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Welsh Affairs

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Gower (Mr. Caton). May I say how much I agreed with almost everything that he said, and how much I profoundly disagreed with so much of what the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies) said? Were a stranger to listen to the debate—I am sure that there are people who know little about Welsh politics—he or she would find the Secretary of State’s earlier claim that my party elected to go into coalition with the Tories frankly incredible, as the two preceding speeches clearly demonstrate. We had a debate yesterday outside this place about the purpose of the Welsh day debate. What is it for? Looking at the attendance here today and the number of Members wanting to speak, we see that it is clearly an important forum. I cannot remember in my short time in this place there being a time limit on speeches in such a debate, which is significant. The debate gives hon. Members from Wales the opportunity to talk about detailed issues in their constituencies, and that is certainly one of the things that I intend to do in my few minutes. Given that it is St. David’s day, I can tell the House that Dewi Sant said:"““Na ddiystyrwch y pethau bychain””—" or"““Do not disregard the small things.””" He also said, ““Cadw’r ffydd”” or ““Keep the faith.”” I intend to do both in my speech, or at least I will try. Looking at the purpose of the debate, we see that there is the possibility of scrutiny and review, and of examining something that the Secretary of State has put great emphasis on, which is the partnership between this place and the Assembly. We also have the opportunity to put forward some policies. I want to scrutinise and review one of the points that has been raised by a number of hon. Members, including the hon. Members for Gower and for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan)—the whole saga of HMRC. I should preface my remarks by expressing my concern that over the last few years we have seen a great deal of centralisation of Government services in Wales. We had a long battle in Porthmadog in my constituency about the proposal that the Department for Work and Pensions office should close, which it eventually did. Its functions have been transferred to a central office the other side of Bangor. That is an actual centralisation and an actual closure. Now we have the proposals to close HMRC offices all over Wales, particularly in Gwynedd, in Porthmadog and Bangor. I should also say that it is not just Government services that are being withdrawn from what are seen as peripheral communities—they are not peripheral to the people who live there, of course. I hear from my colleague, Alun Ffred Jones, the Assembly Member campaigning in the election in Bethesda, that two banks there, NatWest and HSBC, have closed. The fact that there are now no banks in Bethesda causes particular difficulties to local businesses with what one might think are trivial things, such as getting change in order to be able to give the correct change to customers. Public service jobs though, such as those in DWP and HMRC, are very valuable to rural communities in particular, where such opportunities are rare. They are steady, long term, pensionable and comparatively well paid in a local economy that is increasingly casualised and part-time. We see valuable jobs migrating to already prosperous centres. HMRC proposes to move jobs to Wrexham, Swansea and Cardiff, so that those centres will grow. That is part of deliberate Government policy. That raises the question of what sort of co-ordination has gone on between the Government here and the Welsh Assembly. The Welsh Assembly Government is working hard, using hard-won European money to create much needed jobs and prosperity in the west and in the valleys, and that investment is very welcome. At the same time, many good jobs that we need in our areas are being taken away by the policies of the Government here. An example that rankles with me is the likely fate of the Welsh language telephone line run from Porthmadog in my constituency. The line has highly experienced staff who have been running it for many years. That line is likely to move to Cardiff. As we all know, in Cardiff the labour market is very tight indeed, particularly in respect of those who have the valuable extra qualification of speaking Welsh. I am a member of the Welsh Affairs Committee, and last week we heard evidence from British Telecom, which told us that it recently advertised for a Welsh-speaking worker for a good job in Cardiff. There was not a single applicant, yet there are highly experienced people in Porthmadog who, for many years, have run a Welsh language telephone line, which is being shut down. That line is moving to Cardiff, whether or not there are the workers to run it. In Porthmadog, the staff can provide services in both languages. Two for the price of one is a slogan that works for supermarkets, but apparently HMRC does not see things that way. One has to ask the Government where the language planning is. Where is the co-ordination between HMRC and the Welsh Language Board? As far as I can see, there has been none, yet we are rushing onwards headlong. That is a failure of policy, as far as serving the people of Wales, particularly rural Wales, is concerned, and there has been a failure of co-ordination with Assembly policies, too. I should like to turn to a proposal on passport services that was little remarked on when it was made a couple of weeks ago. The proposal is that the first interview for passports should be conducted in centres in Wrexham, Swansea, Aberystwyth and Newport, and a face-to-face interview will be required. Interestingly, in the documents published, it was acknowledged that there would be difficulties in Anglesey, Gwynedd and Pembrokeshire, but the system that we are to have in Wales will involve centralisation in Wrexham, Swansea, Aberystwyth and Newport. What is to happen to people from Caernarfon, St. David’s and Amlwch who want passports? We are told in the document that so-called remote areas will be served by webcam links. As I said earlier, remote from where? They are certainly not remote for the people who live in them. On the question of where webcam links will be established, the document says:"““A procurement exercise will be needed to establish the arrangement””." In large parts of rural Wales, those proposals will be hard to live with, and the only remedy suggested so far is that a procurement exercise should establish the arrangements. That is just not good enough, as hon. Members on both sides of the House would agree. The other day, I undertook a little exercise: I phoned traveline, an excellent service that gives travel times for bus and train journeys throughout Wales—and England, for that matter. The service is available in Welsh and in English; HMRC should note that. It is run from Porthmadog, just down the road from the place from which the tax line is run. Traveline gave me some times, and I can inform the House that it takes four hours and 35 minutes to get to Wrexham from Pwllheli by bus, and to get back takes six hours. The journey time from Caernarfon to Wrexham is three hours and 25 minutes, and on the way back it is four hours. Those are the sort of travelling times that will be imposed on new applicants for passports, unless the webcam exercise is successful. As I say, at the moment, the scheme is just a gleam in someone’s eye; a procurement exercise will have to establish the arrangement. I shall give a couple more interesting times. Even from Bangor, travel time to Wrexham is an hour and a half, and the journey back takes an hour and 50 minutes by train. People from the constituency of the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Williams) trying to get to the passport centre in Newport will have to travel by both bus and train, and the journey would take two hours and 10 minutes, and an hour and 50 minutes on the way back. The webcam links will be important, if and when they are established. Perhaps I am sceptical, if not cynical, in thinking that as the system is introduced those links will be quietly dropped. Scrutiny of a proposal that is little remarked on reveals a policy that is in danger of failing the people of rural Wales, and certainly fails to co-ordinate with the Assembly’s policies. In the remaining minute or so, I should like to consider the development of policy in future. The Mental Health Bill will shortly be introduced in the Commons, and I hope that the Government will allow the Welsh Assembly the greatest latitude in the measure’s application to Wales. Circumstances in Wales are different, and the health service, too, is different. The measure introduced by the Labour and Liberal Democrat Scottish Executive is markedly different from the measure proposed for Wales, and I think that we could do with the Milan principles that were included in the Scottish Bill. Finally, my Bilingual Juries (Wales) Bill is due to receive its Second Reading tomorrow, and I urge the House to give it proper consideration.