Wales Bill

Debate between Nia Griffith and Susan Elan Jones

Wednesday 10th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Nia Griffith]

Indeed. The Welsh Government have made significant progress on that matter with the Welsh baccalaureate.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is a fundamental inconsistency in the Government’s position? I totally agree with their wish to devolve responsibility to the Welsh Assembly on matters to do with the referendum, but why cannot there be the same devolution in respect of the age at which people vote in Welsh Assembly elections? It is nothing short of patronising to 16 and 17-year-olds to say, “You might be able to vote in a referendum, but not in constituency or regional-based Assembly elections.” It makes no sense.

[Nia Griffith]

Perhaps the Minister will clarify that later.

In my long experience as a teacher, I always found that young people are ready to engage in discussion on a range of issues, and I have every confidence that 16 and 17-year-olds can be as well informed as other adults in respect of voting options. They have access to a far wider range of media and sources of information than back in 1969, when the voting age was last lowered. Indeed, when many of us were at school, our only access to current affairs came through being encouraged to read the daily papers in the school library.

Sixteen-year-olds can join the armed forces and, with parental consent, get married. Many of them are active in the world of work, whether full or part time, and are therefore subject to employment law and health and safety law, or the lack thereof. They are subject to the law on national insurance contributions and income tax. It is wholly appropriate that the Bill should allow the Welsh Government to state in a resolution to cause an income tax referendum whether the age for qualifying to vote in that referendum should be 18 or 16. We support the Lords amendments.

Wales Bill

Debate between Nia Griffith and Susan Elan Jones

Tuesday 6th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Nia Griffith]

Absolutely—not necessarily from the hon. Gentleman, but from other hon. Members there has been a blatant and clear attack. I would be the first to make a fuss—indeed, I do—if somebody cannot get a specific treatment, and we all know that in every area, whether in England or Wales, certain specialties may be difficult to cover in certain periods. We all know that we need to fight for certain things for certain constituents. As was mentioned, however, there is no clear winner or loser; there is no clear leader or laggard in the four UK nations in terms of health provision, as shown in a longitudinal study by the Nuffield Trust over a long period.

[Susan Elan Jones]

It is all very well various Conservative Members saying, “We are not making an attack on the NHS”, but the leader of their party went to their Welsh conference and—I have just checked this because it is almost beyond belief that he used this phrase—described Offa’s Dyke as

“the line between life and death”.

I am sorry, but that is offensive. Conservative Members continually play the game, but they are Cameron’s little dogs, nothing else, and they are not prepared to speak up for Wales.

[Nia Griffith]

I fully agree with my hon. Friend. Indeed, many of my constituents, who would be the first to criticise if something were wrong with the national health service, were shocked by those comments and deeply outraged at the insult to the many hard-working staff. I am glad that Conservative Members in the Committee have recognised the hard work done by many of our doctors and nurses in Wales, but there has clearly been an unmitigated and quite unnecessary attack. As has been pointed out, if he looked at some of the statistics, the hon. Member for Monmouth would find that waiting times for certain cancer treatments are shorter in his patch than over the border in the Wye valley. It is absurd to state that everybody is hopping across to England. Likewise, the hon. Member for Forest of Dean has tabled one of the amendments, but Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Trust treats only 82% of its cancer patients within the 62-day limit, whereas in Wales the figure is 91%. Every Welsh trust is outperforming the Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Trust.

When considering these figures it is easy to pick one number or specialty and to forget that for the vast majority of people in Wales treatment has improved rapidly over the past few years. It is certainly very different to how it was in the 1980s and ’90s, when people waited an extremely long time. The key point to remember is that England too has had a dreadful year for A and E.

Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Debate between Nia Griffith and Susan Elan Jones

Tuesday 10th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Susan Elan Jones]

I rise to support the provisions tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David). I wonder whether today we are living through a real-life episode of “The West Wing”, “Borgen” or a unique British combination of the two. We had a newly elected, husky-driven, Prime Minister coming into power saying that lobbying was the next big scandal waiting to happen. We thought about all the elements that involved—the fact that people were concerned about elements of cash for questions and about big corporate donors who had meetings with people we knew not who—but we then discovered that the real villains were the Salvation Army, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, small charities such as those represented by the Association of Voluntary Organisations in Wrexham county and, horror of horrors, the Royal British Legion.

What was fundamentally bad about part 2 of the Bill to start off with was the fact that no consultation took place with the voluntary sector over the summer. I am appalled that we are undertaking our deliberations without hearing from witnesses who know all about the situation—those in the charities and voluntary organisations who have in-depth knowledge of how the Bill might affect them. A system of hearing from those bodies worked well for the Bill that became the Small Charitable Donations Act 2012 and it has been a mistake not to have an equivalent—however procedurally that would have been managed—for this Bill.

[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend recognise the irony that although many of these organisations have contributed massively to many other areas of legislation, on the very piece of legislation that will affect their ability to do that, they have not been consulted?

[Susan Elan Jones]

My hon. Friend could well write the episode of the soap opera that I was describing.

As a co-chair of the all-party group on civil society and volunteering, along with the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) and Baroness Pitkeathley, I was delighted to see the voluntary sector speak up loudly on this issue—rightly so, given the attacks on civic society in this Bill. I know that many hon. Members have been deluged with e-mails, letters, telephone calls and requests for meetings about this. We know the NCVO’s serious concerns from its briefing, and it raised the specific point of how damaging it feels the legislation would be for expenditure thresholds and activities and how they relate to small charitable groups.

