Questions now from the party leaders. The leader of the Conservatives, Andrew R.T. Davies. 

Thank you, Presiding Officer. First Minister, last week, the former chairman of the Betsi Cadwaldr University Health Board wrote an opinion piece for the press. He's also written to you, to which he says he hasn't had a response; he might have, by the time I'm asking you this question, had that response. But some of the assertions within that opinion piece do deserve a public answer from you, as leader of the Welsh Government, notably the concerns that were raised by him and the board members with the health Minister and the director general of the NHS here in Wales back in September, when he raised long-standing concerns and issues that simply went unaddressed—his words, not mine. Why did the Welsh Government not respond to these concerns and support the board at the time? 

Well, Llywydd, I don't accept at all that those things went unnoticed, because the Minister and officials were in very regular dialogue with the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, including the board. The board has responsibilities. You don't discharge your responsibilities simply by telling somebody else that you've got a problem. You have an obligation, as a board, to address the issues that are within your legal area of responsibilities. So, while there was undoubtedly a dialogue, and while the Minister and officials here were always responding to concerns that were raised with the Welsh Government, to simply say, 'We told the Welsh Government about that', as though that is the full extent of your responsibility, I simply don't think that that is the way the system is ever intended to operate. 

I don't believe that was the point that the chairman was making in his opinion piece. Bear in mind, this was a chairman who was a former chief constable, had served the public for 30 years plus, and then chose to do another public service role by being chair of the health board that covers the whole of north Wales. And he made, in his column in the press last week, that clear categorisation that he was not getting the support from the Welsh Government. He raised this as chair with the Welsh Government, which is the sponsoring body of any health board, because they send the cash and they set the priorities for the health board. I take it that you say that the former chair is not speaking the truth when he says that his concerns and those of the board were not responded to back in September, because that is quite an assertion from you, First Minister, if you believe that the former chair is seeking to mislead public opinion by saying that the Welsh Government stood back and didn't support the board when those concerns and long-standing issues were raised with the Minister and the director general as well.

Well, Llywydd, I think the leader of the opposition must allow me to answer his questions, rather than to tell me in his question what I have said. It's my answers that lie on the record, rather than his interpretation of them. First of all, let me say that I do share what the leader of the opposition said about the many years of distinguished public service that the former chair of the board had rendered in north Wales, and I include in that the service that he gave as chair of the board.

The assessment of the Minister and the Welsh Government was that the reports that we had received from independent bodies of the dysfunctional nature of the board could not simply be allowed to lie there without action being taken. That is the culmination of a long dialogue between the board and the Welsh Government, a dialogue in which the Welsh Government took action time after time in order to support the board: significant additional investment above and beyond what its population share would have justified through the normal formula, intervention through national programmes, giving advice, attempting to support the board in the efforts it was making to improve services. Nothing in what the Minister decided should be read as indicating that the board and its chair were not making efforts to put things right. It is simply that the conclusion of independent oversight was that those efforts were not succeeding and that it would have been impossible to put the board as currently, or as then constituted, in a position where it could successfully address those challenges. That is why action was taken. It was necessary action and it will lead, I believe, to a better platform for improvement in the future. 

First Minister, my question was relatively straightforward: why didn't the Welsh Government offer the support when it was requested back last September? I've used two of my three questions and I don't feel that we've advanced any further forward in trying to find out why the Minister or the director general did not respond to that direct—and these are the words of the chairman—that direct escalation of matters to the Welsh Government. That stands on the record, those are his comments, not my comments. I've relayed them to you, and we don't seem to have made much progress towards finding an explanation for why Welsh Government did not respond to those comments. But, you've identified the audit report as being the flashpoint for intervention by the Welsh Government and making sure that the board changed and the chairman was removed. In the same article, the chairman highlighted that there were, in his words, clandestine moves to recruit replacement board members to form a new board at least four weeks prior to the publication of the audit report. So, if this clandestine recruitment was going on, can you today tell us when the recruitment process began to find new board members, even though the existing board was in place? And what would that do to give confidence that the Government was working with the then board to rectify matters in north Wales?

