The proceedings are
reported in the language in which they were spoken in the
committee. In addition, a transcription of the simultaneous
interpretation is included. Where contributors have supplied
corrections to their evidence, these are noted in the
transcript.
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Dechreuodd y cyfarfod am 09:16.
The meeting began at 09:16.
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Cyflwyniad,
Ymddiheuriadau, Dirprwyon a Datgan Buddiannau
Introductions, Apologies, Substitutions and Declarations of
Interest
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[1]
John Griffiths: May I welcome everyone to this meeting of
the Equality, Local Government and Communities Committee? Item 1 on
our agenda today is introductions, apologies, substitutions and
declarations of interest. We’ve had one apology from Gareth
Bennett, who’s unable to be with us today. Are there any
declarations of interest?
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[2]
Joyce Watson: I declare membership of Unite, the union.
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[3]
Jenny Rathbone:
Also, I’m a member of Unite, the
union—relevant for the next item on the agenda and not the
one we’re about to do.
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[4]
John Griffiths:
Thank you.
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[5]
Rhianon Passmore:
GMB.
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[6]
John Griffiths:
GMB, Rhianon Passmore. Sian.
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[7]
Sian Gwenllian: Rwy’n aelod o Undeb
Cenedlaethol y Newyddiadurwyr.
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Sian Gwenllian:
I’m a member of the National Union
of Journalists.
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[8]
John Griffiths:
Diolch yn fawr. May I add to those
declarations by declaring my membership of the Unite union and also
Community? Okay. Thanks very much for that.
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09:17
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Craffu ar Waith Ysgrifennydd y Cabinet dros
Gymunedau a Phlant
Scrutiny of the Cabinet Secretary for Communities and Children
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[9]
John Griffiths:
We move on to item 2, then, scrutiny of
the Cabinet Secretary for Communities and Children. Welcome this
morning, Cabinet Secretary. Would you wish to introduce your
officials for the record, please?
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[10]
The Cabinet Secretary for Communities
and Children (Carl Sargeant): Good morning, Chair; good morning, committee.
I’ll ask Jo-Anne to start, please.
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[11]
Ms Daniels: I’m Jo-Anne Daniels, I’m the director for
communities and tackling poverty.
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[12]
Ms John: Amelia John, deputy director, communities
division.
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[13]
John Griffiths:
Okay. I’d like to begin this
morning, Cabinet Secretary, by just asking you, really, to set out
briefly the new approach that you will take forward, following your
decision not to continue with Communities First and also how you
will ensure that the transition is as smooth as
possible.
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[14]
Carl Sargeant: Okay, Chair, thank you for your question. This week
has been quite intense, actually, in terms of the transition
announcement. We’ve been doing a lot of work behind the
scenes, working with communities and engagement with stakeholders,
staff, interest groups, public services boards, local service
boards, in communities.
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[15]
I made the announcement on Tuesday to
start a transition period, which was about fully funding the
programme until June with a 70 per cent profile over the first 12
months of business. After the 12-month period, we’d introduce
a transition system of finance of £6 million revenue and
£4 million capital. The £6 million revenue will be
based on historic spend of Communities First funding. The capital
spend will be an additional fund to the communities facilities
grant, taking that additional £4 million, with a focus on
bidding in for capital programmes. We see the capital element of
that being used for sweating the assets and transition of capital
assets into other alternative use. So, where you may have a
community centre that is operating purely as a community centre for
youth groups, it may be something that, with the addition of some
capital spend in heating or kitchen or other, security issues,
could be used in a childcare setting or a Flying Start setting or
something similar. So, we’re looking at the planning for the
long term, as the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015
requires us to do.
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[16]
In addition, StreetGames, we’ll be
continuing the funding of StreetGames and also the advice services
with Citizen’s Advice. What not many people have picked up on
is we’re making a significant investment of £11.7
million on an employability programme, which will enhance the Lift
and Communities for Work programme, PaCE, across all of the clusters in the Communities First
areas that are currently situated.
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[17]
So, that’s the transitional
proposal for Communities First, but, if it helps,
Chair—and it is quite
a long answer to your short question—I think what I wanted
just to say to the committee is that Communities First was one part
of a jigsaw, a suite of tools, that we’ve got. It was our
flagship antipoverty programme, and the poverty stats indicate that
it hasn’t been as successful as it could have been. I
don’t think that’s because of the action on the ground.
The staff are fantastic in all of the clusters I’ve been. The
activities are variable—some very good, some could be better.
What I do recognise is the commitment by staff is fantastic, but
it’s not achieving what we need it to achieve. That’s
why, on its own, it’s not working. But, as part of a new
approach, with all of the other programmes that we have, focusing
primarily on employability, skills and jobs, as you will have heard
from Ken Skates, I believe, we believe that’s the key to
tackling poverty long-term, and I think we have to plan for the
long term. As you’ll be aware, you can’t switch on and
off poverty, particularly when there are indirect levers that we
have no control over.
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[18]
John Griffiths: Okay. Could I ask, then, Cabinet Secretary,
how you will ensure that what’s been identified as of value
in the current provision under Communities First will not be lost?
Because obviously you’ve gone through quite an extensive
exercise of consultation and understanding what’s been
working well and what hasn’t been working as well. So, you
may well continue some of the work in terms of employability and
skills, but there will be other aspects that are of value but are
not within those headings. So, how will you work with local
authorities, with the voluntary sector, with communities, to make
sure that those other aspects that are of value are not lost as we
move forward?
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[19]
Carl Sargeant: Yes, a very important question, actually,
because we do recognise that. Probably, Communities First moved
into a space. It was not just tackling poverty; it was more of a
community resilience type programme as well. There’s nothing
wrong with that, but under the heading of tackling poverty, it
didn’t fit in that box particularly. It fits in quite nicely
now, actually, with what our plans are, wholesale, because
we’ve got, as I said earlier on the suite of tools, the
Families First, Flying Start, the children’s zones, ACE hubs,
and the legacy programme of what Communities First looks like in
the future in employability plans. The issue started with a huge
consultation exercise that we started with. We had a massive
response, with about 3,000 responses on the consultation process,
primarily from workforce or individuals that have used the
Communities First programme, which give us an indication about the
popularity of where the programme operates and how that looks in
functioning, but it didn’t really answer the questions about
performance issues around the issues that we are concerned about in
terms of tackling the issues of poverty. So, following that, I made
my decision to exit and transition the programme. What we will
trigger now is the second part of the consultation, which will pick
up the questions that you’ve asked—the bits that are
effective and maybe not strictly poverty-based but actually work in
creating a stronger community. I’m really interested in that.
But that will be a matter for the local service boards or local
authorities, and predominantly people on the ground—what
works for them. Because I don’t want to be dictating to
communities about what we think works for them. We’ve done
that for far too long. Actually, what we’ve got to do is
listen to communities about what they think they need and enable
that to happen. I think this opportunity, particularly about the
funding stream for the longer term—so, we’ve got a
four-year legacy programme in terms of revenue—that gives the
opportunity for the clusters to plan with other organisations to
see how they can gain resilience. So, the health board coming to
the table, or the third sector organisations—how can they
build a bigger system that will wrap around these. What I
can’t guarantee, Chair, is that all of the programmes that we
are familiar with in our communities won’t all carry on. But
today, we can’t describe that yet because, actually, that
consultation starts now, talking to communities, talking to LSBs,
about the bits that work. What we do need and do understand is that
we have to refocus our programmes on the heart of tackling
poverty.
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[20]
John Griffiths: Cabinet Secretary, could you say just a
little bit more, then, about this second phase of
consultation—how it will be structured; the period involved;
how it will work?
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[21]
Carl Sargeant: I expect my team to start working on that.
Well, actually, as soon as I made the announcement we started
getting in touch with local authorities in that process. Now
we’ll start the engagement process with staff and the teams
across Wales, PSBs and, again, interested parties. We’ll
probably start another consultation exercise as well, to try and
get ideas feeding in. It’s a really difficult one, this, in
terms of that there are lots of emotive reasons about why you
should pick up and carry on programmes, and that’s always the
case—it’s the same with buildings, et cetera.
We’ve got to get underneath that and look at what works, and
this is what I’m really interested in.
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[22]
So, looking at our future programmes—and you’ll have
heard me talking about the issue around tackling adverse childhood
experiences—we’ve just invested heavily in an ACEs hub.
That will look at interventions that have long-term effects on
people, so my—and the Government’s—priority is
making sure we have early intervention and prevention in schemes
that will benefit in the long term. It’s morally right, and
it’s fiscally right as well, because if we get this wrong,
longer term we’ll pay much more in health and mental health
services, et cetera. So, it’s a re-profiling of the way we do
business, and I think it’s—. I’ve been called
lots of things this week—not just ‘Cabinet
Secretary’—but I actually believe this is the right
thing to do because we have to refocus. The numbers speak for
themselves: this programme, on its own, wasn’t working as
effectively as we wanted it to.
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[23]
John Griffiths:
Just one further question from me, and
I’ll bring in other Members after that, Cabinet Secretary.
Just in terms of community centres: some community centres have had
substantial investment from Welsh Government and other sources, and
are heavily dependent on Communities First funding. They’re
very important community assets. Will you ensure that you work
closely with local authorities and, again, the voluntary sector and
communities, to understand how community centres that are
performing a valuable role can be sustained as we move
forward?
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[24]
Carl Sargeant: Absolutely, and I see this as not—. I’ve
always said this: Governments can’t fix poverty on their own.
It’s a partnership approach with people on the
ground—whether they are the fire service, local authorities
or the police, who are a non-devolved function. But, actually, we
need to get our heads around what communities look like for the
future, and that’s the principle of the Well-being of Future
Generations (Wales) Act 2015, and that’s why the PSBs in the
future have to create well-being plans. On the very specific issue
of community centres, I recognise that they play a strong part of
community and, actually, a small investment in that community
centre, whether that be capital or revenue, trying to make it
sustainable for the long term, has positive effects on other
budgets as well. So, that’s why the health service, or the
fire service, or the police, or other organisations that are in
that area—. If it’s preventing anti-social behaviour,
why wouldn’t the police make a small investment into that
community centre? Why wouldn’t Government make a small
intervention? Because it’s planning for the long
term.
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[25]
We’ve got to get out of this silo
mentality of operation, and I’m aware that some public
service boards operate better than others. I’m hoping that
the future generations commissioner and the auditor general will be
very robust with those organisations. I certainly will be, in
making sure that they focus on how communities operate. So, I agree
with you that community centres in some areas are very valuable,
and that’s why the capital programme is quite cute, with the
ability for them to make modifications if they need to, to make it
more resilient.
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[26]
The childcare pledge is the most generous
childcare pledge in the UK, which we’re going to be
delivering. We’re starting to ramp that up now. We are
currently short of facilities, and we knew that was the case, and
that’s why we’re ramping the programme up. So, there
are huge opportunities in communities right across Wales for
looking at community centres or other community assets, where that
could be used alongside a small amount of legacy funding from
Communities First, plus a transition in terms of capital funding,
topped up with childcare facility funding. It makes these places
sustainable. I just think authorities need to think differently in
that space, but I’m really encouraged by the engagement
we’ve had to date and the conversations we’ve already
had, post announcement. I think people are up to making sure that
their communities are fit for the future.
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[27]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Thank you for that, Cabinet
Secretary. I’ll bring in Bethan Jenkins at this
stage.
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09:30
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[28]
Bethan Jenkins:
Thank you. I just wanted to ask how you
will be analysing the effectiveness of the current
Communities First projects, when you speak in your statement about
the fact that the legacy fund would enable local authorities to
maintain some of the most effective interventions—and they
are your words. I need to understand how that will be defined and
what the criteria for that will be, because those who’ve come
to me from the sector are concerned that the legacy fund could be
used to mop up other areas of interest by the local authorities and
that the money could disappear into other potential priorities for
the local authorities. So, it’s trying to understand how that
will operate, and when it will come to an end, and what will come
following that.
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[29]
Carl Sargeant: It would be fair to say that’s a very
similar situation to what it is now, in terms of the way
Communities First operate in their budgets—it’s very
localised and determined upon what they want to spend it on. If you
go around the 52 clusters, as I’ve gone around many,
they’re all unique, they all deliver different programmes and
different authorities deliver different services to others. So, it
is a very mixed bag, and that’s why unpicking it is quite
difficult in itself because it’s been locally focused, which
is not a bad thing, but the Communities First programme, as I said
earlier, while tackling poverty directly, in some areas has drifted
into some effective, some nice projects, and I think what
we’re moving into—. We’ve measured the
effectiveness of Communities First. There have been two reports
since 2012 on the refocusing of that. I think that the Wavehill
report is one of them, and the other one is Ipsos MORI.
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[30]
Bethan Jenkins: It’s very difficult for us to compare
various analyses, though, because the data are quite sporadic. So
I’m just trying to understand how you will define those
effective—. Will it be for you to define?
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[31]
Carl Sargeant: No.
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[32]
Bethan Jenkins: So, what guidelines are you setting for that
to happen?
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[33]
Carl Sargeant: I’ll move into that. As I said, the
legacy issue of Communities First was sort of there anyway in terms
of local determination. I intend that to be the same as we move
forward, so I’ll be issuing very little guidance to local
authorities and PSBs. My key message will be the issue around
well-being and tackling poverty. Those are the two principles I
will be expecting authorities and clusters to lead on. That gives
local authorities maximum flexibility to make sure that their
well-being plans around this are able to flex enough to merge with
other programmes—Flying Start and Families First. I’m
relaxing some of the rules on that around postcodes. I’m
looking at where there is need—local authorities and PSBs
would be able to identify that. So I’m trying to have a
more—this will be criticised by some because people like the
ring-fencing one minute and then they don’t like ring-fencing
the next. I’m saying, ‘This is a transition period
where I want local authorities to look at their communities,
working with communities about the programmes that are
effective.’
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[34]
Bethan Jenkins: We’ll have to judge it then on what
the local authorities prioritise, and I think that would be the
difficulty in this. But why have you decided that it’s the
local authorities? I mean, I’ve had some communication today
from people saying that you could potentially have opened this up
to the voluntary sector to put in new bids, or to take up new
initiatives where they wouldn’t have been able to have done
so before. Was that something that you considered when you were
changing this?
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[35]
Carl Sargeant: Well, the current system is predominantly
through local authorities, delivery through the local service
boards, but what’s important is how they operate. And there
are some local service boards that operate through third sector
organisations delivering a lot of those services. So, I’m not
saying that local authorities should or must deliver these
services. Actually, the options are for third sector organisations
to be in that space as well. In fact, I would expect them to be
part of that discussion because they often bring additional funding
to the table, they certainly bring additional skills to the table,
and it’s something that many organisations out there that
understand communities, to aid local authorities—I was going
to say ‘better’, but they probably don’t;
it’s about working with them. They’re out there
already. So, many are already engaged. What I don’t want this
to be is a land grab—a finance grab—‘Why are you
giving it to them and not giving it to us?’ I get this with
local authorities and third sector organisations all of the time,
irrespective of this programme, about, ‘We want the money; we
could do a better job.’ Well, actually, why don’t you
all get in a room and talk about this, about how we’re going
to engage for better opportunities for our community? That’s
what’s important to me.
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[36]
Bethan Jenkins: Sorry to go back, but I don’t think I
understood what you—. From the statement, I can’t see
how long the legacy fund lasts and what happens after that to the
moneys that would have gone into Communities First that, otherwise,
now will—. Where do they go?
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[37]
Carl Sargeant: The legacy fund will be, certainly for the
capital and the revenue, for a minimum of four years. After four
years, the capital programme will be reviewed. I don’t know
what will happen then. We might open it up to a
broader—because I want a strong focus on Communities First
areas in the capital programme that we’re investing in. On
the revenue side of this, I’ve already spoken to the finance
Minister and he’s in discussions with the WLGA about how that
looks and what they would want to do with that. Their first,
initial indication is that they’d like that rolled into the
RSG; I understand that, but there is a risk involved in that, too.
The benefit from rolling it into the RSG is, because it’s not
a grant, there’s less red tape around how it’s spent
and it’s easier to distribute. The danger is that if it goes
into the RSG, they could spend it beyond that—
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[38]
Bethan Jenkins: So, you’re not stipulating now what
you want to see happen.
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[39]
Carl Sargeant: My only stipulation is—. As I said
earlier on, my expectation is, within their well-being plans, which
are a statutory duty on PSBs and broader local public bodies, that
there has to be a principle about tackling poverty and well-being.
That’s the direction I will be giving. They’ll have to
evidence how they spend their money on communities for the benefits
of well-being and tackling poverty.
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[40]
Bethan Jenkins: But how can you be assured that they will be
able to do that when the Government has failed to do it up until
now in relation to—
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[41]
Carl Sargeant: I don’t think we’ve
failed—
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[42]
Bethan Jenkins: —making this scheme work in tackling
poverty?
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[43]
Carl Sargeant: I don’t think we’ve failed to do
this. I think, actually, what I’ve said is the programme has
worked as well as it could under the circumstances. I think we have
stopped, probably, communities getting poorer. We’ve made
them more resilient, but the real, fundamental challenge for any
Government is to start to move that poverty uphill—the
poverty positive uphill. We haven’t been able to do that, and
that’s not because of our investments, always, in
communities, but we’ve had many years of welfare reform and
austerity, and that has a massive effect on our communities. I
cannot mitigate that by simply saying, ‘More money into
Communities First,’ because we don’t have that finance.
We’ve got to do something fundamentally different, and I
believe our approach around employability and skills, giving people
stability, is the absolute key for growth.
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[44]
John Griffiths: Okay. Rhianon.
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[45]
Rhianon Passmore: Thank you, Chair. With regard to a tighter
focus around child poverty, I welcome what you said around Flying
Start and the worth of those projects within that envelope, and I
welcome very much the postcode lottery issue being addressed.
We’ve talked about the legacy funding today and the external
factors around welfare reform and those elements coming into Wales.
