Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:07 pm on 5 July 2022.
Llywydd, can I thank the leader of the opposition for the constructive way in which he has engaged with the statement this afternoon, and for his offers of further constructive engagement on a number of the Bills that we'll bring in front of the Senedd?
He was right to point out a gap in my statement, because I didn't refer, I realise now, to backbench legislation and, indeed, committee legislation in the previous Senedd, which also adds to the legislative load that Members of the Senedd have to carry. The Welsh Government will continue to engage with those Bills that are brought forward in that way. We don't always agree, as he pointed out in relation to the autism Bill, where we believe that our national autism service and other measures provide a more effective way of improving services to people with autism, as we debated during the introduction of that Bill.
In relation now, briefly, Llywydd, to the particular questions that the leader of the opposition raised, on the clean air Bill, we will intend to include ambitious air-quality targets within the Bill and to place them within a more robust regulatory framework, so that those targets can be properly supported.
As far as the agriculture Bill is concerned, I think when I mentioned it in my statement, the first thing I said about the agriculture Bill is that it would support sustainable food production here in Wales. And our plans for the reform of agriculture have always had sustainable food production as an integral part of the way in which we see the future of agriculture here in Wales. And, as we have discussed, indeed, previously, the crisis in Ukraine does shine a new spotlight on the need to be able to have a supply of food available without the need to import, and that has been influencing our thinking. But, the Bill will continue to provide a framework for supporting farmers in Wales, both for the work they do in sustainable food production, but also in those other public goods that the public is prepared to find money to support. I look forward to being at the Royal Welsh Show and being able to discuss these things alongside the Minister.
Our approach in the single-use plastics Bill will be more akin to the one that Andrew R.T. Davies mentioned in England. It will specify a list of specific single-use plastics, the use of which will no longer be possible in Wales. There were 60 such examples identified in the consultation, and we will not bring all 60 of them before the Senedd in the Bill, but we will hope to include a regulatory power for Ministers to be able to add further single-use plastics to that list as the evidence around them matures, and those will then be scrutinised through the Senedd's secondary legislation procedures.
As far as coal tip safety is concerned, the essence of the Bill will be to establish a new supervisory authority—that is what the report of the Law Commission advised us—to oversee a new regime to make sure that there are proper management arrangements in place for the highest category of tips—those tips that have the highest risk to the communities in which they are to be found—and then to compile and maintain a new national asset register. We've learnt a huge amount more than we knew two years ago, when this work began, about the number of coal tips in Wales and where they are to be found. There are over 2,500 disused coal tips across Wales, now with 327 of them in the highest category D designation. We want to make sure that we build on all of that work by having that national register for the future, which in future can go beyond coal tips, because there are many other forms of spoil tipped in Wales, particularly from metal mines. We won't be able, in the first instance, to extend the Bill to the wider range of tips that cause concern in Wales, but we will, through the Bill, open up the way in which that can be done in the future.
As far as local government finance is concerned, we will not be able to bring forward in this Senedd term proposals for a fundamentally different form of local government finance. I wish we were in a position to do that, but the depth of work that is required to move from the current council tax system to a different system—a local income tax system or a land valuation system—is so significant that the background work to enable that to happen will need to continue not just as it was in the previous Senedd term, but during this Senedd term as well. What we will look to do in that Bill is to make sure that we modernise the council tax system, that we make it as fair as we can make it, and that it should become more progressive in both its design and its delivery.
And finally, Llywydd, as far as Senedd reform is concerned and the boundary issue, it will identify boundaries for the 2006 election; it will establish a boundary commission for Wales—