Part of 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:31 pm on 27 January 2021.
Well, Llywydd, may I thank Mike Hedges for that? And I'm very happy to write again to Baroness Vere, as a result of these concerns expressed on the floor of the Senedd. Llywydd, as I said, I wrote to the baroness, as the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Transport, on 22 December. I got a reply dated 23 December. And I must say that, by the standards of correspondence I sometimes see from Whitehall, this was a detailed and engaged reply that did respond to the issues raised in my letter of the twenty-second. I wrote again on 12 January, because I still felt that that first reply left unanswered a series of issues that had been raised directly with us as a Government, including the proportion of staff expected physically to attend the workplace in relation to those working from home. The reply that I subsequently received did deal directly with the issue of the number of people working from home, together with issues of cleaning, ventilation, staff engagement, and a number of other issues that I had set out in my letter. My concern is that there is a gap between the advice that the Parliamentary Under Secretary receives from managers and others on the spot, compared to the evidence that is provided directly to Members here by people who work in the various offices of the DVLA. And I'm very happy to write to her again, relaying Members' concerns, and asking her once again to be sure that the advice that she relies on, or the—[Inaudible.]—that she provides to the Welsh Government, would stand up to examination by those working at the front line.