The Secretary of State for Wales (Simon Hart)
I echo the tributes to the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) for bringing this debate to the House—I also thank the Backbench Business Committee—and regarding the fact that since we last met he has announced that he will be standing down at the next election, whenever that might be. I join in and support his warm comments about Ukraine. I do not think there is a Member of the House with whom those comments would not have resonated, whether here or watching these affairs on television.
However, there the agreement may come to a rather abrupt end. The hon. Member for Caerphilly mentioned two very important subjects: the shared prosperity fund and the cost of living. On the shared prosperity fund, I think that he and other Members, on both sides of the House, will be pleased that the long wait for clarity and publication is coming to an end, and there will be further details available any day now. I am conscious that I may have said that before on previous occasions, but one day I will be absolutely right, and that day is soon. Like other Members who have raised similar issues, he made perfectly justifiable comments about mutual respect and a desire to minimise petty squabbles—an ambition somewhat thwarted by subsequent speeches—but that only works so long as the shared ambition is about outcomes rather than about power.
Simon Hart
I will not give way for a bit, but I anticipate that the hon. Gentleman will want to intervene when I get on to his speech.
On the hon. Member for Caerphilly’s points about the cost of living, all of us representing seats in Wales will have examples not dissimilar to the ones he has raised in respect of this particularly difficult challenge. While the UK Government have attempted, and continue to attempt, to intervene in all the ways that he suggested so as to be as generous, rapid, thorough, fair and humanitarian as possible, the Treasury must of course balance that with trying to control the inflationary effect of those significant interventions, which, if allowed to run rampant, would end up with greater hardship being suffered by the very families that we both agree need the help that we can all provide.
Wayne David
I would respectfully point out to the Secretary of State that inflation is already very high and that at the same time we have a cost of living crisis for some of our poorest people. The two things go together.
Simon Hart
The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. That is precisely why we have to take considerable care with the measures that we are taking, because if we do not, then the already quite pressing inflationary pressures can only get worse. We are in the same place on that.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd West (Mr Jones) rightly introduced early on in the debate a tribute to our soldiers of the Royal Welsh currently stationed in Estonia. That was a sobering and passionate reminder of the role that they are playing and have played in many other pressures facing the nation over the past few months and years. He mentioned, as did others, the potential in the renewables sector, especially in north Wales. He is right to have the ambitions, as is our hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Virginia Crosbie), for large-scale and small-scale nuclear at Wylfa. The other day, I met representatives of the floating offshore wind sector to talk about the potential in the Celtic sea, particularly off the west coast of Pembrokeshire. There are unbelievably exciting prospects in that regard, so we need to aim high. When I refer to the comments of the hon. Member for Gordon (Richard Thomson) about devolution of the Crown Estate, I will explain why that would limit our ambitions rather than enhance them.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd West mentioned the tidal lagoon at Colwyn Bay. That was an argument well made. When visiting north Wales with the Prime Minister the other day, we looked out across the potential site for that. I might add that the Prime Minister has been to that particular part of Wales more often than the First Minister, in fairness to him. That is how seriously we take levelling up and the potential in that part of Wales. I resonate with the comments that my right hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd West made about the Mersey Dee Alliance. That can be just as easily extended to mid Wales and its relationship with the west midlands as it can to south and west Wales and their relationship to Gloucester, Swindon, London, the south-west of England and beyond, as represented by the Western Gateway.
I quickly turn to the comments of the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), who seems to have generated more use of my highlighter pen than any other contribution today, which is probably what he intended to achieve, so full marks for having done that. He made some interesting comments about leadership, most of which I had some sympathy with, but in his glowing tribute to the First Minister, it struck me that if the First Minister’s choice of leadership had been successful, we would be confronting our problems across the globe with the potential of the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) as Prime Minister. I am not sure that would necessarily have provided the leadership and robust response to Vladimir Putin.
Kevin Brennan
On the issue of leadership and mutual respect, will the Secretary of State take this opportunity to clear up confusion in the House? Is he the leader of the Welsh Conservatives, as according to the former Leader of the House, the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), or is it somebody else?