We know that we’re working uphill in any anti-poverty
platform of policies to try and mitigate those, and I want to
clearly say that this is a patchy programme in terms of its worth,
but I know that there are very, very, very good applications of
Communities First across Wales in some parts. I recognise that we
need to be able to spread good practice with best usage of that
money. With regard to the legacy funding transitionally, where
there are exemplar projects in terms of tackling poverty on a
community regeneration basis, for instance, in Lansbury Park in
Caerphilly, what flexibility is there going to be within that
legacy funding to be able to tackle community regeneration where
we’ve got a greater focus on employability and child
poverty?
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[46]
Carl Sargeant: That will be a matter for the local authority
in terms of their allocation of funding, which will be historically
based, out of the £6 million revenue and £4 million
capital bidding fund. What I will say is that we are now widening
our scope with the employability programmes. So, Lift in
communities will be across all of our programme areas. The
flexibility between—. The suite of tools is what I’m
trying to roll out. I’m talking to local authorities already;
I’ve asked for them to come back to me with concepts of
change. One of the leading authorities in this space at the moment
is actually Torfaen, which I know is a neighbouring authority.
Caerphilly’s doing some great work as well. All of the
Communities First clusters I’ve seen are doing something
good, and that’s down to staff and community engagement.
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[47]
The fundamental question here is: is it tackling poverty wholesale?
There are as many people outside Communities First wards across
Wales who are suffering from poverty too. We’ve got to tackle
the national issue of the poverty trap. And we believe, by giving
people that employability pathway, it’s something that we can
do. In our Communities First areas, that’s why we have
intense programmes of employability giving people the skills and
opportunity. I visited one Lift programme in Cardiff about a month
back; incredible work that they’re doing in terms of engaging
some of the very hard-to-reach individuals, with some people in
that group that lacked confidence, had issues with self-esteem and
possibly mental health issues, but taking them through a journey to
give them confidence to get them into the workplace programme. So,
the flexibility of—. I may have heard this wrong, but the
Caerphilly-specific work programmes, compared to Lift or
Communities for Work, is something that Caerphilly would have to
consider funding from their legacy funding.
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[48]
Rhianon Passmore: Okay. So, basically what you’re
saying in a nutshell is that that transitional funding, even though
it might not tightly fit an employability programme—for
instance, something that’s match funded in one of the poorest
wards of Wales, or the poorest ward in Wales—there will be an
element of transition and flexibility around that tighter
governmental focus as to what that money in future will be.
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[49]
Carl Sargeant: The revenue funding will give local
authorities the ability to look at what works for them in their
communities, tackling the issues of communities.
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[50]
Rhianon Passmore: Okay. What lessons have been learnt from
the Communities First programmes? I don’t know whether others
would like to contribute as well.
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[51]
Carl Sargeant: Well, the first one is that it doesn’t
work on its own. It was our initial flagship programme, which has
had significant investment—over £300 million in
communities. I think there’s more to celebrate than to
commiserate about around Communities First, but I just think
we’re in a very different place in time. It had a refresh in
2012 as well, and moved into a different cluster-based approach.
But as I said earlier, we are facing a very different world. On
austerity challenges, there’s still £3 billion of
unallocated funding: non-funding from the UK Government to be
announced shortly. That may have another dramatic impact on some of
the services that we are currently providing, or are not able to
provide in the future. There are the issues of welfare reform, and
in your communities right across Wales you’ll have seen the
impact of that. So, we’re in a very different space from when
we started the Communities First programme. The significant one is:
we’ve got to embed all of our thoughts and programmes around
the principles of well-being, and that’s why we legislated
for this. They’ve for far too long probably operated in
isolation in many cases. That’s why I’m fortunate
enough to have the remit of children and communities, because I
think that’s where we should be investing money—in our
young people, because we know that if we don’t get it right
now, as I said earlier on, we’ll pay for the consequences
later on.
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[52]
I think there is an emotive feeling about Communities First because
it’s been a great programme in many communities, but
it’s time for change. I genuinely believe this is not just a
fiscal issue but that it’s also a programme issue that needs
to think about the future.
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[53]
Rhianon Passmore: Okay—
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[54]
John Griffiths:
Rhianon, before we move further into
evidence, I think Sian and Jenny had questions on some of the
earlier matters.
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[55]
Rhianon Passmore:
Okay, I just need to ask one more thing
on this issue. You’ve touched upon data collection and
you’ve touched on future generations and well-being
measurement of poverty. I don’t know whether you want to take
this up a bit later, Chair, but I’d like a little bit more
clarification in terms of how we’re going to measure the
evaluation of this moving forward in terms of if it’s going
to be around—
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[56]
John Griffiths:
If it’s okay, Cabinet Secretary,
we’ll return to that. I think some of the earlier matters
that we discussed—there’s a wish to add to those from
first of all Sian and then Jenny. Sian.
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[57]
Sian
Gwenllian: Diolch, Gadeirydd. Rwyf jest eisiau deall ychydig bach yn well
y legacy fund—y £6 miliwn. Sut fydd hwn yn
gweithio? A fydd o’n mynd trwy’r RSG? Dyna rydych chi
wedi sôn. Hynny yw, a fydd o’n cael ei wasgaru i bob
cyngor drwy’r RSG?
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Sian Gwenllian: Thank you, Chair. I would just like to understand a
little better the legacy fund—the £6 million. How will
that work? Will it go through the RSG? That’s what you have
mentioned. That is, will it be spread across every council through
the RSG?
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[58]
Carl Sargeant: The grant funding, on the revenue side of this, will
be based upon historic spend from Communities First. So, if you
were the top spend in Communities First, you will get the most out
of the £6 million. So, it's not RSG formula-based;
it’s based on historic spend of Communities First funding.
So, if you’ve got the larger clusters, you get the larger
amount of money. I can give some very rough figures, but they are
very rough, in the first draft. We’ve done some modelling
about what that may look like in terms of the annual 70 per cent
review, and then the revenue spend allocations, which I’m
happy to share with you, Chair and committee.
|
|
09:45
|
|
[59]
John Griffiths: That would be useful.
|
|
[60]
Sian Gwenllian: That would be very useful.
|
|
[61]
Carl Sargeant: All the local authorities that are affected
by that have had those rough indicators. So, once I’m
confident that they’ve all had them, I’ll share that
with you as well, of course. When, or if, it moves into RSG, which
I don’t envisage certainly for probably two years, because
the complexity of doing that is quite difficult anyway, Mark
Drakeford and the WLGA would have that discussion. At that point,
it would be distributed on a formula-based approach to all
authorities, and current ones that aren’t in the programme as
well, because that’s how it would be.
|
|
[62]
Sian Gwenllian: Yes, well, that’s my concern, really,
because, at the moment, three local authorities don’t need
the money for Communities First. You can argue it that way:
that’s why they don’t get the money. But if it is
through the RSG and every council gets it through the RSG, it means
that, you know, it’s being spread even further and going to
areas that may be not really—the benefit won’t be
there, whereas, at the moment, it is actually focused. So, I think,
you know, that needs to be clear, really, going forward, so that
we’re not spreading the butter too thinly.
|
|
[63]
Carl Sargeant: I think what’s really important there
is, and it’s an important point you raise, that one of the
criticisms of the Communities First programme—I think it goes
back to one of the questions Rhianon mentioned earlier on—is
about targeting poverty intervention. I said to you there are as
many people outside the poverty target areas suffering from
poverty. And it’s been postcode based, so, you will all have
areas of postcode assessments where you’ve got Communities
First in one part and the street next to it can’t get
Communities First because it just fell out of the system. What the
RSG will do is flex that system so that—. Again, the
principles still apply to those authorities in Monmouth, Powys, I
think it is—
|
|
[64]
Sian Gwenllian: And Ceredigion.
|
|
[65]
Carl Sargeant:—and Ceredigion, saying, ‘You will
still have to use the principles of well-being and poverty’,
because there are areas, even in those communities, that are
impoverished. Raising the bar—that’s what I would
expect them to do. What I can say is that the employment
programmes—so, the Lift and the Communities for Work
programmes—will be across all of our communities, so
everybody will get some of that, because we believe it’s the
right thing to do.
|
|
[66]
Sian Gwenllian: Thank you for that clarification.
|
|
[67]
John Griffiths: Jenny.
|
|
[68]
Jenny Rathbone: Evaluating where we are, I think it’s
important to look backwards as well. I mean, some people would say
that ensuring that communities haven’t got poorer, given the
tsunami of problems that have been attacking communities, most of
which are outside Welsh Government control, is a considerable
achievement. I suppose one of my questions is really why it is
Scotland has done a lot better than Wales in reducing the levels of
poverty, because, back at the beginning of devolution, they were in
about the same space and they’ve now reduced it, you know,
down to 18 per cent from 24 per cent, which is a significant drop.
And I just wondered what your insight into that was. Why is
that?
|
|
[69]
Carl Sargeant: This is a subject—. I’ve got no
evidence to back this up, although I think the team might be able
to help me, or we can find something that we can certainly drop a
note to committee on this. But I think, historically, Wales has
been a disadvantaged nation in many ways, going back to the 1980s
when we lost significant employment levels through the coal and
steel industries. We were a sicker nation, suffering ill health,
and all those issues feed back into the system where lower
employment feeds into the poverty system. Now, I believe—and
we’re starting to see that trend in terms of
employment—we’ve got high levels of employment better
than anywhere in the UK. So, that’s not by chance;
that’s by planning and opportunity. We’ve managed to
achieve that, but we still have areas that are low in employment.
That’s why the suite of things that we’re
introducing—the free childcare pledge for working
parents—. So, we get people back into work and we enable them
to have a stronger opportunity, with free childcare, and the
ability to earn more. Those areas that are poverty based still have
low employment levels. So, I can’t answer the reason why
Scotland have done particularly well in those spaces, but I think,
as a nation, we were in a poorer place. Just the well-being of the
nation was poorer.
|
|
[70]
Jenny Rathbone:
Following on from that, why do you think
that your civil servants haven’t been more effective at
reshaping Communities First to better meet the targets that were
set?
|
|
[71]
Carl Sargeant: I think my civil servants do an excellent
job—partly because they’re sitting next to me as
well—
|
|
[72]
Jenny Rathbone:
The teams that are in charge of
supervising—
|
|
[73]
Carl Sargeant: I think what we’ve been able to do with
Communities First—. If we weren’t hit by welfare reform
and if we weren’t hit by austerity, would we be in a
different space now? I’d like to think we would be, because
our investments would have changed. But the reality is, we’re
not heading in that direction. We’re heading for deeper
austerity, we’re heading for a very difficult couple of
years, according to the IFS. Therefore, we’ve got to think
differently about what we do.
|
|
[74]
That’s why Ken Skates, who leads on
this whole-programme approach to tackling poverty, is as committed
as I am in saying we believe in full employment and giving people
the opportunity to get into that space. That’s why our
collective manifesto commitments focused on giving people the
ability to be resilient. Rather than funding communities to stay
poor, we’ve got to let them grow. I think it’s
ambitious. There’s nothing wrong with ambition. It’s
about trying this for the right reasons.
|
|
[75]
All of the things that we’re
doing—the 20,000 new homes, getting homeless people out of
poverty, effective and energy-efficient housing—is the right
thing to do. All of these suites of things—. That’s why
I said Communities First is—. It’s been a difficult
week. It’s been a difficult week for all of us, especially
me, the team and the communities. But, I’m offering hope of
something else in terms of the suite of things we’re doing to
give the chance for Wales to grow into a different
space.
|
|
[76]
Jenny Rathbone:
Okay. I mean, we can’t disagree
with the fact that having a job is the quickest route out of
poverty. But unfortunately, many people, the hardest to reach, are
furthest from the labour market. My concern is that dismantling
Communities First will mean we will no longer have anybody with the
remit to go and identify and work with the hardest to
reach.
|
|
[77]
Carl Sargeant: I don’t think that is the case, because
that’s why we’re investing £11.7 million in an
employability plan. I said to you earlier on that the Lift,
Communities for Work and PaCE programmes that I’ve visited
are tackling the very hard-to-reach clients in our
communities—the very hard to reach—and I was very
impressed with the work they’re doing. Alongside that, the
legacy funding that is in place, I believe, will be able to pick up
those issues that you talk about—the effective programmes
that take people to give them confidence and personal resilience to
get into that space.
|
|
[78]
Look, I’m a realist. We’re
not going to be able to do that for everybody because that’s
the world we live in. But there’s nothing wrong with trying
to push the boundaries of saying, ‘Look, if you want to work,
if there’s a barrier to get to work, how can we help you
through that?’ The Lift programme and Communities for Work
and the additionality of the revenue funding that local authorities
and others can bring to the table will, I believe, enable them to
do that.
|
|
[79]
We’re at the hard end here now.
We’ve got high employment levels in Wales and the people we
need to get into work are the people who are in the poverty trap in
general. That’s the space we’re trying to engage in
with our employment pathway programme. From the employment pathway
that we’re starting, this fits into the larger employability
programme that Julie James is leading on. Once you’re enabled
with confidence to get to that place then we start giving people
skills, allowing them to go into the workplace with free childcare,
and then into bigger and better jobs, if that’s what they
want to do.
|
|
[80]
We legislated for it and I remember the
Member very well, when we were taking through the Well-being
of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, saying about legislating in
one of the goals for decent jobs. That’s what our aspiration
is about—not just bringing jobs for the sake of jobs, because
that doesn’t make things better always, but decent jobs will.
That’s what this Government is about.
|
|
[81]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Joyce.
|
|
[82]
Joyce Watson: Good morning. I want to focus particularly on
resilience and what that means because it’s a new word to an
awful lot of people. So, I think it’s an opportunity to
explain that, but I also want to focus on joining up. Some of those
hard-to-reach people you talk about—those furthest away from
the job market—are women. It is a fact, still, that they care
for children more than their partners, shall we say. In an age of
austerity, where benefits are clearly being cut and are beyond our
influence, how do you see this programme helping 52 per cent of the
population to be empowered to go to work by joining up what I
understand as resilience and what you’re about to tell
me?
|
|
[83]
Carl Sargeant: Yes. We sat for—. Part of our discussions in
terms of what the future may look like—.
‘Resilience’ was the last word that we settled on, but
we went through lots of what this may mean for communities:
stronger communities, enabled and empowered communities. We thought
that ‘resilience’ sort of captured all of
that—that principle. It is about people being ready and able
to go to work. People, particularly the offer that we give children
the best start in life—. That then empowers, so we ask them
and work with them, rather than do things to communities. That then
engages with the public bodies and third sector organisations that
operate in the areas. It’s making sure that we have proper
engagement—the Act says that we’ve got to engage. Many
organisations, including Government, have been very guilty of
paying lip service to some of this stuff, and we don’t talk
to communities properly. That’s got to change because people
know their communities better.
|
|
[84]
I visited a community recently that was
very impoverished and was very resilient, interestingly. So, it
didn’t quite add up, because when I went to visit them, the
place—both in capital state and in social state—was
pretty poor. It was pretty poor. But I spoke to some of the
residents there, and they said, ‘We’ve lived here for
30 years, and we’re not moving, because this is our
community.’ I thought that was a lovely sign of resilience,
but actually, we are starting at a very low baseline. Actually,
what we’ve got to do is build that capital and build that
social responsibility back into that community. That’s what
true resilience is for me, and that’s what our vision is,
starting with all of those things: a great start in life,
progressing into good employment. I think that gives the ideal
tsunami of success for Wales.
|
|
[85]
Joyce Watson: I’m particularly interested in the free
childcare offer. I just want to ask if you’re going to embed,
at the very start of that offer, the advantages that should be
accrued from good childcare at an early age, compared to—and
there are existing data that would demonstrate this—where
children haven’t had any pre-school interaction whatsoever
outside the home, so that we can in the future at least understand
how that is working for the young people and their resilience in
the future?
|
|
[86]
Carl Sargeant: You’re right, and I’ve had conversations
with my advisory team around childcare. I have an advisory group
feeding in, so the sector with interests—so, that’s
service users and sector deliverers, both private and maintained,
coming to give us their advice on what childcare should look like.
I’ve said to them that we don’t want to do warehousing
of children. We want good-quality services for all our young
people, because it makes sense. That’s a clever
investment—planning for the future—if we look after our
young people at an early age.
|
|
10:00
|
|
[87]
Can I just pick up on the—? I’m missing the point that
you raised earlier on, particularly around women and the
disadvantages. We’ve done a significant amount of work on
impact assessments on exiting Communities First and we believe
we’ve got mitigating circumstances for all of these issues,
but I still really worry about the effects that it has on half of
the population. That’s why there is, often, an unconscious
bias, particularly around women. I’ve recently, you’ll
be interested, written out to all of my Cabinet colleagues to look
at the issue, particularly around pregnancy. Once a woman is
pregnant and comes back to work, they have a—. The Equality
and Human Rights Commission did a report about the challenges that
they face. I’ve asked my teams across the whole of Government
to look at this specifically because we have to remove the
disadvantage. A lot of the stuff we’re putting in place now,
Joyce—and Chair—is going to be generational. That, in
politics, I think, is brave too, because people will judge you
about a five-year cycle of delivery. We know this is the right
thing to do. We’re having some great work already done on the
first 1,000 days of a young person. There’s a great programme
operating in Gwent, actually, and one in Wrexham, I think it is.
But early intervention we know works. Some of the things around
tackling ACEs and tackling issues around childcare et cetera is a
long-term investment in the future, but brave for politicians. But
we’ve got to be brave.
|
|
[88]
John Griffiths: Okay. Rhianon.
|
|
[89]
Rhianon Passmore: Thank you, Chair. In regard to a shift
from a more geographical poverty-placed programme to one more
person-centred, which I believe we’re moving towards, how
would you comment in regard to potentially diluting the
concentration of activities in communities where we know, for
instance, the—[Inaudible.]—figures are hugely
concentrated—the attraction of Communities First in the first
place? How would you see the future legacy programme working
alongside the employability aspects and the childcare, which you so
crucially have mentioned in terms of it being qualitative, balanced
with the fact that, yes, we need an emphasis on employability but
we can argue we have positive employment growth here now and
poverty here now? So, for me it is about how we built qualitative
pathways within employment. I think you’ve mentioned the
employability programme. So, how can we draw those strands so that
we’re not having very, very poor fully employed citizens
working and being equally poor and therefore doubly
disadvantaged?
|
|
[90]
Carl Sargeant: I think there’s a mixed approach to
place-based services and a more generic-based service. We recognise
that the people in poverty in Communities First areas won’t
change. There will still be pockets of significant poverty in those
areas, and we will make and continue to make those investments.
