Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:23 pm on 28 March 2023.
With respect, I think the Member is being consistent in his broad scepticism over free ports, but I think he's judging them on a model that has existed previously, and not the one we've been talking about, the one where we've got into the prospectus that everyone has to bid against and succeed against where fair work is not negotiable, it is part of the expectation that you have to deliver; where not regressing on our environmental standards is part of what has to be delivered. The economic contract that everyone will have to sign up to is part of what has to be agreed to. So, it's a very different type of economic development tool, and, in the next stage, we're going to have more on how we measure a baseline of activity and understand, from each of the bids, how they can demonstrate that they will grow, not displace, the economy. That was one of the concerns we had at the outline of this process, and it's a fair one, as well. But, of course, the seed capital and the devolved reliefs that are coming in have actually got to help deliver much more significant investment—not just sums of money spent, but what that will mean in terms of the number of jobs and the quality of jobs we want to see created.
Now, part of that will be in areas of devolved levers—so, non-domestic rates and our understanding in conversations with the free port bids around how that will be deployed, what that will look like, and what we expect in return. So, there is an active conversation to be had that we'll go through in the next few phases of the process.
And when it comes to trade unions, it was a specific area that we wanted inserted into the prospectus, so there's a workers' collective forum mentioned—that's a work council by any other name—and the challenge and the strength in the trade union voice is how successfully they recruit and they organise. We'll be really clear that the sort of union-busting activities, the sort of awful employment practices, that we saw with DP World when they sacked all of the P&O Ferries staff is exactly the sort of thing that we won't tolerate in Wales. The challenge is whether partners in the UK Government are prepared to follow through, because they appeared, in public, to be outraged when all those workers were unlawfully sacked. There's a challenge now on how they choose to behave, but I'll be very clear that all the devolved levers we have will be used to make sure that people bid against what was said in the prospectus, and we'll then be looking to see how we can hold people to those, including the way that devolved levers and incentives are used.