Wales Bill

Debate between Baroness Finlay of Llandaff and Lord Balfe

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 10th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I have Amendment 82 in this group. It is a question, as my noble friend Lord Elystan-Morgan said, of flow. The problem for Wales is the flow of alcohol: Wales does not have the ability to control how that flow starts and how that supply chain moves. We in Wales are lumbered with the costs of alcohol abuse, both direct and indirect. There are direct costs in health and social care and indirect ones in damage to other people, either directly to another person or secondarily, through bereavement and so on. There is a real problem of culture around alcohol consumption in Wales. We should remember that while Scotland has the same culture of drinking, it has been given a degree of control. I fear that it is not always a pretty sight. Things have improved greatly but the Welsh Government does have to have the powers to do something about it.

There is another aspect of this that needs to be considered. We understand very little, really, about the way that alcohol interacts on the brain and on the reward centre, on people developing cravings. It is quite possible that the epigenetics mean that when you have a background culture of a family where there has been drinking, an individual’s reward centre responds differently. It may just be that people in Wales, having been born into a culture of drinking are more predisposed, more likely to develop an addictive tendency towards alcohol. It seems bizarre, when this is such a social problem and when the costs are really all borne at a local level, that the ability to control it is not given to the very Government that have responsibility for dealing with those problems.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to say a few words about Amendment 90. I will not stray into the internal affairs of Wales but this matter came up in debating the Trade Union Bill last year. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, mentioned the need for sound constitutional principles. I think that supporting sound constitutional principles should lead us to resist Amendment 90—which, to use a term of the noble Lord, Lord West, represents mission creep.

The amendment looks fairly innocuous and can be split into two parts. On “Terms and conditions of employment”, we keep hearing how Wales has managed to escape difficulties with doctors and has an excellent education system—although I am not sure whether the recent OECD figures bear that out—thanks to its ability to deal with terms and conditions. But, when you move on to the next bit of the amendment, “and industrial relations”, you open up a Pandora’s box. Given the Explanatory Notes accompanying the Bill, once you admit that industrial relations in Welsh public authorities are a devolved matter, you open up a huge area of debate as to what constitutes a public authority or industrial relations. For instance, could you have a different minimum wage for public servants in Wales or would you then get disputes between the private and public sectors?