That’s why the legacy funding is in place alongside a very
specific employability pathway programme. We already make some of
those interventions around PaCE, Lift and Communities First in some
of those areas, which they operate already, and we are seeing
it’s about a pathway to success, whether that would be Flying
Start or Families First. Some families don’t need all of
those interventions—because they live in that area, they can
get Flying Start, but, actually, they don’t always need
Flying Start. They might only need a little piece of that, but also
a piece of Families First or Communities First. I’m saying to
look at the individual. The individuals in Communities First areas
won’t change. They’ll always be there and they’ll
always need those services. So, I can’t see why they
won’t get those services, but there are also people outside
of those areas who need intervention, too. Unless we tackle those
issues as well, we’re not going to have the signs of success
that we are seeking. It is an important programme.
|
|
[91]
I live in a Communities First area. I would like to think that
I—and people might disagree—don’t need any of
those services that Communities First are supporting, and that
would be familiar to lots of people, I expect. So, for the people
who do need those services outside a Communities First area, why
wouldn’t we try to help them as well? So, for the people who
need those services, they’ll get them—I’m
confident about that—but we can deliver a better service for
the people who are in poverty elsewhere as well.
|
|
[92]
Rhianon Passmore: So, in terms of qualitative employment
around the employability strategy then, obviously, that will join
up with the economic strategy. In terms of those pathways, I
suppose my point would be: it isn’t just about getting a tick
in a tick box—we know that—but how are we going to be
able to provide that qualitative of employment through those
programmes that you’re talking about in order to avoid
poverty?
|
|
[93]
John Griffiths:
Before you answer, Cabinet Secretary, I
just wonder if you might address these foundational economy ideas
that are around looking at the care sector, for example, and retail
and hospitality, and how there can be an upskilling of the people
performing those roles and better rewards for them.
|
|
[94]
Carl Sargeant: I probably wouldn’t offer a view on that
because that’s not in my portfolio, but that doesn’t
mean to say that we haven’t had a conversation about that
because, particularly in the care sector—I look after
looked-after children in the care setting with the childcare
pledge—we have a significant stake in terms of people and
investment, making sure that we’ve got the skills for the
future as well.
|
|
[95]
So, this fits in with the employability
plan that Julie James is bringing forward and she’ll make an
announcement on that very shortly. We’ve had significant
interaction with her department. We are at the very front end of
this and I can share with you that I’ve had some robust
discussions with Julie James about why we are operating an
employment plan outside of the employment plan. And I’m
saying that the people who we’re dealing with here are at the
very hard-to-reach end, as Jenny and others have alluded to, and
that’s why, for me, I have to have confidence that it
doesn’t fall into the easier option of the employability
skills issue: if you’re ready, you go into the programme
because you can do this. Actually, we’ve got to enable people
to get into that space in the first place.
|
|
[96]
I’ve said to Julie that, once we
get this off the ground and running, I can, with confidence
then—and I’d be happy to—put that money into
Julie’s portfolio, if it shows a true pathway of delivery.
But it absolutely is part of the pathway of the employability plan,
and Julie, I’m sure, would be happy to come and speak with
you, Chair, in terms of how that’s panning out, but we are in
the very front end of this and I’m absolutely certain—.
I’m keeping a grip on this until I’m absolutely
confident it’s working and then I’ll probably release
the cash into a broader pot of skills. And that’s the pathway
from access to delivery.
|
|
[97]
John Griffiths:
Okay, thanks for that. Rhianon, did you
have further questions on the matter of evidence?
|
|
[98]
Rhianon Passmore:
In terms of the comments earlier that
we’ve made—I think Bethan also alluded to it, and
others—on how we’re now going to be measuring the
remainder of this programme, we’ve talked about the
well-being of future generations and measures of poverty, bearing
in mind that ‘poverty’ is still a very loosely defined
word, but how are you going to assess now the programme moving
forward?
|
|
[99]
Carl Sargeant: We’ve got the well-being of future generations
indicators, which are in statute, which we and 44 public bodies
will have to measure against so they’re in place. They are
new—well, they are old indicators, but they are new statutory
indicators for some of these bodies, so that’s why we go back
to what I said earlier to Bethan and to Sian: the well-being plans
are fundamental to this because that’s what they’re
measured against in terms of the future generations indicators.
It’s all a statutory vehicle to make sure we’re doing
something.
|
|
[100]
Rhianon Passmore:
In terms of collecting those data, I
presume what we’re looking at are annual reports to PSBs. I
mean, how are they going to be collated in future in terms of
analysis of this?
|
|
[101]
Carl Sargeant: There’s a reporting mechanism on the future
generations Act. I think it has to be—I’m trying to
remember now—12 months before the election that the future
generations commissioner has to report. Amelia is really good at
this—
|
|
[102]
Rhianon Passmore:
We can find that out, can’t
we?
|
|
[103]
Carl Sargeant: Again, with poverty, there’s risk in measuring
poverty on an annual basis because it bounces around. You’ve
got to look at the long-term trend and that’s what
we’ve done. That’s why, for the last 16 years—you
get some peaks and troughs, but, actually, it’s been pretty
static, and that’s why we think we need fundamental change
now to make it go in a different direction. But there is a
reporting mechanism through the WFG Act around all of the
indicators, but certainly the poverty ones.
|
|
[104]
Rhianon Passmore:
Okay. Thank you, Chair.
|
|
[105]
John Griffiths:
If you could—. I’ll bring
Jenny—
|
|
[106]
Jenny Rathbone:
Can I just come in on this?
|
|
[107]
John Griffiths:
Of course.
|
|
[108]
Jenny Rathbone:
You’re only going to get these
indicators one year before the next general election, or the
Assembly election, whichever it is. You know, a disaster could be
occurring, and we wouldn’t even know about it.
|
|
[109] Carl Sargeant: There’s a track on
our poverty indicators internally. The national indicators will
be—. I’m going to have to check the detail for you,
Chair, because I don’t want to tell you something
that’s not true in terms of reporting structures. Amelia
might—
|
|
[110]
Jenny Rathbone:
Okay, but this is crucial to our ability
to scrutinise whether this new approach to tackling poverty is
actually working, or whether it’s having an adverse
impact.
|
|
[111]
Carl Sargeant: The measurement profile is no different to what
we’ve been doing in the past, apart from that now it’s
statutory, in terms of the future generations Act. The stats will
still be in place that we were using in previous years. My warning
is: don’t think you’re going to have a dramatic change
in 12 months’ time, because—
|
|
[112]
Jenny Rathbone:
No, no, I wasn’t expecting that. I
suppose the anxiety is that the well-being plans that are going to
be devised by PSBs are being done by people who are a very long way
from Mrs Jones who is agoraphobic and never goes out. With the best
will in the world, the leader of a local authority and the leader
of a health board, they personally are not going to be able to be
in touch with the challenges that are faced by impoverished
communities.
|
|
[113]
Carl Sargeant: I failed to mention—thank goodness,
Amelia’s here—the tackling poverty action plan, there
are action points within that. But actually I’m not sure I
fully agree with your comments about the chief executives of the
authority or the local health board. They have a statutory purpose
to deliver on a well-being plan. They have to understand their
communities better, and they will be driven by effects of
communities, and that’s why they have to engage as well. This
isn’t a set piece where half a dozen men get into a room and
talk about what they want to plan for the future; there is a
process here about engaging real people. And that’s why
you’ll have heard me say, over all of my contributions in the
Chamber, I have to deliver against the Act, because—and
I’m saying—. So, when I was talking about domestic
violence yesterday, I have to get survivors, not only because
it’s the right thing to do, but that’s engagement;
that’s about real time, real life examples.
|
|
[114]
PSBs, while they have a statutory purpose
in terms of invitees, can ask other people to come alongside those
PSBs, as well, to give evidence about what that may look like. A
good PSB would do that. A good PSB would invite the third sector
organisations to come and talk to them about what interventions are
needed in their communities, so I would expect that the cluster
programmes around those areas would feed into the PSBs as well. So,
we’re in a very different environment about what information
sources are available, historically. Have political decisions been
made in communities? I would suggest they probably have. Now
it’s much more an evidence-based approach, and I think
it’s the right thing to do—not always popular, but
that’s what we should be doing for communities.
|
|
[115]
John Griffiths:
Okay, and I think Bethan has a question
on data.
|
|
[116]
Bethan
Jenkins: Rydw i’n credu beth sy’n bwysig yn hyn ar hyn o
bryd yw pan fyddem ni’n edrych ar sut mae’r system
newydd yn mynd i gael ei hasesu, mae yna dal problemau o hyd
ynglŷn â sut mae Cymunedau yn Gyntaf ar hyn o bryd yn
cael ei asesu oherwydd y ffaith, er enghraifft:
|
Bethan Jenkins: I think what’s important at the moment is that
when we look at how the new system will be assessed, there are
still problems regarding how Communities First is currently
assessed, because of the fact, for example:
|
|
[117]
‘Nid yw
data perfformiad ar gyfer y 35 dangosydd ar gael ar sail hydredol
ac nid oes modd eu cymharu yn sgil y cyfnodau o amser a
ddefnyddir.’
|
‘Performance data on the 35 indicators are not
available on a longitudinal basis, and they are not comparable
because of the time periods used.’
|
|
[118]
So, for example, there are data for the
second part of 2014-15, for the fourth quarter of 2014-15, and for
the second quarter of 2015-16, but we don’t have all of those
data. And then we will get an analysis of the Wales-wide view in
relation to the data, but not for all areas. And so, what I’m
trying to understand is, when people are deciding on how they
prioritise for the future, when they don’t have a clear
analysis of the picture going forward, how do they then make a
decision?
|
|
10:15
|
|
[119] For example, in the 2012 report, there’s
information there about how data are collected on the percentage of
the population who have benefits, about the number of 18 to
19-year-olds who have moved forward to higher education, but those
data haven’t been updated since 2012. So, I’m putting
it on the record because I’m feeling quite anxious about the
fact that we don’t have all the armoury by which to
scrutinise how you’re going to be making these changes, and
whether these new projects will be viable moving forward, based on
the fact that we don’t have that full picture. So, how can
you assure us that—regardless of who’s accountable to
who, and the public services boards being set up and the well-being
plans—what they are going to start with is going to be robust
enough for them to have a strong enough project moving forward?
I’m not convinced yet because of that lack of information
that not only we, in this briefing, have had, but the previous
committee of the other Assembly—we said quite strongly to
Welsh Government, ‘Well, actually, it’s very difficult
for us because we don’t have all the data from
you.’
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[120] Carl
Sargeant: I think it’s a really reasonable question. I
think it’s a difficult one because, in 2012, we didn’t
have the legislation in place that we are statutorily involved in
now. There are lots of data there; WLGA, health boards, hold lots
of data. It would be really useful, Chair, maybe for you to think
about this in terms of what data you think would be useful for you
to use to measure success. Because all of those data feed in. There
are 46 national indicators from the well-being of future
generations Act, which are underpinned by individual data sources
from authorities or public bodies—lots of them around free
school meals or NEETs and performance around that. We’re not
short of data—just, at the place and time you talk about, we
weren’t statutorily required to provide those data. The
future generations Act placed a very different duty on Government
in terms of making sure we are measuring success. That’s why,
again, the future generations commissioner will be very
robust—and was very robust—in terms of making sure we
have the right indicators to measure success as we move forward.
Because she challenges us on this issue as well. So, I’m just
not sure which data you think you haven’t got.
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[121] John
Griffiths: Well, it might be a good starting point, Cabinet
Secretary, if you were able to provide the committee with a note of
the data that you are using in evaluating the success of
Communities First: what data have been used, what data do you
intend to use moving forward in the transition period, and for the
new approach. I’m sure the committee will consider these
matters, but, obviously, the Welsh Government needs to be on firm
ground itself.
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[122] Carl
Sargeant: Well, we believe we are, Chair; I’m very happy
to offer you a paper on that. As I said earlier on the statutory
vehicles that are in place now, we don’t have any option of
not looking at this in detail, but I’m happy to provide you
with the paper.
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[123] John
Griffiths: It would be useful to have the information on what
you’ve used in the past for Communities First and what
you’ll use going forward. Could I just—?
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[124] Bethan
Jenkins: Do you compare the data year on year, then, to give a
picture as to where you have changed and how you have based that
on—?
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[125] Carl
Sargeant: Okay. We can probably do something like that. But I
think that what I’d just take you back to is the over-arching
statistic around poverty. You look at how that looks statistically.
It hasn’t moved. There is something fundamentally wrong here
in the interventions that we have leverage over, and that’s
what drives me. But I’m very happy and understand the
scrutiny element of this, about which bits are important to you,
and I will provide a paper for you.
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[126] John Griffiths: I think it’s difficult, often, to prove cause
and effect, isn’t it? As Jenny said, it may be that
Communities First has helped in all sorts of ways, but that other
factors have prevented the sort of progress that would have been
hoped for under the scheme. I do understand it’s fairly
complex to try and unravel the different impacts of different
programmes and different levers available to the Welsh Government,
UK Government, and others, but a note would be very useful to help
the committee understand better what Welsh Government has been
basing its evaluation and monitoring on, and what will happen
moving forward. Would it be fair to say, Cabinet Secretary, that,
in terms of the new emphasis on skills and employment, for example,
that should make evaluation easier? So, if there’s a certain
level of employment in Communities First areas at the
moment, and there are certain skill levels in Communities First
areas at the moment, after a period of time, obviously, you could
look at the employment rate and the skill levels and—well,
again, proving cause and effect would be problematic—at least
understand whether the employment levels and skill levels have
improved.
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[127] Carl
Sargeant: We are hopeful that we’ll be able to do that.
There are indicators currently in place that give us a good view of
that already. So, household income, economic activity of a
household, the skills base, NEETs, we’ve got data on all of
that, and that’s our core group in terms of bringing through
Lift and PaCE and Communities for Work. That will have a
significant shift. I think the big challenge we have is that you
can take somebody through that pathway and you can start them in a
job on day 1, and, effectively, you tick the box that you’ve
moved somebody into employment, but, at day 2, if it’s not
sustainable for that person, then we’ve probably failed.
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[128] I’m asking
the team now how we can give assurance to the employability pathway
of saying, once we’ve got a person to that space, how do we
support them, moving on? I think that’s one for Julie and
myself to make sure that we can deliver on. But I don’t dodge
difficult questions. I think it’s really important and a
fundamental issue about making sure that what we are measuring is
effective data rather than just numbers. What does it really mean?
I can tell you I’ve got 600 people into employment on day 1,
but, on day 2, how many more—what’s the difference
there?
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[129]
John Griffiths:
Okay, well, a note would be very useful,
Cabinet Secretary.
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[130]
Carl Sargeant: Yes.
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[131]
John Griffiths:
Before we move off the area of evaluation
and data and so on, could you tell the committee how you intend, if
you do intend, to involve experts in advising Welsh Government on
tackling poverty as you move forward? Obviously, there was a
tackling poverty external advisory group up until the end of last
year—would you intend to have a similar group moving forward
or some other mechanism of feeding in expert advice and
help?
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[132]
Carl Sargeant: The issue of the tackling poverty external advisory
group is a matter for Mr Skates, of course, but what we do have in
place—and I said to you earlier on it’s about, for me,
that experts are great, but we need real experiences as well
alongside of that. Alun Davies is operating the ministerial
taskforce group for the Valleys. I still meet with the
children’s group, the end child poverty network. So, there
are experts that we call on to give us advice as well. The matter
of the tackling poverty external advisory group is a matter for
Ken, but I think they have done some good work in the past, and I
think what we’re trying to do is make sure that we engage
other people, other than sector-driven—people who are
affected in communities as well.
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[133]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Janet, I think you have some
questions on poverty reduction.
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[134]
Janet Finch-Saunders:
Yes. The programmes in your portfolio now
as regards this, will they have a distinct focus on raising
household incomes for people in poverty?
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[135]
Carl Sargeant: Yes, because the employment pathway is the way
we’ll do that. There are lots of effects, aren’t there,
in terms of poverty? There are lots of trigger points. The state of
the household, the capital of the household, is one of those. So,
investing, with Lesley Griffiths, through our energy efficiency
schemes, giving people lower bills—by just doing that, it
enhances the opportunity for a household in their income and gives
them more expendable cash. So, giving decent jobs alongside of that
and our childcare pledge, allowing people to go into work, are a
suite of things that we are tackling to make sure that this is one
of our focus areas to give people more ability to survive in their
property.
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[136]
Janet Finch-Saunders:
I know that you’ve referenced in
the past, and you’ve just mentioned now decent jobs. I know
we’ve talked about Wylfa. We’ve talked about other
schemes, the metro and things like that. These are highly skilled
jobs. How are you going to marry those two up?
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[137] Carl Sargeant: Well, the employability plan. That’s why Julie
James, with her 100,000—. Again, you’ve given me
the opportunity to celebrate one of our great manifesto
commitments: our 100,000 apprenticeship programme for all is one
that we are keen to ensure—. Ken Skates alluded to this in a
debate yesterday on steel, actually—an urgent question on
steel. We’ve got to plan for the future here because we are
doing very well in our employment, but the times are changing.
Automation is heading in the world’s direction. We’ve
got to give the people those skills in advance to be at the top of
the game.
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[138]
Janet Finch-Saunders:
Absolutely right.
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[139] Carl
Sargeant: That’s why our apprenticeship scheme, our
employability pathway programme, is about resilience for the long
term. Tackling poverty here and now is one thing, trying to do that
today, but the time in the future is changing—you’ve
got to have your eye on that. That’s why we legislated for
future generations. That’s why I want to invest in our kids
today because of the legacy; what we leave today is for them to
pick up tomorrow and we can’t afford to do that.
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[140]
Janet Finch-Saunders:
But on the point that Jenny made about
the hardest to reach, how do you intend to really get out there
with this, and reach those furthest away from the labour market,
bring them forward and help them into these really highly
skilled—?
