13. Statement by the Minister for Housing and Local Government: Preparing our Public Services for a 'No Deal' Brexit — Civil Contingencies

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:33 pm on 22 January 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 6:33, 22 January 2019

Thank you for that series of comments. The Member will not be at all surprised to discover that I disagreed with almost all of the first third of his remarks. I'm always very astonished by how sure people are what people voted for exactly. So, I don't know how you're so sure that people didn't vote to stay in the customs union and the single market. I, personally, am not sure of that. I have met a very large number of people who voted 'leave', who voted 'leave' for a variety of different reasons, some very trivial, some very serious and the whole range in between, so I don't share the Member's certainty that I am aware of all of the nuances of that. Nor do I share his certainty that people want what he suggests they want. So, I admire his certainty, but I certainly don't share it. I personally think that the United Kingdom would be far better off inside the European Union and, if we are to leave the European Union, then clearly we should leave it as set out in our White Paper that we produced alongside Plaid Cymru. That remains the best deal for Wales, and I have heard nothing during the whole of the last two years that has made me change my mind on that point.

In terms of the specific things that he asked, we have a completely tried-and-tested set of local resilience fora and a hierarchy. Those fora are already engaged in civil contingencies planning. All we've done is made sure that they include some of the additional preparedness for 'no deal' Brexit planning. They include the liaison—as Mark Isherwood rightly points out, they ought. We are fully engaged with that. My ministerial colleagues—in particular the Counsel General and the First Minister, but other ministerial colleagues as and when—engage fully in the JMC process. My colleague Kirsty Williams met with a range of other ministerial colleagues across the piece very recently. We have a whole range of those. That's the point at which we share the various contingency arrangements, and the discussions are structured in such a way as to deal with particular areas at particular times. We fully engage in that.

I'm told that we have not yet any details of the overarching co-ordinating committee that he referred to in terms of the letter that we've had. We await the details of that. We have a full set of preparedness sharing, including the kind of supply chain planning that he suggested we ought to do, and clearly we ought to do that. And I would emphasise: this is not in any way to suggest that there's any need to panic or anything else, but clearly, as a responsible Government, we need to be prepared for any eventuality that arises, and this preparedness is very much part of that, and it includes all of the escalations you would expect if there's civil unrest in any circumstance. I'm not anticipating we will need that, but clearly we'd be irresponsible not to have planned for it.