Cycling

Debate between Nia Griffith and Susan Elan Jones

Thursday 23rd February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

My comments will be brief because I do not want to repeat too much of what other hon. Members have said. The first thing we have to remember is that cycling is universal. Whether someone is an 80-year-old former miner or a young person, cycling gives freedom, independence and enjoyment. However, we need a much safer environment if we are to encourage more people, particularly the young, to cycle. We need to take great leaps forward in safety.

I am extremely lucky because in my constituency we have some magnificent purpose-built cycle tracks. We have a millennium coastal path all along the coast and a route using a former railway track, which climbs very gradually at a perfect gradient up to Tumble and beyond. However, we need to ensure that it is safe for cyclists to go wherever they need to go, not just on the purpose-built routes but wherever they want—for example, to work or to the shops in their locality, and when they travel elsewhere for work or holidays. Cyclists need to be safe both on urban and rural roads because, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) said, it is often when people go out into the rural or semi-rural areas that they pick up speed, they are not so aware and it becomes much more dangerous.

We need much greater awareness among drivers—all drivers of all vehicles. We can tackle that through the learner-driver approach, the test and so on. However, we need a very high-profile campaign to bring home to all vehicle drivers how dangerous it is for them to be driving at speed on any rural roads and, indeed, obviously on urban roads. Those who have had the pleasure of cycling in France will know that French drivers traditionally pull out considerably wider when they overtake, beep their horns and leave cyclists a proper, decent space. We need to have that mentality here, so that when someone wants to overtake a cyclist, they give them the same berth as a car or a tractor, rather than trying to squash in and pass by while a vehicle is coming in the other direction. Cyclists are often faced with the extremely dangerous and difficult situation of being squashed into the hedge.

I have never had quite so many vitriolic e-mails as when I spoke up in a debate in the previous Parliament and suggested that all our speed signs change to kilometres per hour, so that when a driver saw a 30, that would be 30 kph, and when a driver saw a 40 it would be 40 kph. Effectively, that would give all urban roads a 20 mph speed limit. I am pleased to say that that is being rolled out in many areas near schools, and I think that many of us have seen that in our own areas. We need to come back to that idea, particularly as, coming from outside London, I have never known why everyone in London has to race between one set of traffic lights and the next. That determination to get to the next red light as fast as possible always strikes me as bizarre.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

One suggestion about why people might do that is the absence of hills. If more people came to some parts of the United Kingdom, including our nation of Wales, they might see what a wonderful place it is in which to cycle. In October, Etape Cymru came into my constituency and there were 1,600 cyclists, so there are great opportunities. Does my hon. Friend agree that one reason why many of us are so pro-cycling is because we see the potential for tourism?

[Nia Griffith]

Indeed. There are many wonderful Sustrans routes across Wales, but they sometimes take the cyclist down very narrow lanes, which can be dangerous. I found myself spending most of the day jumping into the hedge because there was no room for me and the combine harvester coming down the lane.

Solar Power (Feed-in Tariff)

Debate between Nia Griffith and Susan Elan Jones

Wednesday 23rd November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dudley South (Chris Kelly), not least because it gives me an opportunity to make the point about the six weeks’ notice and the arbitrary date of 12 December—before the official consultation ends—all of which were totally missing from his speech.

North Wales will be deeply affected by these changes. The following points were made in a column in a local newspaper:

“The Government needs to rethink…There could be considerable impact on jobs in North Wales as local electricians as well as local producers for solar panels are preparing to deal with the impact of cancelled orders for work. In Wrexham, major housing projects which included provision for Feed-in Tariffs are now at risk because of the UK Government’s decision.”

Those are not my words, nor are they the words of any Labour party representative; they are the words of the former leader of Wrexham county borough council, who now sits as a Liberal Democrat Member in the Welsh Assembly. Unfortunately, the Secretary of State is not present to answer the questions raised by that Liberal Democrat representative.

One business constituent of mine tells me customers are now refusing to go forward with work if it cannot be completed by the arbitrary deadline. He says that what the Minister has done to this industry is atrocious.

[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that this scheme unlocked thousands of pounds of private capital to create jobs in the local economy, and that this Government’s mad decision to impose a cut with six weeks’ notice will not only completely undermine confidence now, but will put future customers off for ever?

[Susan Elan Jones]

I entirely agree.

Sharp Solar was mentioned earlier. It has made it clear that big contracts, such as that with Wrexham council to install solar panels on 3,000 council houses, are now in doubt. The 900 installations completed before the 12 December deadline are safe, but no decision has been made on whether the others will go ahead. The stock for that work had to be ordered several months ago, however, and Sharp Solar is now stuck with it no matter what happens.

All the political parties agree that there had to be changes, but the changes could have been made in a way that was manageable, and a proper notice period could have been provided. The Government could have got businesses on their side in order to make the changes work. Instead, we have a total mess.

Businesses have tried to tell the Government about the problems the changes will cause them. Wrexham council leaders wrote to the Government to tell them about the impact of the 12 December deadline on their scheme. They received a reply inviting them to respond to the consultation, but that response will be read only after the deadline has passed. That is totally shambolic. North Wales needs a strong solar industry, but I fear that the so-called “greenest Government ever” have kicked the industry fully in the teeth.