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[141] Carl
Sargeant: Well, it’s a pathway for the people,
isn’t it? Some people I’ve met, and you will have met,
are not work ready. And there are some softer interventions, like
some things that happen in Communities First areas now, which
we’re saying are fairly effective pieces of work that local
authorities engage in with their revenue funding. That’s what
they should do, if that’s what it means to enable people to
get into that pathway. We make an £11.7 million investment in
our employability pathway for the very reasons of getting the
people who are hard to reach into the skills pathway to fit into
the employability pathway. I recognise a good decent job is the
catalyst to success for the future.
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[142] Janet Finch-Saunders: You’ve chosen
now to focus on spreading prosperity rather than reducing poverty.
The word ‘poverty’ isn’t mentioned at all in
‘Taking Wales Forward’. Why the sudden emphasis on
spreading prosperity, and how have you risk-assessed that going
forward?
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[143] Carl
Sargeant: It’s a play on words, really, isn’t it?
The fact is, I said to you earlier, ‘Do we want to maintain
communities to be poor, or do we want to give them
prosperity?’ Do we want them to grow, with skills, with
opportunity, wherever you are in Wales, particularly the areas that
Communities First currently covers? That’s the key for
us—about giving people success and hope. And all of our
interventions that we are seeking to do across Government, and all
of those programmes I have just been talking about, are a jig-saw
suite of tools that will hopefully enable communities to prosper
wherever you are.
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[144]
Janet Finch-Saunders:
And then to go back to many of the
comments from my colleagues on this committee: how are you going to
have tangible targets and, you know, sort of definite achievable
outcomes? How are you going measure that? The reporting of the
future generations and things like that, as Members have said, we
want to know from the outset how this is going to start to work,
how it’s going to start to develop the success—the rise
or fall of it.
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[145] Carl
Sargeant: We’ll provide a note, as I said earlier, Chair,
around the current indicators that we are operating within, and how
that suite of indicators change. But from your first question about
household income, et cetera, those are things that we measure
already. And I don’t move from this: this is about the
long-term vision. Unless you physically—it’s not about
cash actually—give money to individuals en bloc, then you
don’t change communities in the short term; you’ve got
to plan for the long term. That’s why giving those skills and
opportunities is something that we’re investing in.
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[146] Janet
Finch-Saunders: I’m particularly interested, Chairman, in
early years and why children present with additionality
need—you know, they have additional needs—and that can
be a single individual. How are you going to reach in and help?
Because we do have a society at the moment—. We know there
are 1,000 affected young children who are in pupil referral units,
for instance, because they just cannot engage with the education
system.
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10:30
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[147] So,
they’re already outside that—you know, not being
educated with their peers, which makes it difficult for them to
socialise. How will you get into those on an individuality basis,
because, you know, no two individuals, children or adults, present
ever the same? It’s really fine tuning, isn’t it,
resources, guidance and support, as they’re coming through
the education system? How are you going to maintain that?
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[148]
Carl Sargeant: There are a couple of questions there that I’m
really passionate about, because it really troubles me that we have
young people in referral units that are sometimes not getting the
services that we need, and we take them on a journey that is bound
for not the success that they should be enabled
to—
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[149]
Janet Finch-Saunders:
And then they present later on,
and—
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[150]
Carl Sargeant: Absolutely.
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[151]
Janet Finch-Saunders:
Yes, you’ve got to get in
early.
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[152]
Carl Sargeant: So, my thrust about intervention is about early
years—early intervention and prevention. The problem we have
with that is that we’re doing the day job as well.
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[153]
Janet Finch-Saunders:
I know.
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[154]
Carl Sargeant: So, we’ve got people in the system who are in
need of support, but we know a lot of this—and there’s
some work we’ve done with Public Health Wales around
aCes—is
generational. So, what happens is that it just presents itself
again, so people who generally have suffered from a domestic abuse
situation often find themselves either being the perpetrators or
victims later in life, too, and it goes on from drugs and alcohol
and other issues, depending on what their personal resilience
is—where they live, whether they are in poverty are not, all
have effects in this space. We know we have to break that cycle,
and that’s why we’ve made this significant investment
in an ACEs hub with Public Health Wales—that’s me, the
health Minister, social services and education—saying,
‘We have some great staff out there, whether they be in
education or whether they be in community-based support, who can
identify and support individuals very specifically.’ We know
that it’s clever investment, so these young people—.
The youth justice board—I think I’ve mentioned this to
you before. We’ve done a piece of work with the youth justice
board. It’s called an enhanced case management study.
We’ve had some fantastic effects on some of the
hardest-to-reach individuals in the youth justice system with the
most reoffending. You should go to my constituency of Flintshire,
as the youth justice board there have done this. It’s a
really interesting project. The largest cohort of individuals that
are reoffending, they’ve gone through a different programme,
with an ACE-focused lens, so they’re treating the issues that
they’ve suffered in the past, rather than saying,
‘Don’t reoffend’, because that doesn’t
work. They’ve had, I think, 19 out of the 20 most prolific
offenders in north Wales who haven’t reoffended because
they’ve been through this programme.
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[155]
Janet Finch-Saunders:
That’s fantastic.
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[156]
Carl Sargeant: That’s clever investment, because they
don’t go to a safety unit, a referral unit, they don’t
go to jail, hopefully, and hopefully we’ve broken that cycle.
That’s what we’ve got to do with all our things. So,
I’m in that space of intervention and prevention, but
we’re doing the day job at the same time, and that’s
really hard. Because you asked me, ‘What about the ambulance
times? What about the waiting times?’, and we’ve got to
deliver on that, but, actually, if we’re really clever, we
should be upstream of that. We shouldn’t be investing in that
end; we should be saying, ‘Stop people being ill. Let’s
stop people getting into the hospital in the first
place.’
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[157]
John Griffiths:
Okay, thank you for that, Cabinet
Secretary. And now, Jenny.
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[158]
Jenny Rathbone:
That leads me on to the area that I was
wanting to explore, which is that, clearly, you’re wanting to
mainstream the best of Communities First into other programmes, and
I can see that that’s going to work in terms of Communities
for Work, Lift, PaCE, et cetera. The employability programme will,
I’m sure, survive. So, the areas that I think are most
challenging, as far as my vision of how it’s going to happen,
is around the really important things that Communities First has
done—you know, the glue between all these other programmes.
So, for example: the social prescriptions for people who are,
basically, lonely and isolated and not engaging with the community;
the ‘frequent flyers’ programme to stop people going to
A&E when their problem is that they’re lonely, they have
attachment problems, they’ve got mental health problems,
they’ve got addiction problems, and they all tip up in
A&E. So, how are we going to get other organisations to adopt
those things, given the pressures that the health service is
facing?
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[159] Carl Sargeant: There are things that we deliver currently that will
stop. However, the transition funding that we’ve applied,
working with other organisations, because there is a
responsibility—I think it’s incumbent upon all of us,
not just Government, but on all of us, to ask the questions of
public service boards as a whole about how they make sure
that they embed the future generations Act. This is a really
clever piece of legislation, if we can get it to work. If we can
get it to work properly—. I’ll give you a very simple
example: the Help Point in Swansea is a point, where, of an
evening, if you are a reveller in Wine Street and you fall foul of
excessive alcohol or otherwise—. In years gone by, the door
staff would help you out, accordingly, and often the police would
turn up and send you to A&E, if you couldn’t walk or you
were being sick everywhere. A clever intervention by Alun Michael
initially—the police and crime commissioner—said,
‘We’re spending far too much time here. Let’s all
get our heads around what the intervention should be here.’
So, he brought all the organisations, including the private sector,
door staff, the owners of buildings, street pastors, the NHS and
the ambulance service together and asked, ‘How can we fix
this problem?’ That was, I believe, pre the future
generations Act, but the principle is exactly the same.
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[160] From that, they
collectively started putting money in—most of the
organisations put some money in; some didn’t, actually, which
frustrated me then—and they created the Help Point—a
portakabin behind the nightclubs. On the first weekend, I think
they prevented 16 admissions to hospital. Purely on a financial
basis, that was huge—that was into thousands of pounds by
stopping people going through the A&E system. There were no
ambulance calls, just because they had a portakabin with one
paramedic, the St John ambulance, the voluntary sector street
pastors and a policeman on the door. People were ill, or whatever
they were, and often phoned parents, which embarrassed them
profusely, but it works. But what we’ve got to do is make
sure that schemes like that are important to all of the
stakeholders. So, it’s about a health board in particular or
the ambulance service saying that, for the sake of investing
£10,000, £15,000 or £20,000, long term, that
saves them thousands, but sometimes they don’t want to do
that and that’s the frustration: how do we make sure that
they have a social responsibility around their PSBs to say,
‘Our priority has to be the well-being of
individuals’?
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[161] I think that
your original question is a tough one because we’re in the
space of the day job. Chief executives or finance officers say,
‘I want to stay away from that. This is our job and not
that.’ But actually, it’s not. The fire service has
done really well in terms of moving into that space as well.
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[162]
Jenny Rathbone:
Okay. So, in your statement in the
Chamber on Tuesday, you mentioned children zones and StreetGames as
where we can obviously work with children. What role are schools
going to play in that, given that some schools are still not
community-focused and still won’t let the community use the
premises that belong to the community after 3.30 p.m.?
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[163]
Carl Sargeant: I’ve had some discussions with the Cabinet
Secretary for Education on this issue. It moves quite nicely
actually into the childcare pledge because our childcare pledge
extends beyond the hours of 3.30 p.m. and it also extends beyond
the hours of school holidays: it’s 48 weeks of the year. We
think that we’re pretty sure that a lot of the maintained
settings for operating the childcare setting will have to involve
school settings. So, there’s a different conversation being
had about the use of schools and what their engagement process
is.
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[164]
There is an interesting point around
schools and governors, because I think I’m right in saying
that if the governors or the headteacher don’t want the
school to be open through the summer holidays, they don’t
have to open it, which I find rather interesting, when, actually,
it’s a public asset. I’m with you, Jenny, in that
community-focused schools are a good thing and I’m hoping
that the Communities First transition might open up some
opportunities in that space.
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[165]
Jenny Rathbone:
Okay, so you’re working on it with
the education Secretary; that’s good.
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[166]
In terms of the work that you’re
doing with the Department for Work and Pensions, how easy is it for
the philosophy and approach of the Welsh Government to marry up
with the DWP? To the people in my community, the DWP are best known
for the targets that they set for sanctioning individuals, which
seems to me an entirely punitive approach, rather than giving
people a helping hand.
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[167]
Carl Sargeant: I think we have a very good relationship with the DWP
in terms of the civil service aspect of this. We have a good
relationship. I perhaps would not like to comment on the issue of
sanctions; that’s a matter for the DWP and how they operate.
But our jobs programme works very effectively, so we deliver some
of that with Jobcentre Plus, and it is effective. So, we have a
good relationship, and what I’m keen to learn as we roll out
the programme is whether there are any elements of this that
don’t work so well that we need to iron out. At the moment,
it seems to be working fine. I will be working with somebody
externally, who has strong knowledge on the delivery of this from
the DWP end, who will be able to give us some further
advice.
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[168]
John Griffiths:
Just on that, Jenny, if I may just
intervene only for a moment, of course, there’s the
forthcoming work and health programme from the DWP. Are you
confident that that will be aligned with appropriate Welsh
Government programmes?
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[169]
Carl Sargeant: Yes. I think we’ve looked at this carefully,
and we think it just dovetails into the system. There are political
choices, and the UK Government have that mandate to do what they
wish to do. We don’t see it as a problem in terms of the
programmes that we’re delivering.
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[170]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Jenny.
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[171]
Jenny Rathbone:
I suppose my enduring anxiety is that
you’re clearly minded to relax the geographical boundaries
around all these programmes, which, obviously, will benefit the
people living in poverty living outside the geographical
boundaries. But it also is in danger of taking the eye off the ball
in terms of forcing staff to reach the hardest to reach, who are
not the easiest people to work with—who don’t come in
at the first opportunity. How are we going to prevent programmes
simply responding to those who shout loudest?
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[172]
Carl Sargeant: When I said earlier on that I am looking at flexing
the programmes, I’ve not agreed that I will do this yet,
because it’s based on assurances from organisations that if
they want to flex programmes, they’ve got to be able to
deliver on the services that I expect them to do, and nothing
changes in that respect of targeting those that are most hard to
reach. That’s why I haven’t released the employment
money into the general pot of skills and education, because I know
that these can be difficult people to deal with, and we’ve
got to give them additional support sometimes, and that’s the
right thing to do.
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[173]
So, I’ve asked local authorities to
give me examples of where they see a flex in the programme would
give them greater ability to remove some of the red tape around
that in order for them to deliver what they’re doing, and
more. We did a 5 per cent flex between Flying Start and Families
First; we’ve seen some evaluation around that about how it
worked for some authorities. As I said to you earlier on, I think
the most advanced discussions we’ve been having have been
with Torfaen, but I’m not yet convinced—we
haven’t completed those discussions yet—that I would
flex the programme enough in that space until I’ve got
assurances that they will deliver what they’ve been doing
already, plus a little bit more.
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[174]
Jenny Rathbone:
Okay. And lastly, how is the Welsh
Government going to use the procurement powers that both the Welsh
Government and all the other public bodies have—the 44 public
bodies that are involved in the future generations Act—to
ensure that we’re boosting local employment and businesses
locally?
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[175]
Carl Sargeant: There are two aspects to that. One is about the
physical procurement of services or goods. We should be applying
the FG Act to that. So, can we create an opportunity for locally
produced goods and services? The other element of this is around
people, about apprenticeship programmes and support mechanisms that
will fit quite nicely into our employability pathway. So, once
we’ve got people who are work ready through Lift or
Communities for Work, can we get them into the space of the metro
or the Valleys taskforce employability programmes? These are
all—.
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10:45
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[176] As I said at the start of this discussion,
Chair, we can’t afford to have one programme that we think
will fix everything. We’ve got to make sure these programmes
join up. I’ve been in Government a number of years, and
I’m really encouraged by my Cabinet colleagues and their
enthusiasm to help each other. I hope they see me the same,
although I do present many problems for them, generally. But
it’s a fact: Ken Skates came to me early on in the
administration saying to me, ‘The 20,000 homes that
you’ve got to build is our problem’, and I thought that
was a very different way of doing business in Government, and
I’m very encouraged by that.
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[177]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Well, thanks very much, Cabinet
Secretary. I’m afraid that’s all we have time for
today. You will be sent a transcript to check for factual accuracy.
So, thank you very much for coming along to face scrutiny this
morning, and thanks very much to your officials as well.
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10:46
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Cynnig o dan Reol Sefydlog 17.42 (vi) i Benderfynu
Gwahardd y Cyhoedd o Eitem 4
Motion under Standing Order 17.42 (vi) to Resolve to Exclude the
Public from Item 4
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Cynnig:
|
Motion:
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bod y pwyllgor yn penderfynu
gwahardd y cyhoedd o eitem 4 yn unol â Rheol Sefydlog
17.42(vi).
|
that the committee resolves
to exclude the public from item 4 in accordance with Standing Order
17.42(vi).
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Cynigiwyd y
cynnig.
Motion moved.
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[178] John
Griffiths: Okay, the next item is a motion to exclude the
public under Standing Order 17.42. Is the committee content? Yes.
Okay, we will move into private session.
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Daeth rhan gyhoeddus y cyfarfod i ben am
10:46.
The public part of the meeting ended at 10:46.
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Ailymgynullodd y pwyllgor yn gyhoeddus am
11:10.
The committee reconvened in public at 11:10.
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Bil yr Undebau Llafur
(Cymru)—Sesiwn Dystiolaeth 2
Trade Union (Wales)
Bill—Evidence Session 2
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[179] John
Griffiths: Welcome back. We move to item 5 on our agenda today,
which is the second of our several evidence sessions to inform our
scrutiny of the Trade Union (Wales) Bill. I welcome Steve Thomas,
chief executive of the Welsh Local Government Association, and
Jonathan Lloyd, head of employment at the Welsh Local Government
Association, to our meeting today. I’ll begin, if I may, by
asking why, in the WLGA’s view, the social partnership is
important in Wales and how it contributes to the effective delivery
of local services by local authorities in Wales.
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[180] Mr
Thomas: Thank you, Chair. The social partnership approach that
we’ve developed has been an incremental approach that was
built over a number of years and, in particular, accelerated when
the black clouds started to gather in terms of local government
finance around about 2009-10. What we’ve sought to do in the
Welsh context with the trade unions, and working with the Welsh
Government, as well, is to build an approach that—I
wouldn’t call it the old fashioned beer-and-sandwiches
approach; it’s certainly not that. But, what we’ve
tried to do is actually build an approach where we all sit in a
room and have a mature discussion about how we can protect public
sector employment, because we knew, from 2010 onwards, that we were
going to face some hefty cuts. The result of that is that a social
partnership approach has developed.
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[181] We see that
exercised primarily through something called the workforce
partnership council, which is either chaired by the First Minister
or by the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government, and,
at that partnership council, we have developed a range of ideas. A
classic example was the development of the staff commission in
Wales, which was put in place to deal with the then proposed
mergers. Obviously, they didn’t happen, but we’ve
developed those types of approaches and we’ve developed a
range of agreements, the classic one being the 2012 partnership and
managing change agreement, which is in your pack in terms of the
appendices from the Wales TUC, something that myself and the head
of the Wales TUC worked on extensively at the time. What we were
seeking to do was, in effect, put a framework in place for public
services in Wales that protected employment, but recognised that
the impact of austerity would see job losses, and how to deal with
that in what was a fully partnership-based approach without the
resort to what would be traditional ding-dong industrial relations.
I think it’s worked and I think it is one of the successes of
devolution.
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[182] John
Griffiths: So, following on from that, could you expand on your
assertion that UK Government’s Trade Union Act will undermine
the relationship between employers and staff within local
authorities in Wales?
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[183] Mr
Thomas: I can see there may be a different set of industrial
relations across Offa’s Dyke, but, with the best will in the
world, this is the equivalent of the Westminster Don Quixotes
tilting at Welsh windmills. It’s an approach that’s
trying to solve a problem, to one extent, that doesn’t exist.
