welsh block grant sufficient to provide for payment to English providers at the full rate should be ring-fenced. This would ease the financial difficulties of English hospitals. It might also result in improved waiting times for Welsh patients. This is an interesting suggestion and deserves further consideration.

What is certain, however, is that disparities in health funding are breeding resentment on the part of both patients and providers. This, in itself, is unhealthy. It should be addressed.

→ 5 Comments

Posted in health, Welsh Affairs Committee

Local Difficulties

Posted on March 4, 2008 | 2 Comments
Today, the Welsh Select Committee’s inquiry into the cross-border provision of public services got under way with an evidence session attended by the Bishops of Hereford and Monmouth. Both are erudite men with medical backgrounds and a highly developed social ethos.

The general thrust of what they told us was that patients in the border areas and beyond were suffering as a consequence of both funding and political disparities between England and Wales. As the Bishop of Monmouth, with clerical understatement, put it: “The WAG policy to provide all services from within Wales can run counter to its policy of putting patients first.”

The extent to which common sense is eclipsed by dogma in Cardiff Bay is illustrated by the following extract from the Bishop’s submission to the committee:

“Another example of where policy appears to come before patients’ interests is that clergy and their families in Wales can no longer use St Luke’s Hospital for the Clergy in London because Wales will not pay for any tests that need to be carried out in London but only for tests carried out in Wales. St Luke’s is a charity hospital that does not charge fees and the consultants give their services free of charge. The use of St Luke’s Hospital would save Wales about £300,000 a year and free up beds, because St Luke’s would not charge Wales for consultations, surgery or hospitalisation, but only for tests.”

This is a lunatic state of affairs, but it no doubt makes perfect sense to the Welsh health minister, Edwina Hart.

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Edwina Hart, health, Welsh Affairs Committee

Still Spinning

Posted on July 18, 2007 | Leave a comment
The Welsh Affairs Select Committee’s inquiry into globalisation and its impact on Wales continues to fascinate; I believe its conclusions may very well prove of enormous significance.

Yesterday’s session underlined the employment challenge Wales faces in the new globalised environment. We heard evidence from Caroline Flint, newly-appointed Minister of State at the Department of Work and Pensions, and Peter Hain’s deputy in his day job.

Ms Flint is generally regarded as one of the better-looking Members of Parliament. Easy on the eye she may be, but easy on the ear she’s not. Her extraordinarily wordy evidence consisted primarily of talking up the state of employment in Wales and down-playing the fact that Welsh economic inactivity is significantly worse than that in the rest of the UK. It took me three goes before I could get her to admit that the proportion of the Welsh population in receipt of incapacity benefit is over fifty per cent higher than that of the UK as a whole.

Gordon Brown’s arrival as Prime Minister was supposed to mark to demise of spin as a tool of government. Someone should get around to telling Ms Flint that.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Caroline Flint, Welsh Affairs Committee

Tagged

Local loot

Posted on June 23, 2007 | Leave a comment

It is a curious phenomenon (experienced, I am sure, by most of us) that, whenever we start to take an interest in any particular subject, news stories about it begin to appear, right, left and centre, out of the woodwork, as if by magic.

The Welsh Affairs Select Committee is currently conducting what promises to be a highly significant inquiry into globalisation and its impact on Wales. As a consequence, over the last few months I have become increasingly conscious of an ocean of newspaper and magazine articles and TV and radio programmes about globalisation, its waves washing over me almost on a daily basis.

Today was no exception. The Times carried an interesting piece about a fiscal experiment in the town of Great Barrington, in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts. There, the citizens have issued their own currency, called “Berkshares”. The intention is to stimulate the local economy, by encouraging people to use a currency that can be used only in the immediate area, so that the financial benefit goes to local workers and suppliers.

Lewis Solomon, a law professor at George Washington University who wrote Rethinking Our Centralised Monetary System: the Case for a System of Local Currencies, argues that such currencies are one of the few options that localities have to combat the negative effects of globalisation. “There is now so much globalisation that this is a way that enables you to build a local economy,” he says.

According to the Times, the experiment is only partially successful. The Berkshare is pegged with parity to the dollar, but is sold in banks for 90 cents. That gives locals an incentive to spend, but suppliers take a financial hit when redeeming the local currency, because the banks buy them back at the same rate.

The consequence is that there are not enough suppliers willing to accept Berkshares, and 750,000 of the 900,000 issued have been redeemed for dollars. The Times quotes a local businessman as saying, “To be an effective programme, this really needs to be a completed circle. There are not enough vendors that use it.”

The story reminds me of the famous experiment conducted in the late 1960s by Richard Williams, of Llandudno, who issued “payment orders” under the imprimatur of “Prif Trysorfa Cymru Limited”, or “Chief Treasury of Wales”. The affair attracted considerable public attention, and no less public amusement, in the early summer of 1969, as the Board of Trade scratched its head over what to do about the Welsh banker, who seemed set on creating a separate currency for Wales.

Finally, the Board wrote to Richard Williams and told him that the name of his company was misleading and that he would have to change it. The resourceful Williams complied, and re-registered it as “Cwmni y Ddafad Ddu Gymreig Limited”, or “Welsh Black Sheep Company” – an obvious nod to the 19th century Aberystwyth and Tregaron Bank, which issued notes bearing the design of a black sheep and was commonly known as the “Black Sheep Bank”. Williams issued notes of various denominations in 1969, and again in 1971, at the time of decimalisation.

Williams was probably less interested in creating a true Welsh currency than in having enormous fun at the expense of the bemused officials of the Board of Trade. The notes themselves have become collectors’ items (I have one myself somewhere) and the affair was entertainingly written up by the well-known Llandudno journalist, Ivor Wynne Jones (who died earlier this year), in his book Money for All: the Story of the Welsh Pound.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Black Sheep Bank, globalisation, Welsh Affairs Committee

Tagged

Eastward Ho!

Posted on April 25, 2007 | Leave a comment
The Welsh Affairs Select Committee’s inquiry into globalisation and its impact on Wales is proving a fascinating exercise.

Yesterday, the Committee took evidence from directors of Corus, the steelmaker recently taken over by Tata of India, which operates the plant at Port Talbot, and representatives of the steel workers’ union, Community.

There was a remarkable degree of agreement between the representatives of what used to be called “the two sides of industry”. All the witnesses expressed concern over the migration out of Europe of steelmaking capacity. The principal reason for this, apart from the low cost of labour in countries such as China, India and Brazil, is that the European Emissions Trading System operates against EU steel producers and gives an advantage (some might say an unfair advantage) to steelmakers in the developing world, who are not bound by the Kyoto protocol.

All the witnesses were calling for a global sector-wide protocol on emissions, so as to level the playing field between Europe and the developing world. However, China’s dash for industrialisation makes this a rather unlikely prospect. There would be nothing in it for the Chinese. Indeed, China is now the world’s biggest exporter of steel and there was also a report today (albeit later denied) that it has overtaken the USA as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. China is determined to become the number one manufacturing nation on the planet and is unlikely to be over-concerned about environmental niceties, at least in the medium term.

It is a truism to observe that we live in a changing world, but the current pace of industrial change is nothing short of startling. Unless the EU both reassesses the regulatory burden it imposes on industry and engages urgently with China, India and other developing nations over their industrial practices, we will soon find that the world’s entire manufacturing base has moved east of Suez or south of the Equator.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Welsh Affairs Committee

Tagged