Simon Hart
As the hon. Gentleman knows, the leader of our Conservative group in Cardiff is Andrew RT Davies, and the leader of the Conservative party is Boris Johnson. The hon. Gentleman should know that by now, I would have thought.
I have to resist the hon. Gentleman’s attempt to talk about an English approach or a Welsh approach to the covid response. If anything epitomised a UK approach, it was our response to the covid pandemic, and what better example of that than the vaccination programme, which was originally conceived, researched, contracted, delivered and paid for by the UK Government. It was then distributed, with some professionalism, I might add, by a combination of the Welsh Government—tick that box, we can credit our opponents when necessary and appropriate—with the huge help of the Ministry of Defence, as represented rather conveniently by the Minister for Defence Procurement, my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Jeremy Quin), who is sitting next to me on the Front Bench, and NHS Wales. The suggestion that there was either an English approach or a Welsh approach is demonstrably untrue.
I add one last thing. The hon. Gentleman made a rather unnecessarily snide comment about integrity, but when it comes to promises to the electorate, the First Minister and the leader of Plaid Cymru both said just before the Senedd elections that the one thing they would not do is get into bed with each other. Within months of making that pledge to voters in Wales, they did precisely the opposite.
My hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Simon Baynes), with rather good timing—it was a relief at that moment—decided to celebrate everything that is good about Wales, having been treated for a few minutes before that with apparently everything that is bad. I thought that his message to the outside world about what Wales has to offer, and in particular what his part of Wales has to offer, and the strength, value and opportunities that the Union presents, was incredibly well-timed and reminded me of the visit I paid with him to the Trevor Basin back along, where we were able to see for ourselves the joy on the faces of the people who had received funding courtesy of some of the new initiatives from the UK Government to engage in projects that they have hitherto not been able to do.
The hon. Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) rightly made some powerful comments about how we should be helping communities in need at this time, but she went on to mention one or two things that make that more difficult in terms of the relationship with the Welsh Government. The solutions to the very problems that she rightly pointed out are not necessarily always achieved just by dishing out cash. I do not think that the Labour party has a remotely compassionate record to look back on. The undeniable truth is that, every time a Labour Administration have held office for goodness knows how many generations, more people were unemployed at the end than at the beginning. That is nothing to be proud of; it is no sign of compassion at all.
We want to be as fair and as reasonable as we can to as wide a number of people in vulnerable positions as possible not only by making sensible, fair and humane interventions but by creating the best circumstances for job creation and proper well-paid sustaining jobs across the whole of Wales. That is compassionate and that is levelling up. It is not simply about handing out cash, tying people down into the benefits system and offering no hope of being able to move on from that position to a different state of their lives.
My hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Craig Williams), again, echoed the armed forces’ contribution and made some great comments about the levelling-up fund and how Powys County Council had never been able to qualify for funding of that nature before. I thought he was going to launch into a lengthy speech, because I have heard it often before, on the subject of the Montgomery canal.
Simon Hart
I do not think I will.
That initiative, provided courtesy of the UK Government, unleashed private sector funding at the same time. My hon. Friend put his finger on what devolution really means. It is not whether power is held in Cardiff or Westminster; it is about how many people in frontline decision-making positions, who live and feel the opportunity and challenge every day, are brought into the decision-making process in the way we have in Powys—and I hope it will be reflected across the rest of Wales as well.
I was overjoyed that the speech of the hon. Member for Neath (Christina Rees), unlike others from the Opposition, did not talk down the fortunes of our country, but talked up the record of her great friend Hywel Francis. He was the first and about the only Member of her party who came up to me after my maiden speech in 2010 and, probably through gritted teeth, congratulated me on what I had said.
Christina Rees
I am glad that the Secretary of State is in such a celebratory mood. I am sure that he is as excited as I am that the global centre of rail excellence is coming to Wales, in fact to Onllwyn in my constituency. When will the Government release the funds so that we can get on with it?