As I say, I don’t want to pretend that we live in a world
full of peaceful co-existence with our trade union colleagues. We
don’t. We have vigorous discussions, we have disputes, we
have arguments and, occasionally, there is industrial action. But
we work that within a framework that is mature, that has developed
and that, at all costs, seeks to avoid getting to that place.
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[184] I think this
Bill actually injects that hostility back into the system and
that’s not helpful. We’ve got enough to do out there.
We’ve got plenty of things to occupy us in terms of some of
the big issues we’ve got in local government, not least of
all in terms of the future of things like social care. This, to
some extent, is a distraction, and we want to take the workforce
along with us in terms of these changes. I think the Trade Union
Bill doesn’t help us do that. I think the framework that
we’ve currently got works. It’s proven to have
worked—the amount of industrial action in local government
over the last five years, despite austerity, has been negligible. I
think that, in and of itself, is a testimony to the success of the
approach.
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[185] John
Griffiths: Going one stage further, if there was to be an
undermining of that relationship between employers and staff, in
your view, how would that impact on local services in Wales?
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11:15
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[186] Mr
Thomas: Well, the danger is that if you end up with a
heightened industrial relations climate, which is not helpful. The
danger is that those agreements that we’ve made in terms of,
unfortunately, staff leaving local government—and we’ve
lost about 20,000-plus staff over the last five or six
years—wouldn’t exist. It could lead to us not taking
the approach that we take, which is based on things like voluntary
early retirements and a range of other things. You could end up
with us using graded employment, compulsory redundancies and a
range of other mechanisms. I think if we can avoid that, and my
association doesn’t give a commitment to avoid compulsory
redundancies, but at the same time, wherever we can we will, and
the approaches in the agreements we’ve had allow us to do
that. So, I think if those frameworks are not in place it could
lead to what is a more factious set of industrial relations in
Wales.
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[187] John
Griffiths: Just on a point of clarity, I think you may have
said earlier that the Bill might inject hostility into
Wales—
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[188] Mr
Thomas: Yes, definitely.
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[189] John
Griffiths: Okay. Jenny, did you wish to come in on social
partnership? Sorry, Joyce. I’m getting my Js mixed up.
Joyce.
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[190] Joyce
Watson: I wanted to come in on social partnership. Good
morning, both. I want to understand, or for you to put on the
record, how important that social partnership is in terms of
putting a benefit back to the taxpayer or the user of the services
that are provided through your workforce.
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[191] Mr
Thomas: The level of social partnership is extensive.
I’ve mentioned the workforce partnership council. We also
have something called the joint council for Wales, which is a
meeting between the WLGA as employers, meeting with local
authorities and trade unions. We also have a local government group
with the workforce partnership council. We have an education group
with the workforce partnership council. So, the machinery is
extensive. That doesn’t count either all the other industrial
relations frameworks that are agreed in the London setting. So,
it’s an extensive machinery. It’s difficult to quantify
what the social partnership does other than the avoidance of things
like strike, and other than the fact that, I think, industrial
relations in a Welsh setting are generally pretty good. I’m
constantly amazed at the level of morale in local government.
I’m not suggesting that people are walking around singing,
you know, the Pembrokeshire national anthem, but at the same time,
morale is generally pretty good. I think, from that point of view,
that sort of intense discussion in terms of getting a conducive
framework of industrial relations is money in the bank. I think it
does save money for us and I think it does allow us to be in a
position where, when it comes to the really hard stuff, when it
comes to the devil-in-the-detail stuff, we have a framework where
you can, at least, build on an accumulated level of trust. You
can’t put money—you can’t put pound notes on
that, but it’s built up over the years, it’s important
and it works.
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[192] Joyce
Watson: So, how do you think—because this is a crucial
question—the trade union Bill that’s proposed in the
UK, because we’re trying to mitigate it, will put that in
jeopardy?
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[193] Mr Lloyd:
Perhaps it might be helpful to give some examples.
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[194] John
Griffiths: Just to comment briefly—the Trade Union Act in
a UK setting.
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[195] Joyce
Watson: Sorry, yes. Okay.
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[196] Mr Lloyd:
I think this is included in our evidence, where there was a
national teachers’ strike a number of years ago in England,
which we managed to avert in Wales. We managed to avert that
through sitting down and discussing the issue sensibly and
maturely, and coming up with a solution that suited the approach in
Wales. It caused major disruption in England: schools closed, there
was loss of learning, and the impact that that has on the economy
in terms of parents needing to take time off work to cover the
absence. We stopped that in Wales, and we stopped it through having
a proper, mature conversation under these social partnership
arrangements.
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[197] Joyce
Watson: That’s great, but it still doesn’t
answer—. How do you see that changing the Trade Union Act
that is currently prescribed by the UK? How would that, in your
opinion, change that?
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[198] Mr Lloyd:
Okay. One of the elements is the restriction on facility time.
It’s how you interpret that facility time, and that ability
to be able to have a conversation at various levels, as Steve
mentioned, whether they’re national or local. If
there’s a restriction on facility time, that prevents that
conversation, and prevents the opportunity to discuss a solution.
Steve mentioned social partnership, but he also mentioned the
frameworks. We’re built on collective agreements; they are
joint agreements between the trade unions representing their
membership. That’s in our national agreements. We’re
currently bound by that, and if that facility time disappeared or
was restricted, that would put in danger the ability to have these
mature conversations that resolve problems that affect our
communities.
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[199]
Joyce Watson: To coin another phrase, then, ‘It’s good
to talk’.
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[200]
Mr Lloyd: Yes.
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[201]
Joyce Watson: Have you ever thought about the amount of savings?
Did you ever look at the cost? You mentioned that there was a cost,
and you gave an example of the teachers. Do you know if that was
actually costed to the community or not?
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[202]
Mr Lloyd: No, it wasn’t costed. We could put out finger
in the air, but we’d also consider what it would be a
considerable disruption to right across Wales, as I say, not just
within the workforce and within schools and children, but in terms
of others being able to attend work as well. I have no idea what
impact that would have had on the economy, that particular
day.
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[203]
Joyce Watson: Can I ask another question—because you’ve
sort of alluded to it in terms of social partnership—about
the added bonus of people feeling valued? Because you’ve had
conversations and you’ve recognised, I hope, within those
conversations, the difficulties on both sides, so how do you feel
that that then feeds back into the productivity of the
workforce?
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[204]
Mr Thomas: I’ve spoken to colleague chief executives in an
English context, and talked about the framework with industrial
relations there, and some more hostile frameworks, and I think
there’s a range of things that has happened across—.
I’ll readily admit that English local government has faced
deeper cuts than Welsh local government, but I think in terms of
the package that we give, in terms of a message to the 140,000
employees of Welsh local government, it’s one of,
‘We’re going to seek to protect some of the key
services as much as we can. We’re going to back that up with
an industrial relations framework, which is about dedicating
ourselves to protecting your jobs wherever we possibly can. So, we
won’t give a commitment on no compulsory redundancies. We
can’t. But we will do our damnedest to make sure that we do
not go down that route.’
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[205]
A classic example: the leader of Neath
Port Talbot, Ali Thomas, has negotiated a situation in that
authority where, one year, there were 2 per cent salary cuts, but
it was done on the basis that there would be no compulsory
redundancies and it was done on the basis that those cuts hit
everybody proportionally. The chief exec and the senior officers
took a higher level of reduction. So, that sort of sense of
fairness that comes out of those types of approaches I think plays
well with the workforce, and I think people understand that, and I
think people—. As I say, I’m not suggesting that
everybody is walking around with a big smile on their face at the
current time—it’s very difficult out there—but I
think it’s one of those situations where it does at least
provide a level of assurance about your employment, which in an
English context is slightly different, because authorities there
will privatise at the drop of a hat and authorities there have
probably lost more staff than we have, in terms of the approach
that they’ve taken. We’ve lost a lot of
staff—we’ve lost 20,000—but there are probably a
lot more gone in the English context, and part of that is about the
fact that we are seeking to put in place these frameworks that
protect the employment. As I say, that is something that I think
the employees of local government understand and
appreciate.
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[206]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Rhianon.
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[207]
Rhianon Passmore:
Thank you. In regard to that, which is
quite clearly articulated, you mentioned at the beginning, in a
sense, that this is a non-issue—why fix what’s not
broken—and that you have got better things to do in terms of
dealing with austerity—so-called—and the cuts to Wales
and also social care matters, which are difficult. In regard to the
situation in England and the Act itself, which we are seeking to
disapply here, what is your view in terms of the motivation, if I
may ask, in terms of why that was introduced, bearing in mind your
quite clear narrative about the advantages of a social partnership
here, in terms of our improved industrial relations here in Wales,
compared to England?
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[208]
John Griffiths:
I don’t think that—.
It’s probably not a question that you are able to
answer—
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[209]
Rhianon Passmore:
It’s a view.
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[210]
John Griffiths:
—or is reasonable to expect you to
answer, to be fair, Steve.
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[211]
Rhianon Passmore:
I mean, I don’t know if there is
anything you want to add as to why we’re having to go down
this route.
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[212]
Mr Thomas: I think that the Conservative Government in
Westminster has a different model of industrial relations than the
type of approach that we take in Wales. That is a totally
legitimate model of industrial relations that they are applying
there. We don’t agree with it. In Wales, 21 of our
authorities do not agree with it either.
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[213]
Rhianon Passmore:
Okay, thank you.
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[214]
John Griffiths:
Okay, thank you. Sian.
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[215]
Sian
Gwenllian: Diolch yn fawr am ddod atom y bore yma. Rwyf jest eisiau
edrych ychydig bach ar Fil yr Undebau Llafur (Cymru), sydd yn
ceisio datgymhwyso tri maes penodol o Ddeddf Undebau Llafur 2016. A
ydych yn meddwl bod y meysydd yma yn bwysig—y tri maes y
byddwn yn delio yn fwy dwfn â hwy? Yn gyffredinol, a ydych yn
meddwl bod y rhain yn bwysig o ran cael eu datgymhwyso? A
ydy’r Bil yn mynd ar ôl y pethau iawn, mewn gwirionedd,
er mwyn cynnal y bartneriaeth gymdeithasol honno? Hefyd, a oes
unrhyw rwystr yr ydych yn ei weld wrth roi darpariaethau’r
Bil newydd hwn ar waith? Hynny yw, a ydym yn creu rhyw sefyllfa, yn
anfwriadol, efo rhai o’r elfennau sy’n cael eu
datgymhwyso?
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Sian Gwenllian: Thank you very much for being here this morning. I
just want to look a little bit at the Trade Union (Wales) Bill,
which tries to disapply three specific areas of the UK Trade Union
Act 2016. Do you think that these areas are important—these
three areas that we will be looking at more deeply? Generally, do
you think that these are important in terms of being disapplied?
Does the Bill pursue the right things, as it were, in order to
maintain that social partnership? Also, is there any kind of block
that you see in terms of implementing the provisions of this new
Bill? Are we creating unintended consequences with some of the
elements that are disapplied?
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[216]
Mr Thomas: I think that, in terms of the approach you are
taking, it is the right approach. I think if there are any
unintended consequences, it will be the consequence to show that
Wales applies a better model than is applied in England. We have
got a situation here where, when it comes to things like check-off,
when it comes to things like facility time, when it comes to a
range of other elements in the Bill—I mean, I can’t
over-emphasise that, for most authorities, this is just a
non-issue. You know, in terms of check-off, we take charitable
donations out of people’s salaries. It doesn’t cost
that much. It doesn’t make that much difference. It’s
part of any good payroll system.
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[217]
In terms of facility time, I think
facility time is important. Again, I’m not going to pretend
we don’t have disputes about it. We have had two authorities
in the recent period—Carmarthenshire and Anglesey—who
have had some fairly robust arguments about this. From our point of
view, we want to see the trade unions subject to the same economic
disciplines that the rest of us are subject to. But, you know, we
see facility time as a way of having a dialogue at a local level
that allows us, at the local level, to test some of the ideas that
councillors and officers are coming up with. It’s that sort
of pre-consultation, pre-scrutiny, pre-discussion that allows some
of the more controversial things to get through in budgets. When
you work in Gwynedd—it used to happen in that way, and,
again, it was absolutely essential to have that. You need a point
to go towards, don’t you? You need an organisation that
represents your workforce, where you can raise these things and
take the temperature on some of the things that are being raise.
So, that, as I say, is absolutely key for us.
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[218]
In terms of the way that the Bill is
constructed, I’ve seen the legal advice that the Wales TUC
has got on it, and I think it’s a Bill that essentially
disapplies an Act, isn’t it? From our point of view, we do
not see the need for the Act, so we’re perfectly content with
that.
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[219]
Sian Gwenllian:
It disapplies three particular areas,
doesn’t it? That’s what I’m trying to get at. Do
you think that those are the correct areas to be disapplying
or—? In general, you don’t agree with the Act anyway,
but do you see that these three areas will make a difference? Are
there any unintended consequences?
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11:30
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[220] Mr Lloyd:
In terms of that issue around facility time, that is essential in
having that mature conversation. If that was taken away or
restricted in anything, the industrial relations landscape in Wales
would change totally. Steve mentioned previously some examples
around the Neath Port Talbot workforce agreement. Discussions took
something in the region of 18 months, but took £3 million off
the pay bill, through a mature conversation. There would have been
a different approach required. It would have been members losing
their jobs and services affected because of that. So, I think
it’s crucial that facility time is maintained
proportionately—proportionately—so that you can have
that conversation with the trade union, who represent their
workforce. So, it’s useful to talk to the workforce through
the trade unions, rather than trying to talk to a workforce
that’s geographically all over one’s county in
different offices and communicate—having that point of
contact, taking that temperature test around where we’re
going. And also, dare I say, it’s useful having the trade
union to deliver messages for you, because I think sometimes we
have messages from people and we disbelieve them because of the
relationship. It’s that doctor in a white coat—if a
doctor tells me I’ve got a cold, as opposed to somebody else,
it must be right. So, having that conversation with a trade union,
who understand the issues and can tease that
out—there’s a lot of value in that as well.
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[221]
John Griffiths:
Could I just ask, picking up on Sian
Gwenllian’s question, in your view, are there any provisions
in the UK Act that would adversely impact on the social partnership
and delivery of services that the Welsh Government Bill
doesn’t seek to disapply?
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[222]
Mr Thomas: I think, from our point of view, the Bill itself
disapplies most of the more contentious elements of the Act. Many
of the contentious elements of the Act were anyway amended through
the House of Lords process in terms of the scrutiny within the
Westminster environment. So, the Act is not quite as draconian as
it was. It was David Davis, I think, who described the provisions
originally on picketing as akin to Franco’s Spain. Coming
from a now Conservative Minister, I think that tells you a
story.
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[223]
So, I think, from our point of view, the
Bill covers and touches all the right bases. From our point of view
as well, I think we want to carry on with what we think is a
successful industrial relations framework. We see no need to change
it.
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[224]
John Griffiths:
Can I just ask as well, in terms of the
Welsh Government’s proposals to local government reform, I
think you’ve said that keeping the sort of relations that
currently exist with the trade unions would be beneficial for that
and that trade unions will have an important role to play. Could
you just say a little more in terms of how you think the UK Trade
Union Act 2016 would harm that local government reform process,
potentially?
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[225]
Mr Thomas: We’re going to have—. Over the next five
to 10 years (1) we’re going to see voluntary
mergers—that’s going to happen—(2) we’re
going to see authorities take a range of services up to a regional
level, with consequent impacts on the local government workforce.
From our point of view, what we want to do is have a discussion
about how we do that, because, inevitably, when you take things up
to another level and a different level of scale, there are job
losses.
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[226]
I think, from a discussion between
ourselves, the Wales TUC, and a range of trade unions and the Welsh
Government, we are anticipating this discussion at the workforce
partnership council. In fact, I think there’s a paper from
the staff commission on this at the next workforce partnership
council in March. So, people have said to me on a number of
occasions, ‘Now that local government reform is
over—’. It’s not over, is it? There’s still
a big reform programme going on out there. There’s a
possibility in the future, as I say, of regionally delivered
services to a much greater level than there is now, and
there’s going to be big workforce implications of
that.
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[227] So, I think this approach that we’ve got lays a
foundation to get to where we want to go. I think, if we put in the
provisions of the Act, it will make a more hostile trade union
framework in the Welsh context. We do not want to upset the
apple cart with the approach that we’ve currently got, and I
think, you know, we can get to that next stage by applying the
mechanisms that we’ve currently got, and that includes the
structures of the workforce partnership council. It also
includes—you know, I pick up the phone to the head of the
Wales TUC; he speaks to me. The head of Unison speaks to me. We
speak directly to each other, and we iron things out, and, you
know, we are not sitting in rooms agreeing with each other all the
time, we are disagreeing quite a lot, but we are seeking to find
ways through how we take the reform programme forward, and I think
the Act will help us to do that—what I mean by that is that
the new Wales Act on trade unions will help us to do that. That
will be a firm foundation for moving forward.
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[228] John
Griffiths: Okay. Jenny.
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[229] Jenny
Rathbone: I just wanted to come back to your remarks about
facility time. Nobody’s arguing that facility time
isn’t extremely important—otherwise, employers would
have to consult with every individual employee, which is
impossible. So, I think what we’re trying to understand,
though, is why it isn’t beneficial, in terms of proper
scrutiny by members of what their trade union representatives are
getting up to, to have that level of publication. So, the Cabinet
Secretary said that the public can already access information on
facility time. Can you just explain, you know, how your average
employee would get to find out how their shop steward,
representative, was spending their time?
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[230] Mr Lloyd:
As a member of that union, that would be—. It’s not all
the staff who are—
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[231] Jenny
Rathbone: No, absolutely—[Inaudible.]
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[232] Mr Lloyd:
So, yes, they have their own frameworks, their own meetings. They
appoint their own officers. They have their own membership panels
and hold themselves to scrutiny in terms of what they’re, as
a trade union activity—.
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[233] Jenny
Rathbone: Sticking with facility time, though, what would
be—? What do you think would be a disbenefit, negative, about
just publicising what amount of the appointed
representative’s time was spent on facility time?
