Suzy Davies: Thank you, First Minister, for the White Paper and your responses to questions today. I’ve a couple of questions for you myself and the first is your comment that in future we will still need to recruit from Europe for jobs in shortage areas. I absolutely don’t disagree with you that people need to come into the UK, into Wales as well, to meet those job shortages—you named some in your...
Suzy Davies: 3. Will the Cabinet Secretary make a statement on the role of faith tourism? OAQ(5)0107(EI)
Suzy Davies: That’s encouraging to hear. Faith tourism sites, such as Neath Abbey, and other Cistercian Way heritage, should be a huge draw for visitors, both domestic and from abroad, and particularly from the USA. Last year, you launched the faith tourism action plan to develop faith tourism as part of that wider visitor offer. How are you measuring its success, and can you say yet that it is...
Suzy Davies: Diolch, Lywydd. Good afternoon, Minister. Obviously we welcome the additional £10 million in the next budget intended for social services, but that isn’t ring-fenced, so what reassurances have you had from local authorities that it will be spent on services that commentators in the sector say would be lost without it?
Suzy Davies: My understanding, based on answers to previous questions that I put to you is that the living wage created an issue with the initial allocation of budget, and that the £10 million was to sort of make up for that, at least in some part. So, it’s not actually directly for the uplift in the living wage; it’s for filling the gap that the living wage left, if I can put it that way. You...
Suzy Davies: Thank you for that answer, and I don’t challenge you on your answer on the rise in the cap on payments towards domiciliary care, but I’m still struggling to find out what exactly it is that this £10 million will go on. What I’m picking up from your answer is that it’s primarily to do with staff retention, and that may well be the case, but that’s what I want to be able to see...
Suzy Davies: Yesterday, Care and Repair told me about their warm homes on prescription scheme, which uses the local intelligence of health and care professionals to help identify people at risk of health decline due to inadequately heated homes, and then they intervene to help with more efficient heating. If it works, it will reduce the number of people needing hospital care, which will include elective...
Suzy Davies: Thank you, everyone, for taking part in this debate. I’m pleased to take part as well. I think it’s going to be a rather thoughtful debate about what we want urban Wales to look like, not just literally, but philosophically as well, because this is very much about the place of the citizen in designing our environment. While I want to speak directly to the motion today, I did first want...
Suzy Davies: 7. Will the First Minister make a statement on the Hendry review? OAQ(5)0412(FM)
Suzy Davies: Thank you for that. I think we all welcome it—you, me and other Assembly Members in this Chamber. What we don’t need, of course, is the issue of the marine licence holding up any progress. Bearing in mind that I raised the delay with the marine licence with you in September 2015, how often has your Government chased NRW to come forward with that licence in the last 16 months, and what...
Suzy Davies: Thank you very much. Thank you very much for your statement. I heartily endorse your comments on needing employers’ buy-in to this, particularly for workplace learning and, of course, for parity of esteem. You mentioned a few times that this is based not on the institution, but that the focus is on the learner and fulfilling the aspirations of learners. Can you give us some indication of...
Suzy Davies: Along the same lines, Cabinet Secretary, you know how vulnerable the Gower cockle industry is because of early stock deaths in the Burry estuary. Perhaps the great repeal Bill will safeguard this industry by retaining the shellfish regulations of the European Union, but it won’t actually protect shellfish markets within the European Union at the moment. So, how is the Welsh Government...
Suzy Davies: There is plenty of opposition, still, to Mynydd y Gwair, and local residents are concerned about the potential impact on the local bat population as well. I raise this as the lesser horseshoe bat champion for the Assembly. Residents do point to the recent Exeter university report on bat mortality caused by blade disruption to sonar and to the potential of roosts near the proposed access track...
Suzy Davies: Last week you mentioned that some Vibrant and Viable Places projects were going to be getting more money because of underspends in other areas, which strikes me as slightly odd, that some local authorities seem be quite bad at following guidelines if some are underspending and others haven’t got enough money. Because we’re not talking just about replacing falling-down car parks here;...
Suzy Davies: Diolch, Ddirprwy Lywydd. I welcome this debate and move our amendments. Perhaps I might also mention that Members will have the opportunity to develop the positions put forward today in a debate that the Welsh Conservatives will be tabling in the next few weeks. I think we should really keep this in our line of sight. It is something we should be discussing often, particularly with the...
Suzy Davies: Will you take an intervention?
Suzy Davies: Thank you very much for taking the intervention. I was just listening to your point about driving down the costs within the private sector; would you accept as well that there’s a difficulty with local authorities being able to pay more to those private contractors as well?
Suzy Davies: Will the Cabinet Secretary make a statement on empowering local communities?
Suzy Davies: I suppose the first question I should ask you, Cabinet Secretary, is whether the information that Len McCluskey is asking for is already with you. In September, you answered questions in this Chamber on the situation at the Ford plant based on reassurances that you’d had in June that year. In particular, you said that Ford had told you that there was no surplus of labour in the short term....
Suzy Davies: Diolch, Lywydd. Thank you very much for your statement today, and for the information that you’ve given us. I certainly appreciate that. One of the things I wanted to ask you about was one of the key actions in the heart conditions delivery plan, namely the plan to have an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest plan for Wales—something I’d certainly welcome. Now, that plan would ensure that...
