4. Statement by the Cabinet Secretary for Finance: Update on European Transition

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:18 pm on 17 July 2018.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 4:18, 17 July 2018

I think there were three points there. I'm afraid I agree with what Jenny Rathbone has said. I think the House of Commons is demonstrating that there is not a majority to be brought together for any form of Brexit. I think that is the message we are learning from the last few days. The First Minister has said that in those circumstances a general election is the democratic necessity, and I completely agree with him there.

Jenny makes a very important point about services, Dirprwy Lywydd. The Chequers White Paper offers regulatory alignment in relation to goods and agricultural products, and that is very important in having unfettered trade as far as those things are concerned. But this idea that you can have a simple separation between goods and services as though they are entirely separate categories is simply not the case. To take the most obvious example, most people who buy a car buy a good, but they buy a finance package with it in order to secure that good, so there's a good and a service in the same thing. In fact, some estimates suggest that 40 per cent of goods that are traded in the European Union have an element of service directly connected to them. So, she's absolutely right to point to the very significant difficulty that remains there in the White Paper as far as services are concerned.

And in relation to the important point that she makes about food security, just as I said to Steffan Lewis that the Welsh Government is engaged in contingency planning already, we'll be doing more of that, and more intensively, over the summer. So, food will be part of what we will be considering. And in a point allied to that made by Jenny Rathbone, nobody should believe that there is some simple solution to some of these things in which you simply advise people to stock up and that they'll be okay, because, these days, supply chains and just-in-time delivery of food as well as other services means that there are no big stockpiles of food waiting to be mobilised for the public in the way that might have been the case when these things were organised very differently.