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[234] Mr
Thomas: If we could get a common framework to accurately
account for how every authority accounts for facility
time—which we may be able to do, I don’t know, but, if
we could, I have no problems with it being published at all. I
think the trouble is, at the moment, we’re comparing apples
with pears in terms of the way authorities account for this. I was
looking this morning—. In England, there’s the Local
Government Transparency Act 2014, and you can go through various
English authorities and see how they account for facility time.
There was one large metropolitan authority whose facility time
agreement was much smaller than a district council. Now why is
that? And I’m asking you the question, because I can’t
answer it. It’s probably because somebody’s accounting
for it in a different way and it’s being charged in a
different way, and, as a result of that—. Part of the reason
for publication is to make valid comparisons, isn’t it? And,
as it stands at the moment, I don’t think we’ve got the
framework to do that. But, in principle, I’m not against more
transparency on this. We have pay policy agreements for senior
officers, we have a range of transparent mechanisms in local
government; there’s no reason, if we couldn’t get a
framework in place, they shouldn’t apply in this case.
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[235] Jenny
Rathbone: You say you review facility agreements periodically
to ensure that they’re fit for purpose. How come you
haven’t then addressed the issue of apples and pears being
compared?
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[236] Mr
Thomas: Because, as I say, it would be—. In terms of the
way local authorities account for this—. I mean, you know,
somebody once said to me that there are two people who understand
the local government finance settlement in Wales, and one of them
is the director of finance for the WLGA and the other one’s
dead. It is incredibly arcane, some of the ways these things are
accounted for, but I think what we need to start talking with the
authorities about, if there is going to be a push for more
transparency in this area, is to make sure that we do get a common
accounting framework, and that’s something you might want to
think about as a Welsh Government.
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[237] Jenny
Rathbone: Okay.
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[238] John
Griffiths: Okay. Janet, if we stick with facility time, and
we’ll go back to check-off. Do you want to ask some further
questions on facility time?
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[239] Janet
Finch-Saunders: Yes. I think it’s fair to say there is
some ambiguity, and it isn’t as easy, really, to see how much
facility time is taken out—I know we’re doing a piece
of work on it at the moment. But, if the amount and cost of
facility time taken, say, within local authorities is not known,
how can the public be confident that it is being managed
appropriately and that it provides value for money for the public
purse? Because, as you well know, Steve, some local authorities
have designated trade union officials, and a number of them, and I
know, in England—you know, large numbers of people. I know,
with local authorities and the pressures upon them, my constituents
in Aberconwy wouldn’t be too happy to think that money was
being spent on trade union activities when really those
positions—you know, we’ve got very vital services to
deliver.
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[240] Mr
Thomas: In fact, the authorities do review this in the sense
that, if you take the Carmarthenshire example and the Anglesey
example, there has been a rigorous local debate, which we’ve
been involved in, in terms of reviewing the facility time
agreements there. And, as you well know, Janet, if it moves in
local government and has got a pound note attached to it at the
moment, we review it. We are hugely conscious of every item of
expenditure within a local authority, and this is one of the areas
that we’d look at. But, as I say, it’s one of those
ones where, I’ve got to say, when I worked in local
government, there wasn’t too much public interest in this.
Public interest tends to be on services, not the sort of what
I’d describe as the industrial relations framework or the
back-of-office framework. I think, when you actually look at
this—and I’ve got a vague figure in my head about
probably what we spend on this, but I can’t verify
that—you know, it’s a tiny proportion of money in terms
of the total cost of local government expenditure. Then
you’ve got to think about that investment into trade union
facility time, what does it save in terms of working days, in terms
of ability to get through agreements, in terms of things like
health and safety, all of these things. I genuinely think
it’s a good investment. It’s a good investment. I was
looking this morning to see what other people thought, and I came
up with a very interesting quote from somebody—and, you know,
this is not Len McCluskey. He says:
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[241] ‘In
today's difficult economic climate, it is more important than ever
that all resources available to the workplace are well deployed.
Union representatives constitute a major resource: there are
approximately 200,000 workers who act as lay union representatives.
We believe that modern representatives have a lot to give…to
the organisations that employ them.’
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[242]
That’s the head of the Confederation of British Industry,
Richard Lambert. If they see that value, you know, I think we see
it as employers as well. And yes, there’s a cost, but I think
it’s both a cost and an investment.
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[243]
Janet Finch-Saunders:
But to avoid the ambiguity, what has the
WLGA done in terms of looking out some data to try and establish
exactly what this is costing to our—?
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[244] Mr
Thomas: We’ve had discussions about this on the Joint
Council for Wales. It is difficult to get a common framework on
this. We could put out a survey, I suspect, tomorrow and ask
everybody what their facility time agreements are, and whether
they’d all respond, I don’t know. But, I think, from
our point of view, unless we get a common understanding of
what’s behind those figures, it’s almost meaningless.
It’s like that example I used of the metropolitan authority
and the district authority. The district authority does not spend
more than that metropolitan authority on their facility time. But
somewhere in there, there’s a different way of accounting for
that facility time.
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[245]
John Griffiths:
Just following up on that, just to try
and get some clarity on what processes apply, could you say a
little more about the internal processes and the scrutiny
arrangements in place in local authorities to ensure facility
agreements are fair and reasonable? And are those arrangements
operating successfully across all local authorities in
Wales?
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[246] Mr
Thomas: Well, as I say, they are generally operated in a
smooth-functioning fashion, but there have been flashpoints. As I
say, the classic examples were the two authorities I mentioned
previously. And that was about concerns in terms of the money spent
on the agreement, and that was also about concerns about the nature
of the persons in the job. That is another issue because,
obviously, sometimes there are more senior grades in facility time
agreement jobs. So, it might that the cost is more because the
person in that is a more senior grade. So, it’s a difficult
comparison to make between authorities in terms of how we compare
these—you’re certainly not comparing like with
like.
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[247]
John Griffiths:
But there are those arrangements in place
for scrutiny right across the local—
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[248]
Mr Thomas: Yes, definitely.
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[249]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Janet, did you have any further
questions?
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[250] Janet Finch-Saunders: No, I’ll come in a bit later. Well, I will ask
you—you know, I’ve worked with you over the years,
Steve. You know the issues facing local government, you know the
issues facing us here in Wales. Do you actually think, genuinely,
that this should be a priority for the early term of this fifth
Assembly term, and that this is a
fundamental, important issue when
you consider other Bills that we’ve tried to bring forward?
In the overall scheme of things—. Sorry, I
am—
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|
11:45
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[251]
John Griffiths:
I think it’s probably not really a
question for the WLGA, but—
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[252]
Janet Finch-Saunders:
No, but when other committee members are
muttering. You know, I do want to get my point—
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[253]
Mr Thomas: I’ll answer that.
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[254]
John Griffiths:
We must have one meeting.
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[255]
Janet Finch-Saunders:
If you would, Steve.
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[256]
Mr Thomas: In my view, it shouldn’t be a priority for this
Assembly, but it’s a priority that’s been set for them
by Westminster and it shouldn’t be a priority for
Westminster. Honestly, Janet, on this one, there are elements of
the Act, which—. I don’t want to get into the high
politics of it, but we know what’s happening here,
don’t we? There are things in here that are quite
unprincipled in terms of the Act and they were taken out during the
Lords phase.
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[257]
I think, in Wales, we’ve got a
situation where, you’re right: we want to get on and we want
to deliver services and we want to make sure that we maintain as
many people in employment as we possibly can, and I think that the
current situation that we’ve got, i.e. the way that we do
business in terms of social partnership—. And I can give you
an absolute assurance that this is not some utopian system of
peaceful co-existence between us and the unions. We call each other
names, we row and we have big arguments, but we do it in a way that
is about protecting public services and employment, and it
works.
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[258]
John Griffiths:
Okay, I think we need to move on to
check-off, actually.
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[259]
Jenny Rathbone:
I was hoping just to pursue this slightly
further, this facility time issue, because it’s not about the
benefits of facility time; we’re talking about whether or not
there should be an obligation to publish information about facility
time. So, you said that obviously people collect the information in
different ways. What information does the WLGA have about how local
authorities collate facility time taken by their representatives in
that particular authority?
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|
[260]
Mr Lloyd: We’re aware of the range of facility agreements
that are out there. They’re not costed.
|
|
[261]
Jenny Rathbone:
I’m not talking about cost;
I’m talking about time. I know that time is money,
but—
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[262]
Mr Lloyd: No, we have no sense other than where you have
full-time officers in place—you assume that they’re
working full time as a trade union official, very often working
closely with the authority, developing a whole range of issues
around collective arrangements, around dealing with disputes and
dealing with things that we have to deal with around all the issues
of grievance, and—
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[263]
Jenny Rathbone:
Where you have full-time officers,
clearly they’re employees of the relevant trade union and
it’s up to them to ensure that they’re doing the job
that they’ve been tasked to do, but what we’re talking
about here is the interface between the employer and the concession
of facility time. How does the employer know that people are using
the time they say they’re using? How does—
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[264]
Mr Lloyd: How does it work in practice?
|
|
[265]
Jenny Rathbone:
Because if they’re doing facility
time, they’re obviously not doing the other job.
|
|
[266]
Mr Lloyd: You will have a facility: if you’ve got a lay
representative who is, in principle, allowed to be released from
their work, it is the manager who gives permission for them to be
released. It’s managed and it’s usually released when
they take a specific piece of work. It’s not to go around and
whip up the locals into a dispute; it’s really to attend a
particular meeting, deal with a disciplinary, support somebody and
act as their advocate on sickness absence, but all of that would be
agreed. They don’t just, kind of, walk off site.
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[267]
John Griffiths:
But is it published? Is it publicly
available?
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[268]
Mr Lloyd: I would have thought not, no, in that sense. Other
than it’s an agreement about how many—. It’s
usually an agreement that you would be allowed x many days per
year. So, it’s kind of managed—
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|
[269]
John Griffiths:
So, a member of the public wouldn’t
really be able to know how much facility time is taken within a
local authority or how that time is used.
|
|
[270]
Mr Lloyd: It’s a demand-management approach.
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|
[271]
Jenny Rathbone:
You can see that local authorities in
England are going to have to come up with an accounting system
that’s going to be fair because the Act is going to apply to
them whatever we do in Wales.
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|
[272] Mr Thomas: They
publish their facility time agreements now. They publish under
the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014. As I say, I’ve got no in-principle objection
to that, but what I want to be absolutely confident about—and
this is always the case when you publish information about 22
separate bodies—is that you’re working on the same
principles of publication and to understand the story behind it as
well. If it’s a senior officer in a facility time agreement
in one authority, and a more lowly paid officer in another, it will
look a lot more expensive in Abercwmscwt than in Lower
Abercwmscwt, and yet there’s a reason for that.
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|
[273] John
Griffiths: Okay, thanks for that. Time is moving on, and I
think we’d better move to check-off arrangements.
Rhianon.
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|
[274] Rhianon
Passmore: Thank you, Chair. I can be quite clear in terms of
why I feel that they’ve done it in the UK, and I’ll
keep that until afterwards. With regard to the costs of publication
and with regard to the costs of reductions and restrictions on the
crossover in terms of the payments with check-off, have we got any
collated information across Wales in terms of the costs for local
authorities for that? And with regard to the disapplication of that
restriction within the new Bill moving forward, what is your view
in terms of the cost for Wales?
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|
[275] Mr
Thomas: As you’re aware, this is an accumulation of
payroll information built up over years and years and years, and
there would be employees who’ve been having their check-off
deducted for many years, and it incrementally grows over the years.
To give you a cost is almost impossible, but, honestly, the words
‘de minimis’ were invented for this. It is a very low
amount of money that this costs. As I say, people have their
salaries deducted, and deductions from their salaries for a range
of things.
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|
[276] Rhianon
Passmore: So, from your perspective, it isn’t an issue.
It’s a non-issue, again, coming back to that particular
point.
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|
[277] Mr
Thomas: Absolutely.
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|
[278] Rhianon
Passmore: So, with regard to the whole principle and concept of
social protection—sorry, social partnership—in terms of
the reasoning for why we have relatively strong industrial
relations in Wales compared to England, you either accept that
premise at the very beginning or you don’t, and you either
value that principle and that concept of sound, solid, strong
industrial relations in Wales or not. With regard to the precedence
of teacher strikes and junior doctor strikes in England, as far as
I can see the case is very clear that we value that social
protection, and all of these accumulations of issues are important
in order to be able to protect that moving forward. So, in terms of
your context around that question, then, you don’t feel that
there is any real issue in that regard.
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|
[279]
John Griffiths:
Can I just add to that by saying that in
answering this question, could you make it clear as to whether you
support the Welsh Government’s Bill’s intention to
disapply the check-off arrangements in Wales? I’ve got a note
here that, previously, the WLGA suggested that mandating an
appropriate charge for check-off would be a reasonable
approach.
|
|
[280]
Mr Thomas: I think from our point of view, we’ve always
looked at cost recovery in terms of how we go forward. Frankly, you
as a legislature shouldn’t be involved in this. You know, we
can sort this out at a local level. This is something that we can
sort out at the local level. I genuinely think there are things
that are the preserve of local democracy and local government, and
that relationship and how we do that can be done at a local level.
And, as I say, the amounts of money involved are
tiny.
|
|
[281]
John Griffiths:
So, why hasn’t that been done up to
now, then?
|
|
[282]
Mr Thomas: Because I don’t think anybody identifies it as
a huge problem. You’ve got to remember as well that
there’s a large section of the Welsh local government
workforce that’s not in the trade unions, so there’s
not a cost there. But those who are, the cost of it—. You
know, I could probably pick up a phone to a director of finance
today, and they’re not worrying about this; they’re
worrying about all sorts of other things. The cost of it is very
low.
|
|
[283]
John Griffiths:
Would there be any practical or financial
implications for authorities if the UK Trade Union Act’s
measures on these matters were to proceed in Wales?
|
|
[284]
Mr Thomas: Well, you’d have to go through your payroll
system and disapply it, wouldn’t you? I suppose there would
be a cost to that, but, again, I don’t think that would be
huge. It’s difficult for me to comment further on
this.
|
|
[285] Mr Lloyd: Some
of the practicalities around this are to do with the intelligence
of understanding who in your workforce is a member of a trade union
or not. Because when local authorities went through that massive
single status job evaluation exercise, that intelligence was useful
to understand whether they were represented collectively through
one of the unions or not. You’d have to do that individually.
Even at a practical level, understanding of issues around where
there’s a disciplinary investigation and somebody’s
entitlement to be represented, understanding thatit’s
an upsetting time if somebody’s being accused of something,
and understanding that they’re a trade union member and
signposting them can save a lot of time.
|
|
[286] I can remember
at a practical level dealing with—perhaps I’ll share
this experience with you, because it kind of runs through some of
this stuff around check-off, intelligence and facility time. I
dealt with a disciplinary some years ago when I was in an
authority: phone call, somebody had fallen foul of our rules, and
immediately I found that they were a member of a particular union.
I don’t think the misdemeanour was massive, but it was one
that needed dealing with. I found out they were a member of a
particular union, they had an official just down the corridor from
me, I saw the official and said, ‘Look, you’ve got a
member, this has happened’, they made a phone call, I made a
phone call to the manager, and within probably two to three hours
we’d concluded the investigation, concluded the disciplinary
interview and issued a sanction. So, back to some of the questions
earlier on about disruption to services—if we’d not had
that facility or that intelligence, that could have taken a couple
of days and that person would have been taken out of service, which
would have affected our communities.
|
|
[287]
John Griffiths:
Okay. I’m keen to move on to ballot
thresholds. I think, though, Sian has a further, hopefully brief,
point on this.
|
|
[288]
Sian Gwenllian:
Yes. I just think that you’re
contradicting each other a little bit on this one, because Steve is
saying it’s not really a big deal, so therefore why are we
bothering putting it in the Bill at all, in the Welsh Bill, and
Jonathan seems to be saying that it’s more than just the way
the subscriptions are paid; it’s about being able to
recognise who are trade union members and therefore point them in
the right direction.
|
|
[289]
Mr Thomas: My point is that what’s not a big deal is the
cost. The actual process of check-off, as Jon said, there are many
positive aspects to it. But as a cost pressure, it’s not a
big deal.
|
|
[290]
John Griffiths:
Is that okay, Sian?
|
|
[291]
Sian Gwenllian:
Yes.
|
|
[292]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Bethan on ballot
thresholds.
|
|
[293]
Bethan Jenkins:
I can see from your evidence that
you’ve commented on the important public services distinction
that the UK Government has exemplified, but there’s nothing
in the evidence—correct me if I’m wrong—on your
perception of the necessity to reach 40 per cent for the ballot.
