Emergency Question: Carillion

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 1:39 pm on 16 January 2018.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:39, 16 January 2018

Wel, Llywydd, successive Welsh Governments have not been prepared to follow the model that Mick Antoniw has just outlined. We have always been alert to the dangers of a way of conducting business in which profit is privatised and risk is socialised, and that's exactly what you've seen in this example. Here is a company that, from public money, has been giving dividends to its shareholders, and is prepared to go on paying its senior executives well beyond the point where that was a sensible course of action to take. And when it all goes wrong, when their friends over there go wrong, what happens? What happens then? You expect the public purse to step in. You expect the public to pay for your mistakes, and in Wales—[Interruption.] In Wales, that's a course of action we've never been prepared to follow. That's why we don't have and won't have in Wales the sort of handing over to the private sector of public services that ought to be publicly provided and publicly paid for. That's why we don't have fire service personnel delivering meals in schools in Wales today. Yes, there are lessons to be taken from Carillion. Luckily, in Wales, we'd learnt them well before the party opposite.