Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:41 pm on 10 May 2017.
I’ll repeat it again: what I said was—. I was comparing Wales with Northern Ireland. There are people in the Northern Ireland Assembly who are sitting there today, who, 40 years ago, were on opposite sides, and many of them may have wanted other Members there to be killed. I said that I disagree with the Conservative Party and I disagree with UKIP, but I don’t want to actually kill them—I never have wanted to kill them; I want to beat them in argument. That was the point I was trying to make, and I think it’s important: that Northern Ireland, with all its history and all its problems in the past, is allowed to have devolution of police, but we are not.
Sian Gwenllian said that there’s a consensus in Wales. I think we’ve seen that. I know that Mark Isherwood mentioned that he’d talked to policemen, but I would guess not only weren’t they chief constables, but they weren’t sitting on the command floor. I’ve spoken to police at all sorts of junior levels who have all sorts of interesting views. It’s the people on the command floor who have a view of how policing is being run across the area—it’s not the local sergeant who is involved in an area. Important as his job is, his understanding of the policing of the whole area and the police policy is substantially less than those on the command floor.
It has a close involvement with other devolved services, and not just fire and ambulance, but also with substantial other things run by Welsh Government. It’s involved with local government and it’s involved with social services. It’s involved with a whole range of bodies—I probably haven’t got time to list them all—and not just fire and ambulance.
Can I just finally say that I agree with everything that the Minister has said? I think it’s really important that we believe in Wales, believe in ourselves and support the devolution of policing to Wales.