So, with regard to this Welsh Government piece of legislation, do
you support them in taking that necessity away, and if you do, why,
and if you don’t, why?
|
|
[294]
Mr Thomas: You’ve got to apply, in all these things, a
principled approach, haven’t you? If you’re going to
apply this to one part of the public sector, you’ve got to
apply it in another part of the public sector. In local government,
we have people who are elected and don’t get any votes
whatsoever. They stand unopposed. The police commissioners—I
think the figures I saw were that the police commissioners are
elected by one in five, one in six electors across the UK. If
we’re going to talk about thresholds, let’s be
consistent and let’s do it across all elements of the public
sector. I think to apply it solely to the trade union ballot is
unfair.
|
|
[295]
From our point of view, we’ve seen
some pretty low ballots in the trade unions, and we sometimes
think, ‘Oh well, you know.’ In one sense, that’s
a signal to us about the level of support, but we understand as
well that the way that people vote in trade union ballots at the
moment really probably does need reform—it’s a bit
cheap and not very cheerful. From our point of view as well, what
we want to do is make sure that we’re dealing with the issues
and not having a debate necessarily about the numbers, because the
issues are the most important things. As I say, if we apply all
these principles across the way that we deliver democracy in the
UK, it would forbid people from standing for public office,
almost.
|
|
[296]
Bethan Jenkins:
Am I hearing that you’re saying
that there could have been a discussion in this particular piece of
legislation about how trade unions potentially use that ballot as a
tool in the industrial relations box, or are you saying that, for
now, this would be sufficient because, of course, some are saying
that it would enhance the difficulties between yourselves as
employers and trade unions, and that the evidence surrounding it
isn’t strong enough? But could this potentially have been a
missed opportunity to say, ‘Well, let’s have a
discussion about how that comes about in the first
instance’?
|
|
12:00
|
|
[297] Mr
Thomas: I think I’d support the
Wales TUC view on this. I think it’s an opportunity to start
looking at how we get people to participate in some key decisions. I noticed
yesterday, and I’ve got to say, it somewhat surprised me, the
difference in terms of the ballot outcomes for the Tata pension
deal, which went from 51 per cent with one union to 75 per cent
approval at the other union. Now, I’m not criticising anybody
for that, but that difference there—I’d like to know
why there was that difference. It’s clearly not the case that
49 per cent of those members do not care about their pensions. Why
didn’t they vote? So, I think there are some things to be
investigated underneath these issues, and what I think we should be
doing is a more glass half-full approach, which is basically
looking to see how we can help people participate, because I think
the current—. We have union members with us who will
sometimes say that they don’t receive a ballot
form—that they’d like to participate and they’re
ringing up union officials. It might be that databases are out of
date. It might be there’s a range of problems. I ceased being
a member of Unison 10 years ago, and I still get all Unison’s
elections for their national executive. I assure you I do not vote,
but I still get it. So, the databases—some of them really do
need looking at, and I think—
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|
[298] Bethan
Jenkins: But you don’t think that this is the place to do
that, you think that it’s a conversation for a different
day.
|
|
[299] Mr
Thomas: Absolutely, but I think it does need to be looked at,
and I think that’s where—. Perhaps you have ideas in
this place about how you might help facilitate that, and I think
that would be something very progressive that you could put into
the work that you’re doing on this Bill.
|
|
[300] Bethan
Jenkins: My final question was, going back to the threshold
again: do you think that it would affect the way public services
are run if this wasn’t taken out? TUC evidence says that they
dispute the quoted estimate of £85,000 annual savings through
reduced days lost to strike action. I think the way the UK
Government were trying to push it was that we could save money by
putting this forward, but do you have any sort of financial
analysis as to why this needs to be taken out because of the way
that it stops potential days lost, as opposed to that figure
there?
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|
[301] Mr Lloyd:
I suppose, working on the premise that we have very few industrial
action days within Wales compared with England, you can draw your
own judgments as to why the UK Government have chosen those
particular services. I think, in terms of your original
question—and it may not be clear; it’s paragraph 13 in
the evidence, where we’re saying that all public services are
important, why distinguish and have a different threshold for one
set of workers to another set of workers? It’s the principle
of equality, basically, why you determine that. Why not social
care? Why not refuse? Why not regulatory? Why those particular
services? You can draw your own—
|
|
[302] Bethan
Jenkins: But that’s your fundamental point, not the
actual number of the percentage of the threshold.
|
|
[303] Mr Lloyd:
Yes. The threshold will be drawn where they’re drawn, and we
could debate that all day in relation to all the different
thresholds around ballots and appointments, but it’s drawn
where it is. I think what we are saying is it should be an equal
playing field for all members of staff.
|
|
[304] Bethan
Jenkins: Thanks.
|
|
[305] John
Griffiths: Just to add to that, of course, the UK Government
has said that that distinction between some services and others,
where the 40 per cent threshold applies or not, is based on the
potential impact on the public’s health and safety.
What’s your view on that?
|
|
[306] Mr
Thomas: I’m trying to think back to the last time we had
industrial action, and I think it was 2014. There were clearly
issues at that time in terms of the impact of that particular
strike. I think the thing it crystallised around was the closure,
if I remember, of the Butetown tunnel at that time. Yes, there are
problems; there can be problems, but, in a democratic society,
there are trade-offs, aren’t there? It’s the right to
strike versus the inconvenience to the public, and I think, from
our point of view, what we want to make sure is that people
don’t go on strike, and I think we have a system in Wales
that, with a few exceptions—we’ve had
strikes—minimises the amount of days taken in terms of strike
action. If you look at strike figures over the last five years,
particularly within the climate that we’ve worked in—it
has been a very hard and difficult climate to work in—but, at
the same time, the strike figures are down at historically low
levels in the Welsh context. It suggests a system that is working,
doesn’t it?
|
|
[307] John
Griffiths: Finally, we have some questions on agency workers,
and Sian Gwenllian will ask those.
|
|
[308]
Sian Gwenllian:
Diolch. Ar hyn o bryd, nid yw’r
Bil drafft yn sôn am
weithwyr asiantaeth a peidio â’u defnyddio nhw yn ystod
cyfnod o weithredu diwydiannol, ond mae’r Ysgrifennydd
Cabinet wedi sôn efallai y byddai’n bosibl i ddod
â’r agwedd yma i fewn i’r Bil hefyd yn ystod y
cyfnod o roi gwelliannau ymlaen. A ydych chi, fel cymdeithas, yn
cefnogi cynnig Llywodraeth Cymru i barhau i atal defnyddio
gweithwyr asiantaeth rhag cyflenwi yn ystod gweithredu diwydiannol;
ac os felly, pam?
|
Sian
Gwenllian: Thank you very much. At the moment, the draft Bill
doesn’t mention the use of agency workers or, rather, not
using them during a period of industrial action. The Cabinet
Secretary has mentioned it might be possible to bring that aspect
into the Bill also during the amending stage. Do you, as an
organisation, support the Welsh Government’s proposal to
continue to prevent the use of agency workers from covering
industrial action; and if so, why?
|
|
[309] Mr Lloyd:
Historically, when we’ve had periods of industrial action,
we’ve not used agency workers. There may be an argument that
undermines the democratic right of the trade unions to invoke
industrial action and, as has been said, the aim would be not to
have strike action and to mitigate that through mature conversation
and an agreed outcome. There have always been arrangements made
with the trade union to cover what is called life and limb
services, and generally, they’re around social care, CCTV and
those critical things that perhaps are not reflected in the UK
Government’s interpretation of important public services.
We’ve never seen a need to cover with agency workers
previously, and for that reason I guess we don’t see a need
going forward. What might be useful is some consistency around how
we determine life and limb services. But I don’t think
that’s necessarily a matter for the Welsh Government. I think
that’s a matter for local government and the trade unions to
work together to determine what services we allow concessions to
keep going.
|
|
[310] Mr
Thomas: On this particular one, we’re taking it to our
members as well in our next executive board. I don’t think
we’ve got a formal policy position on it, but I anticipate
very clearly that they will not want to see agency workers used in
these settings.
|
|
[311] Sian
Gwenllian: So, do you think that it is appropriate to bring it
into the Bill?
|
|
[312] Mr
Thomas: Yes.
|
|
[313] John
Griffiths: Okay. Well, thank you very much for that. You will
be sent a transcript of your evidence to check for factual
accuracy. Thank you very much for coming along today, and for
giving evidence to the committee.
|
|
[314] Mr
Thomas: Thank you, Chair.
|
|
[315] Mr Lloyd:
Thank you very much.
|
|
[316] John
Griffiths: The committee will break for lunch until 12:45.
|
|
Gohiriwyd y cyfarfod rhwng 12:08 a 12:46.
The meeting adjourned between 12:08 and 12:46.
|
|
Bil yr Undebau Llafur (Cymru): Sesiwn Dystiolaeth
3
Trade Union (Wales) Bill: Evidence Session 3
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[317]
John Griffiths:
Welcome back to committee Members. We now
move to item 6 on our agenda today, which is evidence session 3 in
our evidence-taking on the Trade Union (Wales) Bill. This session
is to enable us to deal with health and social care sector issues.
Could I ask you all to introduce yourselves briefly, please,
perhaps starting with Andrew on my right?
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[318]
Mr Cross: Thank you. I’m Andrew Cross. I’m
assistant secretary and solicitor for the British Medical
Association Cymru Wales. I’m a full-time trade union
official, which I’ve been for the last 24 years. Prior to
that, I was a lay official in the Unite union for five years, so my
whole professional time has been between industrial relations and
employment law. I’m a member of the Wales committee at the
Law Society, I’m a chair of Cardiff Law Centre, and a pro
bono volunteer at the Cardiff employment law clinic. I’m also
a member of GMB and Unite trade unions—just to get all that
out of the way.
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[319]
John Griffiths:
Thank you very much.
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[320]
Dr Monaghan: I can’t keep up with that. I’m Dr Stephen
Monaghan. I’m a consultant in public health medicine in the
day job, and with the BMA I chair the BMA Wales legislation
sub-committee.
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[321]
John Griffiths:
Okay.
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[322]
Mr Meredith-Smith:
Good afternoon. I’m Peter
Meredith-Smith. I’m currently the associate director for
employment relations at the Royal College of Nursing in Wales, so I
technically head up the trade union arm of the organisation in
Wales. I’m still—just about—a registered nurse.
I’ve worked in the health service in Wales for 36 years in
some shape or form, and have been involved in employment relations
issues from the bedside, through to the board, through to the
RCN.
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[323]
John Griffiths:
Okay, thank you.
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[324]
Ms Turnbull: Lisa Turnbull. Policy and public affairs from the
Royal College of Nursing in Wales.
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[325]
Ms Watts: I’m Lien Watts from the Social Workers Union,
which is a long-arm union of the British Association of Social
Workers. I am a qualified and registered social worker. I hail from
Wales, but I’ve only ever practised in England. I moved to
BASW, as we call it, about seven years ago, and shortly after that
the Social Workers Union was set up, so I became a trade union
official. I’m am now the assistant general secretary of the
Social Workers Union, and I head BASW’s advice and
representation service.
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[326]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Thank you, and thank you all for
those introductions. By the way, don’t feel that all of you
have to answer every single question that is asked, because
obviously we do have a higher number of you giving evidence in this
session than is normally the case, but obviously, please feel free
to contribute as you wish. Perhaps I could get us under way by
asking the question, really, in terms of general principles and the
need for legislation, and to ask you to comment on the extent to
which the social partnership model contributes to the effective
delivery of services in the health and social care sector.
Who would like to—? Peter.
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[327] Mr
Meredith-Smith: I’d be happy to make a start on that for
you, to get things going. It’s interesting for us. I guess,
by way of preamble, just to be clear: there is big interest in the
public sector in this but, primarily, our expertise is in the
health service, though the social care sector is becoming
progressively more important. It is interesting for us because, in
terms of the key issues that relate to the legislation in terms of
ballot thresholds, we don’t have a reputation for striking.
We deal with things without strike and industrial action. In terms
of the subscription agenda, we don’t use check-off. We are
relatively transparent in terms of issues around release time, but
there is an incredible strength of feeling from the membership that
I engage with about the fact that the legislation that was passed
in England in some way undermines the principle of partnership
working and makes some judgment about the way that we do things in
Wales.
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[328] We have an
exceptional record in Wales of working in partnership, as I
indicated in my introduction. I’ve been involved with the NHS
for 30-odd years, and never had tougher times than the last several
years, certainly since the advent of austerity and so forth. We
have needed to do some really difficult things within the NHS in
Wales in terms of service reconfiguration, re-engineering staffing
models, difficult discussions around the terms and conditions of
employment, protection of pay, and so forth. We have steered our
way through that, and that has been achieved through very, very
successful partnership working, and I give credit to all parties in
that: the trade unions, the employers, Welsh Government. I have to
say that, certainly from our point of view, we involve all of the
political parties in that. It works really very well, and there is
an implicit criticism—is the view of our members—in
terms of the legislation that was passed in England that that
isn’t the case. It does ire members—our members,
certainly—and we think that the efforts of the Welsh
Government to address the issues that fall out of the UK
legislation, as it is, are right and proper.
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[329] John
Griffiths: So, would you then, Peter, offer a view as to
whether the UK Trade Union Act would adversely affect the social
partnership in Wales in the social and healthcare sector, and would
impact on the delivery of those services?
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[330] Mr
Meredith-Smith: I think it will, and, particularly, the way
that the National Assembly for Wales responds to this legislation
will be very important. Times are tough out there. There are far
more important things, in terms of industrial relations, that we
can be working on, other than these issues. I think that what this
is about is making a very important statement—this
legislation. As I said, from our point of view as an
organisation—and I’ll leave other colleagues to comment
from their point of view—the individual bits and pieces are
not major practical issues. But there are bigger issues of
principle in terms of whether the people we represent are servants
of society, in the sense of giving service, or whether they are
servile—because that’s the way it feels in terms of
this legislation. So, the big issue is how we—and I count my
politician colleagues in that—give a statement to those
front-line workers about the value of partnership and the
recognition that there is not a tendency in Wales to man the
barricades and somehow disable the NHS because of industrial
grievance.
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[331]
John Griffiths:
Okay, well, thanks for that. Would the
other organisations like to offer a view on those same issues,
please?
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[332] Dr Monaghan: Yes, just to say, on the social
partnership—I don’t know whether we will deal with all
of those; I presume we will do them in turn—but on the social
partnership, to start with, the BMA is broadly committed to the
principle of social partnership within NHS Wales. BMA Wales has
always been part of the council arrangements. We remain on the
staff side, and we remain committed to those. We have also actively
worked with other unions on matters of common interest—just
to take one example, the NHS pension scheme. But, overall, we are
committed and believe—it goes without saying,
really—that the NHS and the nature of healthcare are very
labour—with a small ‘l’—centric. Seventy
per cent of the budget is staff. It’s dealing entirely with
human beings: the patients. Most of the interactions are with other
human beings: the staff. There is a lot of staff, a lot of people,
in the NHS, and they are critical. We believe that the smooth
running of the NHS is substantially underpinned by, in a sense,
network arrangements, more so than totally relying on a top-down
hierarchal management approach. So, you’d expect us to say
that because networks are the epitome of professionalism, whether
that’s within a profession or
inter-professional—it’s kind of a horizontal form.
Obviously, there is a strong place, we believe, for representative
organisations and trade unions representing staff. The interface
between employers and their representatives, trade unions, is
central to getting an efficient working relationship for the
benefit of the service and, ultimately, the patients.
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[333]
John Griffiths:
Okay.
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[334]
Ms Watts: I have a little bit more to add. I totally agree with
the comments that have been made so far. We operate across the UK,
so we’re not specifically in Wales. We don’t have a
separate section in Wales, per se. We have officers based in Wales
who manage the cases that come up for us within Wales. What I would
like to say is that the social partnership model that is promoted
in Wales is very much aligned to the way social workers work
generally and the way our union operates as well. We find it far
more effective and useful to try and work in partnership with not
only our members and our service users but also the employers.
Where that happens, there is no doubt it works much more
effectively and you make progress.
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[335]
The introduction of this Act did cause a
huge outcry amongst our members and the feeling was that this was
perpetuating or exacerbating the them-and-us scenario between trade
unions and employers. So, everything that you are trying to do in
terms of working closely with employers to reach solutions without
going to the last resort of industrial action—as I say, it
aligns very closely with everything we are and do.
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[336]
John Griffiths:
Okay, thanks for that. I wonder if I
could just ask the RCN to expand a little on its view that the UK
Government’s Trade Union Act undermines the balance between
workers’ rights and the rights of the public to receive safe
and effective health services in Wales.
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[337]
Mr Meredith-Smith:
Yes, sure. Interestingly, there’s
often a lot of conversation in this debate about the power balance
between the employer and the employee—that tends to focus the
discussion. I guess what we’re saying, in terms of that
statement, is that what we recognise is that we have a
responsibility, and you have a responsibility, to ensure that the
services that are run for the population of Wales are effective and
efficient and not compromised by industrial action and so
forth.
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[338]
As we’ve said in our evidence,
there’s no history or evidence that the services to the
public have ever been compromised. So, what we’re saying is
we recognise that we need to consider that as part of the debate.
By effectively taking away the rights of workers to act
democratically within the workplace to raise issues of
concern—it’s very concerning, really. We don’t
doubt that we all have a responsibility and the way that we work as
an organisation is rooted absolutely to not doing anything that
harms patients. So, why would you shift that balance and suggest
and offend our members that that is the case?
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[339]
So, what we’re trying to do, I
guess, is recognise—and, actually, picking up on the point
that this isn’t about redressing any imbalance between
employees and employers in Wales, because we do not have that
difficulty—. We work together very productively, but we have
to acknowledge that, as part of this debate, and the difficult
decision that the politicians will have to make around this
legislation—we are mindful of that balance about the
responsibility to the public as well. We think that this does
something that is totally unnecessary. There isn’t a problem
that needs fixing. Why has this been done?
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[340]
John Griffiths:
Okay, thanks very much for that. In that
case, we’ll move on then to some questions from Rhianon
Passmore on the check-off priorities.
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13:00
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[341]
Rhianon Passmore:
Thank you. There seems to be a theme so
far today in terms of there being a non-issue and, if nothing is
broken, don’t fix it, but we are where we are.
I’ll stop my narrative
there. In regard to check-off—and I’ll speak to the
RCN, actually, at this point—do you believe that the
restrictions that we’re trying to mitigate with this Bill
moving through are necessary? And if we get rid of check-off in
Wales without this mitigation Bill, what knock-on effect do you
think that would have?
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[342] Mr
Meredith-Smith: In practical terms, as I said, it doesn’t
have a major issue for us. For the last 10 years, I think,
predominantly our subscriptions have been garnered by other
means—you know, standing orders and all that. Collection of
fees through union fees through payroll is a very useful way of
doing things for other unions and we would support that.
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[343] Rhianon
Passmore: Does it need fixing?
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[344] Mr
Meredith-Smith: No, it’s not an onerous task with the IT
that we have at the moment. It’s easily done. We collect
other things through payroll in terms of charitable giving and
other things. It can be done, and I think that it’s about
investing in partnership because partnership working is actually a
very core function of an effective organisation, and strong unions
are very important in that. Again, it’s this focus on
industrial action all the time; it’s engaging with the
membership that’s really very important. And I think
it’s actually an investment in democracy. It’s about
enabling people if they want to participate in union work, to pay
for that in a way that is simple, in effect, not a problem.
It’s never been an issue of dispute in Wales between the
unions and management. It’s another problem that
doesn’t need fixing.
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[345] Rhianon
Passmore: And the same question to the BMA, if I may, in regard
to your approach to this horrendous issue that needs to be fixed.
