Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:59 pm on 28 March 2023.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:59, 28 March 2023

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.