Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:20 pm on 12 June 2018.
Could I raise two issues with the leader of the house? First of all, could I ask for a statement from the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services regarding the interoperability of the performers list in Wales and England? This is, as I understand it, the list that allows GPs to come from England to practice in Wales and, I suppose, vice versa. It's been raised with me several times by GPs in my region. I have got a particular issue at the moment in the Dyfi valley, where, for example, a practice has tried to get three locums recently. One locum took six months to get onto the performers list in Wales. Another one took two months to get onto the performers list in Wales, even though he was actually working in Bristol checking blood tests, but because the blood tests were from Wales, he had to be on the performers list in Wales. Two months' delay to do that is, I think, inordinate, when you think about it.
I don't understand the full background as to why we can't have a completely interoperable list here. Of course I support the devolution of health services in Wales, but I want us to share commonality with England in that regard. It is what's stopping many GP practices successfully using locums in the most appropriate and effective way. They are engaging with them, paying some initial costs for them, and then they are not actually working for them for several months. This is what's holding back many GP practices, actually, not their willingness or otherwise to answer the phones in the morning. That's just a way of rationing services, and let's be honest about it; we may as well face that fact. So, can we have a statement or a letter to AMs about how this works, why there are problems, and why I'm receiving GPs contacting me with months' delays in simply getting fully qualified GPs, who are on the list in England and can work as GPs in England? To my mind, they should simply cross the border with a tick-box and we should have a way of doing that.
The second issue I'd like to raise with you isn't for a statement, but it is very much around the business of the Assembly for the next couple of days. We've had a little bit of a ding-dong around whether the First Minister does involve himself in Westminster politics or not. I think we concluded that he does, and I think that we all have an interest in what's happening in Westminster today. We have the debates and the amendments on the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill from the House of Lords, and we have one and a half hours to discuss the whole bunch of amendments around devolution, around the operation of both Wales and Scotland, which I think is a disgrace—that so little time has been allowed for that debate. But, within that set of devolution amendments, we have amendments that potentially affect our legislative competence here.
We have an amendment from your party—from Jeremy Corbyn himself, with Keir Starmer as the seconder—that changes the five-year rule that we have at the moment, around regulations carrying on for five years post the operation of the EU withdrawal Bill, to three years. That itself is different to your inter-governmental agreement. The inter-governmental agreement allows for five plus two. Your own Labour leader is saying it should be three plus two. So, straight away, something that we voted on—Plaid Cymru certainly didn't support it, but we voted on it as an Assembly several weeks ago—could be changed today in the House of Commons with a different set of amendments.
This does underline, I think, just how chaotic Westminster is in dealing with devolution and, I have to say, to be frank, it underlines a lack of coherence in your own party in the way that you are addressing this. I won't rehearse the old arguments we've put forward that you did this inter-governmental agreement too early and you did it in haste and maybe you are now repenting at leisure, but can you tell the Assembly how you will deal with these issues as you receive reports from the House of Commons? As we see any impact on the devolution settlement, how do you intend to give us that information, and how do you intend that the Assembly, over the next few days, should respond to some of those amendments that might now change the EU withdrawal Bill?