Well, Llywydd, let me return to the leader of the opposition's first questions, because he asked what support the Welsh Government provided to the board. So, let me put them on the record again. The Welsh Government supported the board through financial assistance—£82 million over and above what the board would otherwise have had available to it. Secondly, the Welsh Government corralled a set of professional advice, available to the board through our national programmes, to make sure that the efforts that were being made could draw on expertise from beyond the board itself.

Thirdly, there was a pattern of continuous monitoring of the board. That's the nature of the relationship between the Welsh Government and the board, and senior civil servants here were involved in that continuous dialogue.

Fourthly, the delivery unit—the arm of the Welsh Government that assists boards across Wales in addressing those difficult issues that boards face. The resources of the delivery unit were made available to the board as well. Any idea that the Welsh Government simply stood back and allowed the board to flounder would not be borne out by that continuous set of engagements [Interruption.] Well, I'm explaining to the leader of the opposition why I don't accept that the board was simply left to its own devices. It absolutely and clearly was not.

As to the responsible actions that the Minister took in assessing her options, given the advice that had come from those independent sources, when the Minister was considering whether or not to remove some members of the board, it would have been utterly irresponsible to have done that without giving some thought to what would follow. Imagine what the leader of the opposition would be saying to me today if the Minister had removed the board and had no plan at all for how those legal responsibilities were to be fulfilled. In planning ahead and assessing the options available to the Welsh Government, the Minister absolutely properly asked the question, 'If the current incumbents are not to be there, do we have credible other individuals able to fulfil those legal responsibilities?' It would have been a dereliction of her duty had she not done that.

Leader of Plaid Cymru, Adam Price.

Diolch, Llywydd. On Thursday, Ofwat is due to announce its draft decision on whether the plan to extract up to 180 million litres of water a day from Llyn Efyrnwy in Powys and transfer it to the south-east of England is to proceed to the next stage of its rapid investment programme. Do you think it's right, First Minister, that a water regulator answerable to the UK Secretary of State should be making decisions on what should happen to water in Wales? Do you think that Thames Water, which loses 635 million litres a day through leakages, should be able to make up for its own failings by accessing our own water resources? And do you think it's right that Thames Water should be planning to pay just over £5 million for the use of this precious resource when we in Wales pay among the highest water bills anywhere in the UK?

Well, Llywydd, I believe that the position may have moved ahead a little today. I am relying simply on a newspaper report of the end of this morning. The Guardian is reporting that the Environment Agency has turned down the Thames Water plan and instructed it to return to the drawing board and to come forward with a better plan, including the plan to extract water from Wales via the River Severn. The Guardian reports that the Environment Agency has told Thames Water that it is not convinced that this is a viable solution and that it will not be prepared to endorse the plan that Thames Water has advanced so far. And it's for the many reasons that the leader of Plaid Cymru set out in his question. Thames Water, instead of producing a plan that relied on remarkable ideas, it seemed to me, extracting water from the Thames itself and replacing it with sewage-polluted water, and taking water from Lake Vyrnwy, that it should do two things. First of all, it should focus on reducing demand for water. We have, in the United Kingdom, some of the highest daily usages of water per head of the population of anywhere. We use on average 141 litres per day. In Belgium, a country just across the channel, the average is 95 litres a day. So, the first thing that Thames Water should be doing is to come forward with credible plans to reduce the use of water, a precious resource that we don't regard preciously enough. And then, as the Environment Agency is being reported as saying, it needs to fix the leaks in its own system—leaks which, if they were to be fixed, would almost match entirely its plan for extracting water out of the Severn and backfilling that through drawing water out of Welsh resources. It looks as though some outbreak of sense may have occurred, and that would be very welcome.

As to what would have happened had the plan gone ahead, then, of course, there are rights for Welsh Ministers in all of this—rights to intervene, rights in relation to the approval of any plan, and Welsh Ministers here would have exercised those rights very much with the points that the leader of Plaid Cymru has made in mind.

