Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:42 pm on 15 July 2020.
Thank you, First Minister. I share the concerns about our inability to go ahead with the bus Bill, but I'm reassured that you think you've got other ways of protecting this sector, because in particular in Cardiff, where we're fortunate to have a publicly owned Cardiff Bus, they are constantly facing unfair competition from private, so-called commercial operators who have managed to cherry pick the most profitable routes while ignoring the socially important routes. Equally, Cardiff Bus hasn't been able to access the economic resilience emergency fund, even though it obviously has been able to get hold of the support of the COVID job retention scheme. But, nevertheless, they've lost over £600,000 in the last three months, ensuring that essential workers were still able to get to their jobs, and I would be interested to know a little bit more about how we plan to safeguard these essential services, going forward, if we can't legislate.
One thing that you mentioned in your statement was the seed potatoes amendment regulation. It sounds marginal, but I wondered what relationship it has to the post-Brexit regulations the UK Government is preparing, where commercial seed operators are very concerned that they may have to pay £300 per variety in order to be able to continue to sell their seeds in Wales or, indeed, across the UK. That is obviously a very anti-competitive measure that could hugely benefit the very large conglomerate companies and put a lot of small vegetable seed companies out of business. So, I wondered if there is any link between those two.