4. Will the Minister make a statement on the responsibilities of the proposed corporate joint committees? OQ57205

The four corporate joint committees established on 1 April 2021 will exercise functions in relation to strategic land use planning and regional transport planning. They will also have a power to improve the economic well-being of their area.

Thank you for that response. I listened carefully to your responses to some previous questions in this area, and you did touch on the question of passing responsibilities down from the Welsh Government to the CJCs, but I didn't necessarily hear your view in terms of those concerns among local authorities that the Government, over time, will add more and more responsibilities that currently lie with local authorities to the CJCs—that is, that they move up the chain, rather than down the chain. Now, at the time of passing the legislation, assurances were given that that wouldn't happen, and I would ask you today whether you can give the same assurances as we've heard from your predecessor that shifting of responsibilities from local authorities to the CJCs won't happen unless local authorities desire that.

Absolutely. There will be no shifting of responsibilities unless those requests came from local authorities themselves. I absolutely see this more about devolving power from the Welsh Government to the CJCs than anything else. As of yet, we haven't had requests for large areas of new responsibility to be devolved, because this is very much an early days scenario that we're seeing in terms of the CJCs. It's important that they're able to get up and running and find their feet before we really start to have those conversations about future responsibilities. 

Minister, corporate joint committees, like my colleague Sam Rowlands has said, are basically Government reorganisation by the back door. They were rejected by the WLGA leaders group because they create unnecessary layers of costly bureaucracy and they take decision making further away from local communities, which undermines the whole process of devolution of powers to our local communities and councils. The one established in mid Wales is going to have a say over strategic planning. Minister, local communities and the directly elected councillors should and must be able to have a say over strategic planning and the future development plans for their communities. So, Minister, will you do all you can to ensure that local communities will have a voice on CJCs and that they will not be pushed further away from decision making that affects their communities? Diolch, Llywydd.

I would just repeat what I said in answer to Sam Rowlands earlier about the importance of public accountability and the fact that a CJC will be required to encourage participation in its decision making by members of the public, ensuring that they are able to contribute to the shaping of the services, which is absolutely important, and I know that CJCs will want to do that work in any case. I think that there is a very strong argument that some functions are better delivered on that regional footprint. The work to improve the economic prosperity of an area is one obvious example, as is transport planning, which clearly should be done on that larger footprint. So, I think that the areas for which the CJCs are responsible are the right ones, and I think that they will make a real difference in terms of being more coherent and allowing decisions to be taken that benefit people in those areas.