Julie James: Yes, I couldn't concur more with the campaign. I thought the housing Minister endorsed it in a very clear statement. Somebody asking for sex instead of rent is not a landlord—they are a criminal. It could not be any more straightforward than that. And, of course, we share yours and many other people's concern that vulnerable people are put into this position, driven there by some of the...
Julie James: I'm very happy to say that the Welsh Government supports family reunification where at all possible in all of the circumstances where families are divided. It's amongst the worst and most pernicious effects of some of our more draconian immigration rules. If Neil McEvoy wants to write to me with the details and the contact details of the family, I'm very happy to make representations to the...
Julie James: Yes. The Cabinet Secretary is very, very firm that bullying is not to be tolerated, of any sort, in our schools, but we are particularly concerned about racist bullying, especially with the rise of hate crimes across the UK. Actually, we've got a group called EAST working very hard on a set of guidelines for schools, and we're currently looking at putting a new project into schools exactly on...
Julie James: Formally.
Julie James: Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. Well, I would very much like to begin by thanking the Conservatives for bringing forward this debate today because it's given us a timely opportunity to reflect and celebrate the significant progress successive Welsh Labour Governments—so, that's successively elected by the Welsh people, Welsh Labour Governments—have made during Carwyn Jones's time as...
Julie James: Yes, certainly, Janet.
Julie James: Well, that is the reality. I was about to come on and say. But, actually, if you really want to know what I say to my constituents in Swansea, Janet, I say that the Tory Government has cancelled electrification; it's cancelled the Swansea bay tidal lagoon; they cannot deal with any of the infrastructure problems. It is an absolute shambles. So, you asked the question: that's the answer you're...
Julie James: It bears repeating today: if we were not a penny better off in real terms than we were in 2010, we would have £850 million more to invest in front-line services today. Now, if spending—
Julie James: I'll come on to that, Rhun. If spending on public services had kept pace with the growth in the economy since 2010, we would have an extra £4 billion to spend on public services in Wales. And if the UK Conservative Government had matched the level of investment in public services achieved by every Government for the last 50 years, Wales would have £8 billion more to spend.
Julie James: Well, as you know, David, Gordon Brown had already turned the economy around and we had growth. The Conservative Party choked that in its infancy immediately. So, I don't have any worries at all of what would have happened there. The Tory Party that followed was one of the most fiscally irresponsible in the history of Great Britain. Llywydd, in the face of this global recession, austerity and...
Julie James: Yes. In our continued roll-out of fast fibre broadband, we have identified around 3,773 premises across the region that could potentially see connectivity coverage under the new initiative. Assistance with connectivity also continues with our Access Broadband Cymru and ultrafast connectivity voucher schemes.
Julie James: Right, well, thank you for that, I think. The meeting was indeed packed. I did explain at great length—as I have at all of the meetings around Wales that I've attended, and I think I've been almost to every constituency now—that the big problem is that this is not regarded as infrastructure; this is still regarded as the procurement of a luxury product. And so, we have to go through a...
Julie James: Yes. Although we don't hold information specifically for Preseli, under the Superfast Cymru project we provided access to fast fibre broadband to 54,500 premises across Pembrokeshire, delivering average speeds of 77.6 Mbps and investing over £15.8 million.
Julie James: It was a hope. I thought it was a hope that I could be relatively secure about, but actually it's turned out to be way more complex, with the negotiations between ourselves and the various other members of the state aid provision issue. So the procurement has just turned out to be much more complex than we had hoped in the first place. We are hoping, as I just said in response to Janet...
Julie James: It's worth looking at a cluster of people even if they're quite geographically spread. It's surprising what can be done with some of the technologies, and precision agriculture is one of the really big uses of this, so we have a number of examples of communities across Wales where one farmer has been connected and has been able to broadcast the signal, for example, to a number of other...
Julie James: Yes, we know that a lot of domestic abuse is hidden. We do know that people don't come forward and that there are inconsistencies of evidence across the piece. So, we work very hard with the police and crime commissioners, and actually with the lead police and crime commissioner, who is an ex-colleague that you'll all be familiar with, Jeff Cuthbert, who's taken the lead in this regard...
Julie James: So, what happens with our Act—the Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act 2015—is that that drives a statement by local authorities as to a needs assessment in their area, and the needs assessment is then how we plan the services, and that's in its infancy. We've only just had the first iteration of that. The whole propose of that Act is to overcome some of...
Julie James: So, that's very much part of the same piece that I was just talking about in terms of the assessment of need. And what we're looking to do is exactly that, to make sure that we have a proper assessment of need across all of Wales, and that we provide services based on that needs assessment and not just—. These services, generally, grew up because got together back in the 1970s and 1980s...
Julie James: We very much followed the superfast roll-out programme with a business exploitation programme and the domestic exploitation programme—some of you may have seen there's a big yellow cartoon lightning bolt that arrives on your village green with a big sign—and then we run programmes for people to come and understand how to get the best out of the service that's arrived and how to assess...
Julie James: Yes, that's a huge matter of frustration to me, I have to say, because that's to do with the way that the UK Government sold the spectrum and the geographical coverage they either did or didn't put on it. So, it's clearly inadequate. I've mentioned many times in this Chamber my frustration at not being able to get them to see that having a single provider across 98 per cent of the land mass...