Simon Hart
I am delighted that the hon. Lady is delighted that we have been able to put £30 million into that project. That shows what levelling up is capable of and it shows that collaboration and co-operation—all the things that apparently do not happen—are happening in her constituency. I cannot tell her exactly when, but I will find somebody who can put her out of her misery. Her reference to Siân James reminded me of many happy hours, which other hon. Members might have shared, in Patagonia on a trip of the Welsh Affairs Committee courtesy of my absent hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (David T. C. Davies). I can see the odd smirk of Opposition Members who also remember it.
Nearly finally—somebody once said to sprinkle one’s speech liberally with “And finally” to retain a sense of optimism in those listening—the hon. Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden), who I have known for a long time and who I like to think of as a friend, made a speech that started brilliantly and ended disappointingly. It almost sounded as though the first half was written by her and the second half was written by a Labour policy wonk obsessed with scoring cheap political points.
The good points were brilliant, however, and I very much take on board the hon. Lady’s comments about the visa situation and the spirit of co-operation with local authorities. There was a call this afternoon between the UK Government and the Welsh Government on the subject of Ukraine refugees, so that level of co-operation is already in place. In response to her point, I hope that she will be as pleased as I am that we have now recruited 479 additional police officers in Wales. It is however difficult to get the oxygen into the hospitality sector, which she rightly raised, when the Welsh Government are about to impose a tourism tax and a second home tax on people who like to go and spend money in the hospitality sector in Wales.
The hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams) made a warm tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Fay Jones), which this week of all weeks was much appreciated, and I know it will be appreciated by her, too. When it comes to additional bank holidays, I have to say that the lobbying I tend to listen to the most is not from politicians, I regret to say, but from the business community in Wales. I will probably now have a few emails within a few minutes, but I have yet to hear any such requests from anybody who is actually striving to make their business work, to encourage investment into Wales and to create long-lasting jobs. The last thing they have been knocking on my door and asking for is an additional bank holiday. They have asked for lots of other things, but that is not one of them.
On the question of the Crown Estate, and to deal with the comments of the hon. Member for Gordon, I have to say—this is similar to my last answer—that very few people who are, I hope, on the cusp of investing significant sums of money and creating many thousands of very good, long-lasting and well-paid jobs in Wales are saying to me that the blockage, or the only thing stopping them doing so, is devolving the Crown Estate. It is quite the opposite. In fact, I think the potential opportunity for income to come into Wales is enhanced by not devolving the Crown Estate, and that is the official Government position.
I loved the quick whip around the world of rugby from the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi). It reminded me of how many members of the national side came from Bancyfelin in one particular game, and although I cannot remember the number, I think it exceeded the number who came from Gower. However, we can argue about that another time. I would love to meet her to talk about the youth element of the sport. That is a source of frustration and ambition, as far as I am concerned, but it is of course devolved. We discovered that when we tried to get some money for the WRU at the beginning of the pandemic, only to get sucked into the whole devolution settlement and it became almost impossible to do a reverse Barnett and get in the money that was necessary.
Tonia Antoniazzi
I appreciate the Secretary of State’s comments about sport being devolved, but I would like to draw his attention to my main request, which was that he press the WRU for the release of its report last year on the review of women’s rugby. That is my key ask.
Simon Hart
Absolutely, and when we undoubtedly meet in Cardiff for a rugby-based evening, I think in a couple of weeks’ time, we can with any luck carry on that conversation.
The hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) made some strong comments about culture, but again failed to mention that this is a devolved area and that the investment she referred to was brought to her courtesy of the UK Government’s investment in the cultural sector, Barnettised and made available for those very opportunities in her own constituency. I was surprised she did not mention—I am sure it was an oversight—the £5.3 million that the UK Government have put into the Muni in Pontypridd, which I have visited twice, or the £20 million that her local authority, Rhondda Cynon Taf, has successfully bid for under that particular scheme. Anybody who points a pork barrel politics finger at me gets promptly referred to the hon. Lady, whose local authority came out of that process better than any other in Wales.
