Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:02 pm on 8 February 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:02, 8 February 2022

Well, Llywydd, a number of points there. It's important to put on the record the fact that up to half of the 44 cases investigated by the Royal College of Surgeons long predate the reorganisation of the services; these are cases that span from 2014 to 2021. The Member, I think, does a disservice, again this week, in mixing up those two issues together. The way in which services have been redrawn, so that specialist services are concentrated in one place, was the right decision; that is not challenged in either of the Royal College of Surgeons' reports and, indeed, the royal college supported that plan. What is unacceptable and deeply disappointing is the neglect of basic standards of professional practice that are revealed in the report. 

I was the Minister that placed Betsi Cadwaladr into special measures. I remember being told by Members on the floor of the Chamber that that was convenient for political purposes, just as I'm used to other parties trying to claim that the decision to bring the board out of special measures was somehow politically motivated. It was, Llywydd, simply the result of the process that is in place.

I cannot give the Member the guarantees that he asks for this afternoon, because those are not political decisions. Now, he may think that he, as a politician, has the answers and that we should simply rely on his political judgment, but that is not the way in which those decisions are made in Wales. There will be a tripartite meeting. The tripartite meeting will make recommendations and then, indeed, it will be Ministers who decide whether and how to act on them. But that's how the system works. It's not by people designing solutions on the floor of the Senedd; it's by taking the expert judgment of that rounded tripartite meeting, and then Ministers taking the responsibility for acting on them.