Adam Price: My time is very, very limited, I'm afraid. Leanne, I think, pointed to the wealth of evidence that there is internationally on the value of cash transfer versus in-kind payments. There's a debate going on, of course, between the benefit of universal basic services versus universal basic income, the social wage that Joyce Watson referred to, but the evidence is pretty overwhelming that,...
Adam Price: The debate started with Rhianon Passmore focusing on the question of whether we have the power. I mean, when Rhodri Morgan decided that the Welsh Government was going to top up the child trust fund, I didn't see much discussion or soul searching then; it was the right thing to do and if you didn't have the power, you went and asked for it. And that's the Calman attitude now. And I think that...
Adam Price: I entirely agree with you. The case that I'm making is, look, we should create our own instrument because, as the biggest systematic review in this area by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has said, income support policies like a Welsh child payment are the ultimate multipurpose policy instrument because of their cumulative impact across so many parts of children's and families' lives. The...
Adam Price: I certainly agree with the spirit of the point you're making, that we should definitely hold Westminster to account and continue to do that very vociferously. But I suppose the logic of my case is that we have to ask ourselves what we can do here now, because the salvation will not come, I think, likely any time soon from Westminster. Now, in essence, we've had two elements of an anti-poverty...
Adam Price: Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. I'm very grateful to have this opportunity to introduce this motion on child poverty, which dovetails very neatly—completely unplanned, but serendipitously—with some of the theme of the last debate. Child poverty is one of the most persistent problems that we face as a society. In Wales relative child poverty has been in a band, essentially, between 36 per cent of...
Adam Price: In relation to houses, I was merely asking you what the position was over the last year, the first year of your tenure, compared to the previous three years under your predecessor. What I have to say to you is that you've gone backwards, in terms of the last three years. In terms of trees, you've been unable to confirm it, but I suspect that, once again, you haven't met the target for new...
Adam Price: Well, as we normally say under these circumstances, I can assist the First Minister, as the Assembly Research Service, quoting your own Government's statistics, say that the corresponding figures for 2016 and 2017 of homes built per month were 552 and 574 a month respectively. You were even marginally down on 2018, so it doesn't seem that that's something, First Minister, to crow...
Adam Price: As we embark on a new year, I'd like to begin, apart from wishing you blwyddyn newydd dda, with your end-of-year video. No, not the infamous James Bond one, but the one in which you set out your biggest achievements in your first year as First Minister. You highlighted, as one of those achievements, building almost 480 houses a month in 2019. Are you able to tell us what proportion, roughly,...
Adam Price: First Minister, that same freedom of information disclosure also revealed that some of these management consultants in north Wales are being paid up to £1,000 a day, which is more than most nurses earn in a week. Now, let me present one more sobering statistic that points to your mismanagement of the NHS in north Wales: PwC are being engaged by you to cut costs—or, as it's euphemistically...
Adam Price: First Minister, how much money is being handed over to private sector management consultants to try and fix the Welsh NHS?
Adam Price: First Minister, we both agree that creeping privatisation is a threat to the NHS. The surprising thing, perhaps, is that that threat, in part, comes from you. You're funding a management consultancy gravy train at a time when front-line staff and services like A&E are stretched to breaking point. Perhaps I can help you out with some of the figures, First Minister. Freedom of information...
Adam Price: First Minister, I'd like to ask you, finally, to respond to some new information that's been released in relation to the now-rejected proposals to introduce unpaid breaks for nurses in the north. First of all, can you say whether you believe it is appropriate that your officials sought to involve the chief executive of Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, Gary Doherty, in political...
Adam Price: Surely, the fact that a Labour shadow Cabinet Minister called for an inquiry on Friday, then had to withdraw that on the Sunday, simply because they hadn't shown I think what we would expect from them, which is a decent level of interest in what is happening to people in Wales—. It happened on the Friday, and you'd have thought, having been caught out once by their indifference and...
Adam Price: Given the seriousness of what's happened at Cwm Taf, should we not have expected a Labour shadow Cabinet Minister speaking at the Senedd to have familiarised themselves with this tragic case? Or is it simply true that Wales matters as little to the Labour frontbench in Westminster as it does to the Tories?
Adam Price: Well the paragraph, actually, on the need for reform is exactly the same. It's cut and pasted from the 2017 manifesto. I would have—. Given that you have set out this 20-point plan—and it's good to have references in a manifesto, but I would have expected progress, that you actually would have been able to make a cast-iron explicit manifesto commitment to scrapping the Barnett formula,...
Adam Price: Yes, you're right, the manifesto does refer to the report, and it uses the language of 'working with' and 'considering the report', but why couldn't there be a cast-iron commitment at least to devolve policing, and then to go further and deliver the recommendations of the report? This is a rowing back, effectively, from the position that you had in the 2017 manifesto. Now, the paper...
Adam Price: First Minister, in 2017, the Labour manifesto contained an explicit commitment to devolve policing to Wales. Your 2019 manifesto does not. Why?
Adam Price: First Minister, your education Minister said in 2017 that we need to make progress in the next set of PISA results if we're to hit the next target. If the news for Wales on 3 December isn't positive at all, or isn't positive enough, what will the response of the Government be in that situation? Will you accept that the strategy isn't working? We've had a PISA target since 2006 after all. Will...
Adam Price: First Minister, I believe it's normal practice for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to give advance notice to Governments, summarising the scores before the official announcement. Have you already received such advance notice, and can you say if you expect significant progress to have been made to achieving your target?
Adam Price: Diolch, Llywydd. First Minister, can you say if achieving a score of 500 in each domain of the PISA global education rankings, in reading, mathematics and science, is still the policy of your Government? And can you confirm that the figures for Wales will be published alongside all the other international figures on 3 December, unencumbered by the rules around pre-election period announcements?