I suppose, if you forgive me, First Minister, this is one leak, I think, that we would welcome, isn't it? But, of course, that's one of the three regulators that have been quoted. There is the Drinking Water Inspectorate, and it's Ofwat that will be publishing the formal response on Thursday. We await to see what those two other bodies—. But the point stands, of course, that we have three regulators here, which are answerable to the Secretary of State, making a decision, and hopefully they'll make the right decision, but it's not a decision made here in Wales. Now, Wales already exports 320 million litres a day of water to England from cwm Elan, and Welsh Water receives just £7 million from Severn Trent Water for that as part of an agreement they were obliged to accept in 1984. It's an agreement that will last for almost 100 years and possibly 100 years after that. The Welsh Government, the Minister has said, has no formal powers to change the terms of that agreement, but you are considering how trading agreements can be revised to better reflect current and future circumstances. What does that mean in practice, First Minister, to the price of water currently now being supplied from Wales to England?

Well, I don't think it probably does mean anything actually here today because there are existing commercial, contractual relationships in place that govern the price of water today. The leader of Plaid Cymru is right to say that the Welsh Government has a direct interest in how those contracts are shaped for the future. I do not, myself, sign up to a nationalist view of water; I don't object to English people drinking Welsh water. But what I do say is that the economic, environmental and wider benefits for Wales must be demonstrated in any relationship in which the natural resources of Wales are used to the benefit of other citizens in the United Kingdom, and in any renegotiation of those contractual arrangements, then the price that is paid for that precious natural resource must reflect the value of that resource to Wales as well as allowing its beneficial use for other UK citizens.

That's the point, isn't it? It's about fairness, isn't it? The current agreement doesn't reflect a fair price, particularly when Welsh Water customers face the second highest bills in the whole of England and Wales. Now, it's six years since the UK Government promised to transfer the power to Wales over all of our water resources and infrastructure, not just those controlled by the two Welsh water companies. But to date, the provisions in the Wales Act 2017, which would have given effect to this, have not been brought into force by the UK Secretary of State. Why is that? And is the practical effect of this that the Welsh Government cannot, at the moment, legislate for example to regulate the use of Welsh water by United Utilities, who own Llyn Efyrnwy? So the water could be transferred in the future, but the power is not.

And to the point that you earlier made, can you just say a little bit about the veto power that the Welsh Government would have under those circumstances, given that the transfer of power that was promised six years ago hasn't actually happened yet?

Well, Llywydd, it's a very good question indeed that the leader of Plaid Cymru raises, because the 2017 Act was a Conservative Government Act. It wasn't an Act made here, it wasn't an Act that reflected the policy preferences of the Welsh Government; it was an Act that a Conservative Secretary of State took through the House of Commons and put on the statute book. What happened, I believe, is the general election of 2019 and the arrival of a very different regime at Westminster. The history of devolution is that, from 1999 to 2019, under Governments of different political persuasion at Westminster, it was possible to have rational discussions about where powers best lay, and that's why the 2017 Act, the result of very significant negotiations over the water issue, allowed for the transfer of those responsibilities. Since 2019, we have faced a Government in Westminster that doesn't respond to issues on that rational basis; it responds to them on the entirely ideological basis that devolution was a mistake and that the work of the Westminster Government is to roll it back in the opposite direction wherever it can, and quite certainly never to transfer new powers to Scotland or Wales, even when it was a Conservative Government that had made the arrangements that would have allowed that to take place.

So, that's my answer to the leader of Plaid Cymru's question: that, when we were dealing with a reasonable and rational Government, albeit of a Conservative nature, we made the progress that the 2017 Act embodied; all of that has been at a standstill over the last four years.

As far as the rights of Welsh Ministers, water companies wholly or mainly in Wales must follow the Welsh Government's guiding principles, principles that we have published and set out, and then Welsh Ministers have a statutory role in the sign-off process for any plans. So, while the powers are not in our hands in the coherent way that we would have wished to see and that the 2017 Act would have assisted, we're not without powers in this area, and, if the reports from this morning don't turn out to be true and further regulators take a different view, then the Welsh Government will use the powers we have to defend Welsh interests in this area.