Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:03 pm on 3 May 2017.
We say it quite clearly. We’ve set out amendments to a whole series of Bills. I know that the honourable Member and I myself were elected last year, but Plaid Cymru put in a whole series of amendments on six separate occasions to two different Bills. They were set out in amendments to those Bills, and you voted against. It’s not as if we’ve just done this to play politics, right? We actually tried to legislate in this place and your Government opposed it. [Interruption.] Well, I’ll tell you the pathetic arguments that you gave against it. Actually, on one of those occasions on the Regulation and Inspection of Social Care Bill, your Minister in your Government said this:
‘But, let’s be clear about the proposition that is in front of the National Assembly. This amendment seeks an outright ban—an outright ban—on the use of zero-hours contracts…. I don’t think that that is a position that we ought to support.’
That’s what you were saying then. You say a different thing now in your British Labour Party manifesto. Yes, you introduced it in January 2016 after research that showed that there are quite clear disadvantages in terms of workers’ rights. Yes, you agreed to look at limiting the use of zero-hours contracts, and you consulted up on that, and presumably, that’s what the Cabinet Secretary was referring to earlier—‘We’re expecting an announcement about limiting the use’. Well, limiting the use of something that is quite clearly wrong in every sense, both in terms of the workers, but also, as we’ve heard, in terms of service users as well—you don’t limit the use, you ban it, you get rid of it, you root it out. That’s what people expect from a party that purports to be socialist, so why isn’t the Cabinet Secretary able to get up at that dispatch box in a few minutes and say that that is what you’re going to do?
And this argument, as well, that we’ve heard: ‘You could have imperilled the Bill’. Well, we have a system for dealing with that—it’s section 111 of the Government of Wales Act 2006, which allows a Member in this place, if there is a legal challenge at the Supreme Court, to remove that section of the Bill to allow the Bill to proceed without the danger of the whole Bill being lost. It’s a completely vacuous argument. And we were told as well the idea that, ‘Oh, there’s a lack of clarity whether we can actually do anything that is related to employment, and therefore, it might raise questions about the Bill’. That’s the argument that you—. The argument that you’re using with the trade union Bill is that, actually, public sector employment is a legitimate area for this place to legislate. And that’s what we’re talking about, certainly, in terms of what we have in this motion—at least banning the use of zero-hours contracts in local authorities in Wales. Why don’t you do it and put your principles into practice?