, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Ministerial scrutiny session—The co-operation agreement
Well, Chair, very quickly, here are four of the things that we are doing in this challenging environment. First of all, paying the real living wage is a major commitment of this Government. It will cost £70 million in additional funding in the next financial…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Ministerial scrutiny session—The co-operation agreement
I'll just make a start; Adam will have things to add, I know. But this is one of the areas where that context for the work of the co-operation agreement has altered very significantly since the negotiations to come to an agreement were being carried out. When…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Ministerial scrutiny session—The co-operation agreement
It includes it in the sense that, as I said, Chair, in that co-ordination sense of the strategy, it will need to bring together the things that happen across the Government. Farming our land is the key driver here, paying farmers in the future to do the…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Ministerial scrutiny session—The co-operation agreement
There's a great deal of discussion between Lesley Griffiths, who leads for us on this, and the designated Member on those matters. Lesley is very well aware of that project, so certainly the lessons from that have been part of that discussion. The community…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Ministerial scrutiny session—The co-operation agreement
In everything that the Welsh Government does, the co-operation agreement plays its part, because in anything that we do that trespasses into, if that's the right word, the scope of the co-operation agreement, I am very clear with my ministerial colleagues…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Ministerial scrutiny session—The co-operation agreement
Just to repeat something I said earlier, it’s important to remember that the agreement is a three-year agreement, and not every aspect of it is going to be covered in the first year in an annual report, because some things will happen at the very end of the…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Ministerial scrutiny session—The co-operation agreement
Well, Chair, if you look at the broader sweep of devolution, then I would have said that, from 1999 to 2019, the flow was, to different extents at different times, in the direction of strengthening the responsibilities of the Senedd. And that was true under…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Ministerial scrutiny session—The co-operation agreement
Rachel will—. She's the keeper of the timetables for us.
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Ministerial scrutiny session—The co-operation agreement
Well, I'll take one turn and then Adam will. So, you will know that there are institutional mechanisms that we have set up, which we've declared publicly. They culminate in an oversight board that Adam and I both sit on, and that regularly discusses…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Ministerial scrutiny session—The co-operation agreement
Well, actually, I don't think that will be the biggest—. At least, it won't solve the problem, because if we have the catastrophic circumstances of a dash to the end of this calendar year to resolve all the issues that need to be attended to in retained EU…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Ministerial scrutiny session—The co-operation agreement
What I can from memory say definitely is that we have taken recently—. Sorry, just one step back—I have been trying more recently to try to organise Cabinet business on the basis of bringing together a set of papers that are linked with one another. Within…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Ministerial scrutiny session—The co-operation agreement
Well, Chair, first of all, look, I don't want to claim for a minute that the interim assessor is able to do all the things that we will want the regime to do in the end. I think Dr Llewelyn Jones has done very good work. I think she's very well regarded…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Ministerial scrutiny session—The co-operation agreement
Well, Chair, I welcome the letter; that's the first thing to say. The letter has many positive things to say about the record in relation to the environment here in Wales, and the letter does what you would expect campaigning groups to do: it tries to put…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Ministerial scrutiny session—The co-operation agreement
Thank you very much, Chair. So, Des Clifford is back with us for the session, and we're also joined by Rachel Garside-Jones. Rachel leads the unit that we have created to help us to co-operate on everything related to the co-operation agreement.
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Cost of Living
Yes, of course.
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Cost of Living
Well, Chair, this is being done as part of the education Minister's response to the report of the Children, Young People, and Education Committee and, indeed, the Finance Committee's recommendations that we should undertake an independent review of EMAs. That…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Cost of Living
Well, Chair, in our discussions with Plaid Cymru, as part of the co-operation agreement, and the influence that Plaid Cymru have in the budget-making process, you will see that we published a joint statement, that said that post the spring statement, the…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Cost of Living
Delyth Jewell is absolutely right; any of us who go to speak with school students will know that the impact of COVID and the impact of pressures on mental health do mean that there is a generation of young people—and it's not just in Wales; it's more…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Cost of Living
The plan to provide free school meals during the school holidays was an issue that came up in the COVID context. Of course, through that experience we've identified the importance of doing that for the benefit of children and families in poverty, and that's…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Cost of Living
As I tried to explain on Tuesday in First Minister's questions, I wouldn't put too much reliance on the UK Government's plans for things that will happen well after the expiry of the term of the current UK Government. I would describe these not as plans but…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Cost of Living
First of all, I completely understand the frustration of people finding that you take one form of transport and it arrives just after the other form of transport has left. But, actually, alignment does require you to have some control—or, at least…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Cost of Living
I know that the Deputy Minister for Climate Change and the Minister for education do meet regularly to talk about that interface between school transport and the more commercial bus services.
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Cost of Living
I believe that there are opportunities there that we should certainly look at. The sums of money, as Lee said, are much larger than probably most people realise. The challenges that are there in the bus industry are, in some ways, felt even more acutely in…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Cost of Living
You are already seeing it in parts of the rail industry, because Transport for Wales continues to offer a range of cheaper and sometimes flat fares. Children under the age of 11, for example, travel free when they travel with a fee-paying adult. So, it's not…
, Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister
Cost of Living
I'm not unattracted to the idea that you have a flat-rate low fare, but there are some very practical challenges that you have to think through before you embark on that, such as what would be the interaction between that and our policy of free bus travel for…
