Part of 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:22 pm on 23 May 2018.
Cabinet Secretary, I can understand why Tory Ministers are congratulating you for slavishly following their privatising agenda, but the fact that we are now poised to hand over responsibility for our national railways to a French-Spanish consortium of transnational corporations is surely not a source of celebration. It's a source of regret and political soul-searching by the Labour Party. Surely, your own manifesto, which I think, Cabinet Secretary, you had a hand in writing, promised that you
'will deliver a new, not-for-profit, rail franchise from 2018'.
Now, anyone reading that would assume that this is going to be a state-run operator. Well, of course, it is state-run, except it's not the Welsh state—it's majority owned by the French state. The current one, of course, is majority owned by the German state, so I suppose that's some form of progress—is it? Because, what, effectively, we're doing—we are binding the hands, not just of the next administration, but the administration after that, and, indeed, the administration after that.
So, can I ask you, Cabinet Secretary, you have promised—[Interruption.] Can I ask you, Cabinet Secretary, you have promised that the next Labour Government that you're always talking about will change the Railways Act to enable the Welsh Government to have the power to have a public sector operator, so have you done what the Scottish Government has done and introduced a break clause in the contract so that you can, at the earliest possible opportunity, ensure that you deliver on what you promised to have—a not-for-profit operator?
Can we also ask as well, in the event that the contract is handed back, as has happened in a number of cases, will the Welsh Government be the operator of last resort? This is the third time I've asked you that question, Cabinet Secretary, so I would appreciate if you could respond.