5. Statement by the First Minister: The Legislative Programme

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:32 pm on 15 July 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:32, 15 July 2020

I will thank Alun Davies very much for that. I agree with him that the deregulation of the buses has been a 30-year disaster, and we see that in Wales, which is why our Bill to reregulate the bus services was such an important one. I do want to be clear with Members that we are working on alternative ways of achieving the same objectives. Even though the method, the legislative route, is not available to us in this Senedd term, it doesn't mean that there are not other powerful levers that Government can use, and we will be using those, particularly in the current context, where bus providers are so heavily dependent upon public subsidy to provide a service of any sort.

I thank him for what he said about environmental legislation. I sometimes have anxieties about environmental legislation, that the burden of it is carried by the poorest, that when we demand higher standards and we require other things, it's people with the least ability who have to find a way of bearing that burden. But there is no excuse for littering; there is no excuse for fly-tipping. Nobody needs to do those things, and poverty doesn't come into it, whereas it does in lots of other things. So, I am with him myself. I regularly bore people who I am travelling with, as we go along the routes in and out of Wales, at the sight of litter on our roadsides and on the sides of our train tracks. What sort of message does it send to people who are coming to visit this beautiful place about the way some of those locations are treated? So, legislation to do more and do better through a clean Wales Bill, he's made a powerful case for that.

And, of course, the Member makes a case for cardiac legislation with an authority that I certainly couldn't muster, and Members here, I know, will have listened very carefully to what he has said on that. As everybody in this place will be thinking ahead to ideas they want to put to the public next year, I think some very powerful points have been made by the Member this afternoon.