Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 1:56 pm on 30 March 2022.

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Photo of Lee Waters Lee Waters Labour 1:56, 30 March 2022

Well, after more than 10 years of austerity, there isn't a single public body in Wales that has the capacity that they would wish to have, and I think that is just a fact that we have to deal with. NRW is no different from Conwy council or from any other public body, and we, all of us, have to live within our means. There are discussions going on with NRW about how we prioritise. For example, in the hitherto referred to deep dive that I did on woodland creation, one of the things we identified there is that there were 82 people where part of their jobs on woodland creation was about erecting barriers to planting trees. So, that wasn't a capacity issue; that was how we use the capacity we have to align it to our policy outcomes. What we want to do in that case is to recalibrate that effort so that those same people are focused on pursing a different policy outcome. It's not about extra people; it's about using the people you have in a different way. So, there's that discussion to have with NRW across the piece, but there's also prioritisation to have. We've done a baseline budget exercise with them. We're going through that with them now as part of the budget-setting exercise, and we're having other discussions with them about how we treat different forms of spending in order to enable them to do the task that we all want them to do.