And finally, the hon. Member for Cardiff North (Anna McMorrin) mentioned random acts of kindness—that was her expression—which gave me a sense of false hope, I suppose, about what was coming next. If we are to be able to operate with the Welsh Government, local authorities and other stakeholders in the form she described, we somehow have to wean ourselves off this pathological inability to recognise that we all have a stake in this game, and not everything that goes well in Wales is down to Labour and not everything that goes badly is down to UK money. We have to prise ourselves off that ridiculously lazy generalisation if we are to make progress and if we are to be able to have a proper, mature conversation about how we level up Wales in the way that I think we both want to do. For all the warm words, there is never an opportunity missed to make a snide comment about some party political point that puts us all back to where we started. I do ask her, with the greatest respect, if we can possibly try to move ourselves away from that rather 1970s model of political exchange.
Anna McMorrin
I cannot let that rest while the right hon. Gentleman attacks my speech. Yes, it was about focusing on random acts of kindness within the Welsh people and the stark contrast with the current UK Government, who are damaging the Welsh people time after time after time. If we speak to my constituents, we hear that they do not get anything from the UK Government. The right hon. Gentleman speaks about outdated 1970s politics; he should speak to his own Prime Minister.
Simon Hart
I rest my case. My son is a constituent, so I will refer to him. It also might have been an oversight in the spirit of the warm relationship the hon. Lady and I are now forming that she has not mentioned the 9% increase in funding for S4C as a bastion of the Welsh language. [Interruption.] The hon. Lady looks astounded; this is a major contribution to our ambitions on the Welsh language.
Finally—last, and least—the hon. Member for Gordon referred to a number of what I thought were slightly predictable points around devolution. Again it reminded me of the fact that it is difficult to make the progress we all want if every single thing we debate in this House is seen through the prism of independence rather than the prism of jobs and ambition. The big difference between his country and our country is that in Wales 54% of people on average voted to leave the European Union back in 2016, and it is brave for somebody of the hon. Gentleman’s record in this area to suggest that somehow the voters of Wales were not bright enough to make a decision on this.
Richard Thomson
The Secretary of State is nothing if not prescient, on that point at least. Of course there may have been a slim majority in Wales for Brexit, but does he honestly think that has exempted Wales from any of the problems that have afflicted the rest of the UK from that, and if a referendum were held tomorrow would he truthfully expect that result again?
Simon Hart
The obvious statement to make in relation to the hon. Gentleman’s claim that somehow Wales and Scotland were not involved in the negotiations is that I was one of the lucky ones who had to sit and listen to his colleague Mike Russell putting the case, as he did loudly and persuasively in the numerous meetings we had on the Brexit negotiations. It is simply not correct to say that the devolved Administrations did not play a very full and active part in those discussions.
Today’s debate has had its moments of optimism, its moments of hope and many moments of respect for our friends and colleagues in Ukraine. I hope it has also served to show what we have in store on levelling up, and also the huge amount of funding. People sometimes question the amount of funding coming to Wales and make an erroneous comparison with what might have been the case had we remained in the European Union, but actually the numbers and the facts show that there is everything to be cheerful about. I want the relationship with local authorities and the Welsh Government to be positive, because if it is, and if we do not get strung up on the minutiae of power and instead concentrate on our important jobs and inward investment agenda and are prepared to enter those negotiations in the spirit intended, we have a real opportunity of the Welsh Government being able to demonstrate they are good and competent at what they do and the UK Government demonstrating we have an important strategic and economic role to play in Wales as well. That is the challenge that faces us, and today’s debate has enabled us to move just a few small steps towards achieving it.
Wayne David
This afternoon’s debate has been good and extremely worthwhile. It is particularly good that many Members referred to Ukraine and the solidarity the Welsh people are demonstrating to the people of Ukraine; I thank everyone for that.
My only hope is that the St David’s Day debate does not have to be applied for every year but becomes automatic. I ask the powers that be in Parliament for the St David’s Day debate to be a permanent feature of our parliamentary calendar.