Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Education – in the Senedd at 1:50 pm on 25 April 2018.
Complex or not, it’s clear that there’s a need to look in detail at the situation following losing some of the safeguards that we have at the moment through being a member of the European Union.
Ensuring rights to users to receive services through the medium of Welsh is the basis of the 2011 Act and the standards that have followed that. The standards in health are deficient—they don’t provide anything in terms of the need for a service though the medium of Welsh in our hospitals and they don’t, either, place standards on a number of primary care providers, who are the main link between users and the health service.
Despite these deficient standards, it’s important that the Government moves on with safeguarding these rights through medical contracts, as has been promised. Also, it’s important to introduce all of the other standards that have been on the Minister’s desk, and that of your predecessor, and his predecessor, for a number of years. We’re still waiting for the standards relating to the housing sector, water, postal services, buses, trains a railways, gas and electricity, and telecommunications. Is it a lack of political will that’s behind this? Are you dragging your feet intentionally on this?