Mark Reckless: Should the economy Minister not have been clearer in his letter to his party's leader of Cardiff Council that, in seeking to raise money for public transport, it is wholly unacceptable to structure a charge in such a way that it is only paid by people outside his council area, while everyone inside the area is completely exempt?
Mark Reckless: Just the EU.
Mark Reckless: Well, because we had these laws before we joined the European Union and the European Union was there. We had far greater protections for workers' rights in this country than most of those European countries had, which had been gained, largely, by the trade unions. Yet you now ignore that and make out that it's somehow a gift from the European Union rather than from the unions that created...
Mark Reckless: I thank the First Minister for his motion proposing that we give consent to the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill, as we should, following the decision of the people of Wales in a referendum. It's astonishing that the First Minister is voting against his own motion, in effect maintaining Welsh Government's opposition to Brexit. That argument should be over; it should've been over on...
Mark Reckless: Will the First Minister give way? Isn't that exactly what you said in 2016 after the referendum? Given your actions for the last three and a half years, why should people believe you now?
Mark Reckless: I'm glad to hear the Government will be looking at this in detail and responding to the consultation. However, doesn't this go to values? Average pay in Cardiff is £583 per week. In Blaenau Gwent, it is £458 per week. Why should people who earn £125 less per week pay a new tax while people who earn £125 more a week are exempted? What does that say about the values of the First Minister,...
Mark Reckless: First Minister, a key element of city deals, at least as the UK Government has promoted them over the past eight years, is to integrate transport on a regional basis. Does Cardiff council's announcement last week mean that a different approach is being taken in Wales? Not only does one council area, Cardiff, appear to get a disproportionate share of public transport investment for the Cardiff...
Mark Reckless: We have too rather seductive, ostensibly competing, phrases from the First Minister: we should use the cheapest funding first—sounds very sensible—and then the committee says that we should match funding sources to projects, which also seems very sensible. But, usually, in the private sector, when people talk about matching funding to projects, they match high-risk, high-return funding to...
Mark Reckless: Thank you for giving way. He said it was dropped due to the climate change emergency, but does he recall that the nine or 10-page decision notice didn't mention climate change once?
Mark Reckless: I thank the Minister for his reply. If I may turn to the particular issue in light of that of pensions, I think it was when the Minister was standing in for the First Minister at a previous First Minister's questions that I asked him about what had happened in England to pay those extra costs that doctors were finding and would we be doing similar in Wales. I see that we now are doing so;...
Mark Reckless: Diolch, Llywydd. Minister, I wanted to enquire about the thinking behind how our pay scales for hospital doctors differ from those in England, and the impact that this has on recruitment and retention. I note that, for the first-year foundation doctors, our scales are between £1,300 and £1,500 higher per year than in England, but don't doctors look through that and see that at the end of...
Mark Reckless: I thank the First Minister for his considered and thoughtful response. First Minister, when I first asked you about the fall in stamp duty commercial receipts following the introduction of land transaction tax, you said it was too early to draw any conclusions. We now have the definitive data in the 'Welsh taxes outlook' from the Office for Budget Responsibility, and they say that your...
Mark Reckless: First Minister, GDP declined by 0.3 per cent in November, and I know that you like to blame Brexit for any weakness in the economy. However, isn't it revealing that we've had some much stronger data since the election? For instance, the Halifax have reported that house prices rose by 4 per cent in December. Deloitte, who surveyed companies' chief financial officers between 13 December, which...
Mark Reckless: I congratulate the Member on his work, actually, over a long period of time, putting the case for seaside towns, and I congratulate the Conservatives, who are representing rather more, at least at Westminster level, than they were before. But not all seaside towns are deprived. I'm not sure whether we'll hear from David Melding—perhaps he'll be putting the case for Penarth, but I'm not sure...
Mark Reckless: I thank him for that assistance. 'Co-produce' is in Dictionary.com, not 'co-productive', but 'co-produce'. It says, 'to produce (a motion picture, play, etc.) in collaboration with others.' In any event, I infer it has something to do with community involvement and co-designing and co-delivery of local services and that is a good thing, but the actual word 'co-productive' is not one I'm...
Mark Reckless: I oppose the motion for different reasons for each of the four points. The first point, I think it's fair enough to regret the failure of the Welsh Government's Communities First programme, but there are an awful lot of Welsh Government programmes that have failed in one way or another, but generally, they drag on without the Government admitting the failure. In this case—and I think they...
Mark Reckless: One of the advantages of the international convention centre and Jayne's excellent proposal is its location on the east side of Newport at Celtic Manor, so that people coming to events there from England by road don't need to travel through the Brynglas tunnels. Wouldn't a wider strategy of events coming to Wales, for instance to Cardiff, and making it possible for more people to get to them...
Mark Reckless: I can see that the Minister wants to draw on best practice. And to the extent there's a UK Committee on Climate Change and it has a list of various projects that it considers may be effective, I can see why she uses that as a starting point. But, as a finance Minister taking a decision about how much of our precious resources to invest into particular areas, surely, to the extent this is...
Mark Reckless: Diolch, Llywydd. Finance Minister, I spoke with you the day that the budget was announced and made some of the points that we have heard from Rhun today, and partly yesterday. And I'm pleased to hear that you met with Lesley Griffiths this morning to consider some of these matters. However, in your statement yesterday, you said that you're investing in the areas where we can have the greatest...
Mark Reckless: I congratulate the finance Minister on her budget and the process she's used. I'm noting, just from Rhun just then, that his remarks were quite gentle in admonishing the UK Government for the shifts in timings of its budgets and how those have been communicated, which contrasts what we heard earlier in the Scottish Parliament, where there seems to have been a serious ding-dong about the...
