Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:23 pm on 14 February 2017.
Of course, one recommendation you can’t respond to, but which must lay on file for the moment, is the wider recommendation on ministerial responsibility, taking decisions that are important to a Minister’s constituents and constituency, but not actually based in the constituency. The Public Accounts Committee says that the perception of a conflict of interest is just as important as an actual conflict of interest. On this occasion, I suggest that the First Minister took his eye off the ball and didn’t realise what procedures should be followed, and another Minister should have taken this decision.
Can I also ask the Cabinet Secretary and tell him that I wrote to his predecessor, Edwina Hart, on 1 August 2014—several weeks before the company went into administration—raising with her several serious concerns expressed to me by workers at the company who are resident in my region, in Llanelli, because workers from this company are spread over quite an area? They were particularly concerned at the lease that had been taken out by the then Welsh Assembly Government, which I was told was worth £1.25 million and ran for five years without a break clause within those five years. Can I understand, therefore, are you still subject to that lease and what is the ongoing cost of that lease to the Welsh Government? Because that would seem to be in addition to the costs we’ve seen so far in the Public Accounts Committee report and I’d like confirmation of that.
The second element that gave great concern to the workers at the plant was the fact that several directors, at the time they were laying off workers, were employing themselves for a period of time at a cost of up to £7,000 per month, as self-employed consultants or otherwise employed full-time with Kancoat. This was a time when the company was seen to be struggling publicly, and I raised this directly with your predecessor. The answer I got from her was simply one to say that all full and thorough due diligence had been undertaken. We now know that that doesn’t seem to have been the case. What do you say now, two years down the line, to the workers there who were raising these concerns, and are you completely assured that the directors of this company did not take any money for themselves, personally, out of the unfortunate situation that the company found itself in?