Welsh Labour

Speeches and questions

Speeches and questions in Plenary and in committees, newest first. The Llywydd's and deputies' chairing of Plenary is left out.

2,194 speeches and questions

16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
I beg your pardon. Yes, I’ve raised them with Lord Bellamy; it’s raised at every opportunity, and the message is there. Part of the reason why there hasn’t been movement is because of this sort of—I think it’s more political than legal. That is, we have an…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
Well, can I just say first of all that we haven’t always had representation, if we take the Supreme Court and then its predecessor, the House of Lords? David Lloyd Jones was a very specific exception, and I think represented the fact that representations have…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
I have. I have discussed it with legal practitioners as well, and I discussed it, in fact, when the report was being prepared with Lord Bellamy, and again, more recently. I suppose, what is disappointing about it is that there hasn't been a grass-roots…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
So, that is there at the moment. In terms of the other engagements, they're the ones we've mentioned: the work that goes on on the blueprints, the family drug and alcohol court pilot and the fact that there will almost certainly be engagement in respect of…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
Well, look, the first thing is that the inter-ministerial group will be a significant step forward in actually doing that, with Governments working together, because you'll be able to raise things now in a forum that we don't have at the moment, other than…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
Thank you for the question. I suppose one of the reasons we produced the 'Delivering Justice' paper was partly to give as comprehensive as possible a picture of what was happening in the justice scene. What I felt after the Thomas commission's report was that…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
I think it is about, as much as anything, what our contribution is to the broader equality agenda, which goes into many other areas—economic, in terms of training, apprenticeships, the whole scale of so many of the Welsh Government's aspects that are actually…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
—because you need that broader number of persons in terms of the capacity to scrutinise.
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
I think we do have that level of transparency, and the transparency is also growing as the work we do continues to grow. So, I'm satisfied with that. I'm also satisfied, I think, that we probably have more transparency than we've ever had within the Senedd on…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
—but where those individual portfolios come in, of course, as a committee, you have the opportunity to scrutinise those Ministers specifically on those, so the Minister for Social Justice in terms of those particular areas. So, beyond, I suppose, the…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
No. I'd rather not, if you don't mind. [Laughter.] No, I think the answer is that it is a co-ordinating role—
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
Absolutely.
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
Well, it is. In many ways, chairing it is a co-ordinating role, and the importance of chairing it and having that sub-committee is you bring all those elements together. So you have all the Ministers with their individual portfolios together to discuss the…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
No. I suppose all I am signalling is that those pressures are intense—that we have protected and we are maintaining, but the pressures aren't there for the beginning of the year and then they disappear. We're going through an environment that's very…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
I don't think it does, because, as you know, most of the justice elements that certainly I'm involved in are predominantly staffing costs and some research and so on, as was said earlier. But, of course, the devolution of justice is very much an ongoing…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
Not yet, but I've got a feeling that the next year is going to involve lots of hard decisions.
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
I don't think the hardest decision we've had to make has yet potentially materialised. I think the decisions may well come depending upon what the future pressures might be. I think, because of the approach the Welsh Government has adopted in terms of the…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
At the moment, there is no impact, in the sense that we will continue to support the numbers that we have. The impact on communities may well be coming in the extent to which we can manage and cope with the scale of demand, for example, for single advice…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
Really, the data is, for example, the past performance. For example, if I take the single advice fund again as an example, we know how many cases there are that we've had in, we know how much money's been recovered, we know what the scale of the debt problem…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
There is nothing that we have deprioritised. There are things that we have worked to retain, and we've retained by keeping budgets at the same as what we planned to do, but what we haven't been able to do is, of course, to take into account what the impact…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
Yes, I do, and I believe we will deliver on that legislative programme.
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
Well, no, I have to answer it by saying what we have is we have the budget that is set in terms of the functions that we have. Where the challenges come might be, for example, in the area of retained EU law. We're not quite sure precisely what that is going…
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
What we do have—. I think perhaps I'd turn the question round a bit in answering it—
16 January 2023Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Welsh Government's Draft Budget for 2023-24 (spending in relation to justice) and general scrutiny: Evidence Session with Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
Thank you for the question, and of course, you'll appreciate it's an incredibly difficult environment financially. The Welsh Government's budget overall has been impacted not only by long periods of austerity up till now, but potentially also significant…
11 January 2023Plenary
Topical Questions
Thank you for those comments and I do agree with them, and I have the greatest of respect for the Communication Workers Union, and also for those postmen who deliver through all the bad weather. You look at the weather we have now and we have them out there…