Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 2. Questions to the Leader of the House and Chief Whip – in the Senedd at 2:54 pm on 18 July 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:54, 18 July 2018

Yes, I think there's much that I can agree with there in what Siân Gwenllian is saying. I don't agree that it's an issue across the board, but there are data issues in Wales. We struggle to uplift some of the national surveys in a realistic way, and although it's not quite on the topic that we're currently discussing, I hope it will be illustrative. For example, we haven't taken part in the race disparity audit that the UK Government did, even with the Welsh uplift, because the numbers that we would have got from that would have been too low to have been of any statistical significance. So, we're actively looking at the moment at what we can do in Wales to do something that is statistically significant, and very much in terms of our response to this early phase of the gender review, and then I hope in the action plan going forward, once we've got the second-stage process, will be how we get baseline data, what data's currently available, what resource we need to uplift that, because we will have to do that, because the UK data tends not to have enough of a sample in Wales to be significant, and then what we can do to create those targets, because I quite agree with her that, unless we have those targets in place, we won't have any idea whether our policy is or isn't effective.

Also, on the point of leadership, though, it's easy to be cynical, but if you don't state that you want Wales to be a feminist place, and if you're afraid to do that because of the cynicism, then I personally think you'd never get there. So, whilst I acknowledge the cynicism, I also acknowledge the vision, and I want to work very hard indeed to make sure that we do have an active action plan that is implementable and meaningful over, as I said, the short, medium and longer term to embed those processes.