3. Statement by the First Minister: The Legislative Programme

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:01 pm on 16 July 2019.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 4:01, 16 July 2019

Llywydd, I'll try and respond to a number of the points raised. I don't think it's possible to understand the next year's legislative programme without some account of the measures that are already in the pipeline and the workload that falls on this Assembly in order to complete them, and that's what I was trying to do in my statement.

As far as the agriculture Bill is concerned, we will continue to consult, now, over the summer, on the proposals that my colleague Lesley Griffiths set out last week. Our aim is to reward active farmers for two essential purposes: for sustainable food production, and for delivery of those public goods that, without help from the public purse, farmers would otherwise be unable to deliver. Our aim now is to bring that together in a single sustainable farming scheme. Now, I think that has been broadly welcomed by the farming unions, and I think they think that it is a genuine response to the concerns that they raised during the consultation on 'Brexit and our land' of having two separate schemes, where in fact we want to provide a single sustainable farm income for those farmers who are active farmers, that they don't simply get rewards on the basis of the amount of land they occupy, whether they do anything with is or not, and I think again that's something that the industry welcomes, and we want to make sure that the investment that the public makes in our agriculture industry, which we are very keen to make sure we go on making, is an investment on which the public see a return for those environmental purposes that the Member mentioned.

The GP indemnity Bill is a very good example of how, when Governments act on behalf of a group collectively, we are able to put the force of the Government behind a really important need in an occupation. I could describe it as a socialist solution to what was otherwise market failure, and I don't think I would be that far wrong from it. Last week, I thanked the Member for his generous endorsement of our social partnership Act as 'socialism in one clause', but he's been good enough to repeat it this afternoon.

As far as bus transport is concerned, I think we would go further than saying deregulation has not been a great success. I think we have seen deregulation damage bus services across Wales. We see competition on that relatively small number of profitable routes, and money being therefore drained away from local authorities' ability to go on supporting bus services on routes that will never survive on an entirely commercial basis. We want to be able to avoid that wasteful competition by giving local authorities the powers they need to provide a planned bus service that delivers for the wider public good. How they will do that—I don't think we have any objection to the idea that local authorities will come up with different approaches, but we think that those different approaches should be regionally mapped out. I entirely can see why a regional approach to bus services in the south west of Wales would be different to a regional approach in the Gwent area of Wales. So, it's not a difficulty with differentiation, but it is a feeling that bus services don't operate on local authority boundaries. To plan a bus route, you need to be able to plan how that bus route operates across the boundary, not just within a local authority. That is why, in our proposals for bus transport and in our proposals for local government, we will bring together a set of proposals to support the regional development and delivery of bus services, because we think that simply makes the most sense, in the way that the industry operates on the ground.