What is your view and can your clarify what you do?
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[346] Mr Cross:
Well, our position is rather similar to the RCN because we’re
a professional association. Most of our members, I guess, have bank
accounts, and they tend to pay by direct debit. That’s the
usual thing. And also, obviously, they get a journal and all the
rest of it with that. So, that’s the way that we operate.
Having said that, we work in partnership with other trade unions.
And from my own trade union experience, I don’t understand,
in a day of a sort of cashless society, why people are getting hung
up on this, really. I think, if there is still a proportion of
people out there who haven’t got access to bank accounts and
so forth, then they need to be accommodated, and, you know, I think
that’s got to be right. Rather, it’s such an old
debate—it reminds me, actually, of the debate about people
being paid by bank transfer as opposed to in cash; it’s about
at that level, really. So, I think it’s a bit in history, but
we would want everybody to be included. So, if people can be
excluded by not having access to check-off, then I think
that’s regrettable. Our view would be we want as large a
tent, really, as possible.
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[347] Rhianon
Passmore: So, in order to enable those constructive industrial
positive relationships that we have with health in Wales, you would
say that this is advantageous in terms of being able to
democratically input and to propagate and progress those good and
healthy industrial relations in Wales. And obviously I’m not
going to mention the junior doctors’ strike.
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[348] In terms of
social work, and you’ve got a slightly different arrangement,
haven’t you, holistically—?
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[349] Ms Watts:
Well we don’t use check-off either, and we collect our
subscriptions via direct debit or standing orders, cheques,
whatever. But that said, we don’t have a problem with
check-off. It does seem to be used by the bigger unions, the
recognised unions in employers, usually local authorities. But from
our point of view, if it’s what the member wants and
it’s not any strain on the public purse—and as I
understand it, there are contributions made to cover the
cost—we just don’t feel that it’s necessary to
legislate for it; it should be a matter of personal choice. And I
think, for us, it seems to undermine the value, or does nothing
more than undermine the value placed on trade unions in the
workplace, and—
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[350] Rhianon
Passmore: So, to just clarify what you say, you feel
that—and I don’t want to put words into your mouth;
I’m just trying to understand what you’re saying to
me—. Would you say that, in terms of the UK Act, without this
mitigation in Wales, that this would have an effect on,
potentially, union membership in Wales? I don’t know if
that’s possible for anybody to comment on.
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[351] Ms Watts:
I can comment.
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[352] Rhianon
Passmore: Yes, if you wish.
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[353] Ms Watts:
Speaking to colleagues from the other unions, that was the fear,
that they would lose members as a consequence, that, particularly
in these times of austerity, people are looking at where their
money’s going and they may not remember or it may not be in
the forefront of their mind to maintain their trade union
subscriptions.
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[354] Rhianon
Passmore: So, potentially, a knock-on effect that could happen
as a result of this—
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[355] Ms Watts:
Yes.
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[356]
John Griffiths:
Can I just intervene,
briefly—
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[357] Rhianon
Passmore: Certainly, Chair.
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[358]
John Griffiths:
—just to say that, if you believe,
then, that the proposed restrictions on the check-off procedures
would adversely impact on social partnership in health and social
care in Wales, could you explain why you think that’s the
case and, if you also believe that there would be an adverse impact
on the delivery of the services, health and social care services,
in Wales, could you explain why that would be the case as
well?
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[359]
Mr Meredith-Smith:
As I said, we do need to look at these
things in the round in terms of the message it sends. It’s
very reasonable to look at the individual parts of this. Union
membership is protection for people, isn’t it? It’s not
just—. There’s an assumption that union membership is
about, when you’re in trouble, you need representation, or
it’s about joining up to an organisation that is at odds with
management. But the range of support that is available to members
is very significant in terms of service safety and
quality.
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[360]
The union support that we provide, for
instance, keeps people out of trouble. They have access to advice;
they have access to engagement with professional staff who can
support them. What we need to remember—maybe we’ll get
on to this in the conversation later—is that the bulk of
trade union work, certainly as seen by the people who act as our
representatives, is something of a civic duty in a sense,
it’s doing work that is valuable and contributing to the
health service. The bigger the pool of people we’ve got to
draw upon for that, the better, I think, for the health
service.
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[361]
The bulk of the work that the
representatives—volunteer and paid reps—who we support
in the RCN engage in is actually partnership work. It’s about
working with the management of organisations and stakeholders to
re-engineer the services to deal with the real challenges that
we’ve got at the moment. It isn’t a levy to enable
industrial action or to create tension with the employers.
It’s about resourcing a very important part of service
delivery. The challenges won’t be met and the services
won’t be delivered at the pace that we need it to happen, in
terms of the challenges that we’re all facing at the moment,
unless we engage with the people who are delivering those services
to seek solutions from them and to have them on board. The bulk of
trade union work that we engage with across the field—and I
think I could actually speak beyond the RCN on this, wearing my
chair-of-the-partnership-forum hat—it’s partnership
work that we’re engaged in, working constructively with the
NHS in Wales to tackle the challenges that we’ve got, to
modernise the services. The more people we’ve got on board
with that, the better. The more people we’ve got in our
membership who we can help to keep out of difficulties in terms of
the industrial setting, the better.
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[362]
Rhianon Passmore:
Can I just ask, Chair, if I may, in terms
of—? You’ve mentioned—one of you
mentioned—a shifting of the balance in terms of those
delicate conversations that occur and all of the work that occurs
behind the scenes in terms of avoidance of industrial action.
Although I’m speaking particularly to this one element of our
mitigation in terms of our Bill around check-off facility, do you
feel that the collective mitigation of the Wales Bill will go far
enough to be able to protect industrial relations in Wales compared
to England? I don’t know if the BMA would like to comment on
that.
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[363]
Mr Cross: We’re moving on to industrial action and those
issues, are we, with—
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[364]
John Griffiths:
I’d prefer to stick with
check-off—
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[365] Mr Cross: Well,
if we can stick with check-off, I think the point about check-off,
I would say, is that the unions are stronger together and I would
be very unhappy, and I know that a lot of my members would be very
unhappy, with the thought that there were people who were being
excluded from the process by virtue of the fact that there
wasn’t a proper system in operation for collecting their
subscriptions. Hospital work, in particular, which I know something
about, is very much part of the team. Whatever people think of
consultants, I can assure you that they know the people in their
team. I walk around the hospitals all the time and I know
who’s friends with who, and I can assure you that it goes
right across the piece, from everybody, from the chief executive to
whoever at the other end of the spectrum. That’s the
point: it’s a team thing, and we wouldn’t want to see
any body being formed, in terms of trade union activity, that
wasn’t representative of everybody that worked in the
workplace. That’s in nobody’s interests, so—.
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[366] John
Griffiths: Okay, and Lisa.
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[367] Ms
Turnbull: I just wanted to add as well that it might be worth
considering not just the impact on union relationships at the
national level, but also on membership, and I think times are very
difficult, very stressful for members—our members and members
of all other unions. People are working very, very long hours.
They’re working extremely long hours and they’re often
caring for elderly relatives and young children at the same time.
They often have to travel long distances on public transport. In
that kind of atmosphere, where people are very tired, even
something that may seem as relatively trivial as, ‘You have
to now change the way—you have to create a standing order,
you have to create a direct debit’, is just one more thing
that people then have to fit into their schedule, and the impact of
that, I think, if it were to be sort of announced collectively, I
think you would see a huge—we would see—a huge outcry
from people just feeling that that was just yet another issue. So,
I think the impact on the convenience for people’s lives,
really, is a very significant point in terms of protecting that
goodwill and those relationships within the NHS.
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[368] Rhianon
Passmore: Okay, thank you.
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[369] John
Griffiths: Can I just ask, as well, in terms of the cost to
public sector employers of providing the check-off service, do you
think it’s appropriate and reasonable for the trade unions to
meet those costs?
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[370] Mr
Meredith-Smith: I’m not in a position to comment on that.
I don’t have any detailed briefing in terms of the costs
themselves. My knowledge in terms of the way that the—.
They’re pretty insignificant, really. I think there are other
issues of cost that would benefit from addressing. I mean, if we
think of a situation—. I gave an interview this morning to
the BBC about a situation in the NHS at the moment in terms of the
staffing pressures in the service. We know from information that we
garnered from members recently, in terms of the amount of work that
our members are doing free, really, for the NHS in terms of
run-over times and staying on the end of shifts because they
can’t cover shifts and stuff that they’re not getting
paid for, in terms of the cost of the agency bill that could
be—it’s probably about 1,000 staff nurses per annum in
terms of the agency bill. There are other issues of cost that I
would be focusing on. Money is a very important issue, and value
for money is a very important issue, and transparency with the
public. I can’t imagine—as I say, I would reiterate,
I’m not sure of the detail of the cost of that—that
this is a major issue that we should be having discussions or
passing legislation on if we want to address cost issues in the
NHS.
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[371] John
Griffiths: Okay, and Andrew.
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[372] Mr Cross:
I don’t know the individual cost, like Peter, but I do know
that there are other things that are deducted from pay
automatically, like hospital social clubs. Now, I don’t think
anybody’s suggesting that that’s an inappropriate use
of public money to do, but I think it’s—we really are
dealing with the minutiae here, and, if hospital social clubs are
okay, I can’t really see the problem with making a deduction
automatically, electronically, for a trade union membership, if
that’s what people want. That’d be my take on it.
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[373] Dr
Monaghan: I agree with that. I think there are, ultimately,
deductions for things like paying for a bicycle to go to work. So,
there are lots of deductions. As far as I’m aware, the cost
of doing this is pretty negligible, I would have thought—not
I’m an accountant.
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[374] John
Griffiths: Okay. And Joyce.
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[375] Joyce
Watson: Just to try and get some understanding by those who
might not be involved in this, are we talking about a cost that you
just set up when you’re setting a pay system for
somebody—just a one-off cost of putting it in the computer so
that there is a deduction? Is it really that simple?
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[376] Mr
Meredith-Smith: There’s a starter form when you start in
the NHS, and it’ll be one of the fields on the form. That is
easy enough. The important thing is the governance around it: we
need to remember that people are not forced to do this, it’s
a choice that they make, and we need to have systems in place that
enable that to come off the database as well. But, if you see the
NHS starter form, it’s got the range of things you fill in
and that’s an option that you tick, and then it’s on
the electronic pay system, essentially, which will deduct things
like bicycle payments and childcare vouchers and charitable giving
and so forth. The system’s relatively sophisticated. I
don’t know whether you could apportion a cost to the trade
union bit of that, really, to be honest, so I can’t comment
on that. I don’t know if that’s helpful.
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[377] Joyce
Watson: Yes, it is, because it’s about getting a picture,
isn’t it, an impression. So, it would be part of a form, and
it would be a tick box, or not, within the same form that would
have cost implications in any case. Is that what you’re
saying?
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13:15
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[378] Mr
Meredith-Smith: I suspect, again—I mean, I'm speculating
a little bit—when we’ve got a situation when we
can’t get enough staff on the wards to give clinical care, I
hope that we don’t have people sitting in offices with the
sole purpose of collecting union dues. I think it’ll be the
administrative function supported by the IT, which is the payroll,
hopefully. Hopefully.
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[379]
Joyce Watson: It was just to clarify; that’s all I was trying
to do for—
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[380]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Well, thanks for
that—
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[381]
Dr Monaghan: Just on that, looking back historically, I think we
used check-off years and years and years ago. We moved to direct
debit originally because junior directors, who are a particularly
vulnerable hardworking group, moved every six months, so there was
a question of having to re-set it up and there was a new technology
called ‘direct debit’. It wasn’t that we have a
problem with check-off, but we do it all by direct debit, not
because we don’t agree with check-off—it’s a
perfectly reasonable way of doing it.
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[382]
Joyce Watson: Thank you.
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[383]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Lien, did you have anything to add
at all?
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[384]
Ms Watts: No, except to reiterate that it’s a matter of
personal choice. I think even very small employers have the systems
in place, so the costs are minimal to do these things. So, I do
think it’s an unnecessary discussion. I understand that the
larger unions do, in fact, make contributions to the larger
employers for this facility anyway. I don’t have any idea
what those costs or contributions might be, but, as I say, for me,
as long as it is a genuine matter of choice, then I don’t
have a problem with it. Like the junior doctors, social workers
tend to move around from time to time, and, as I say, we’ve
never ever used check-off, but I just think it’s not a
problem.
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[385]
John Griffiths:
Of course, just to be clear, we’re
talking about the UK Act restricting check-off and changing the
system, rather than abolishing it entirely, but I think
you’re all clear on that. Yes. Okay, well, thanks very much.
If we move to facility time, which we’ve touched on already,
could I begin by asking whether the proposed restrictions in the UK
Act on the right of union officials to facility time is likely to
adversely impact on the social partnership and the delivery of
health and social care services? Could I invite views on whether
that’s likely to be the case or not?
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[386]
Mr Meredith-Smith:
Yes. It’s another of these issues:
if it ain’t broke, why fix it? I would reiterate the point
that I made earlier on. I did a little bit of preparation yesterday
to get a sense around the scale of the facility time issue in the
RCN, and I found it even surprising myself in terms of how much of
a non-issue it is in terms of the paid hours, really, in terms of
the cost of it. I may not be able to go into detail with that, but
I’ll think about that, depending on how the questioning
goes.
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[387]
But, again, I would make the point that
the representatives, the accredited representatives, that we have
across Wales are predominantly volunteers. A small percentage of
them are actually benefiting from paid released time to do that.
Most of the reps that we support are doing it in a voluntary
capacity. Much of the work that we undertake—. The bulk of
the work that the paid reps would undertake would be supporting the
partnership agenda, as I’ve said. It will be things like RCN
members sitting on boards to support the governance of the
organisations. It might be chairing local partnership forums. It
might be engaging in work within those partnership forums, which is
about dealing with service pressures and modernising the services.
So, inevitably, if there’s what is perceived as an attack on
facility time, yes, it would have an impact in terms of partnership
working, undoubtedly, because the bulk of the paid hours, certainly
for our staff—I’ve had a good look at the individual
names, and so forth—are people that are not, again, spending
hours each week planning industrial action or thinking about how we
can fall out with management again next week. They’re
actually spending hours of time engaging in work streams that are
set up by the health boards to try and tackle the problems that
we’re facing and to move things forward.
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[388]
John Griffiths:
Okay, and is that ‘yes’,
Andrew?
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[389]
Mr Cross: I think we could echo that. In the BMA, a large
amount of the time that’s spent, as you say, is
exactly—it’s responding to the management agenda, and
the other part of it is representing members who find themselves
the wrong side of a management decision. So, that’s the work
that’s done. A large part of it, certainly for our members,
because, clearly, they have operating lists and out-patient clinics
and all the rest of it, they end up doing it in their own
time, so it’s very much a voluntary activity. We don’t
have any full-time seconded people. They employ people like me to
go and represent where that’s necessary, but we do have quite
a lot of local representation that’s done. We have a network
of local negotiating committees whose sole purpose is to meet with
management in each health board and NHS trust in Wales and to
negotiate the agenda that’s there. A lot of what we do is
responsive, and we don’t certainly have any great benefit
from facility time—it’s just fitted in around things.
We ask for some time in the job planning process, but that’s
about all. The junior doctors don’t have that benefit, so it
just has to be fitted in around their work.
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[390]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Perhaps I could ask Lien, in terms
of the Social Workers Union, how not having facility time affects
the way that the union operates.
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[391]
Ms Watts: Well, it doesn’t impact on us in any way,
because all our officers are employed by the association, and we
don’t operate with local shop stewards or whatever. We have
recently reintroduced a workplace volunteer scheme, so our members
can put themselves forward as workplace volunteers, but they are
not expected to represent members, for example, and they tend to do
it, as the name suggests, in their own time. So, I’m not sure
that I can give you any further information. I think, for smaller
employers, it might be more of an issue, but I don’t think
I’m in a position to comment on that.
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[392]
John Griffiths:
No, that’s fine. Is it on this
particular point, Jenny?
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[393]
Jenny Rathbone:
Facility time, yes.
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[394]
John Griffiths:
On this particular point of facility time
with social—
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[395]
Jenny Rathbone:
Well, I wanted to pursue some of the
issues that were in the BMA paper.
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[396]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Bethan, are you on the Social
Workers Union point?
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[397]
Bethan Jenkins:
Directly on this, yes. I just wanted to
understand: if you’re not paying somebody through that
facility time, and it’s mostly voluntary, why have you taken
that decision? Is it because you’re set up in a different way
to some of the other trade union organisations? If you are not,
would you be minded to look at that? Obviously, I don’t feel
potentially you may be able to answer in the same way if
you’re not actually engaging in that very process.
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[398]
Ms Watts: We’re a fairly new union. We’ve only been
operating for six years as a trade union, and prior to that we had
an advice and representation service through the British
Association of Social Workers, which was, as the name suggests,
advising and representing our members. In both arenas one of our
unique selling points, if you like, is that we are independent of
the employers, so, for us, that’s the way we want to be.
However, as the union grows and as we want to develop the union, we
would want to reserve the right to have that long-held and
long-fought-for opportunity. Again, it’s going back to:
what’s the value placed on trade unions? Are they the
opposition or are they a valuable, democratic part of the process
to work with employers? If you value them in that way, then why
would you not enable some of your own staff to give some of their
time to do that work?
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[399]
Bethan Jenkins:
So you’ll be working towards
providing that type of—.
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[400]
Ms Watts: I can’t say it’s in our minds at the
moment, but there’s certainly no reason why we wouldn’t
move towards that eventually. As I say, from my point of view, even
though we don’t use it, I feel very strongly about the role
of trade unions in positive industrial relations.
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[401]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Peter.
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[402]
Mr Meredith-Smith:
I just wanted to come back on that point,
perhaps to clarify. We’ve got three ways that we do things, I
guess. We have full-time officers that are engaged with some of the
more technical aspects of representing, when we’ve got
members in significant difficulty, usually, or negotiating some of
the bigger issues around employment relations. Our preference at
all times is to work with volunteer reps, because generally
you’re then working with people with real commitment.
That’s usually the starting point on a journey to paid
hours.
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[403] But I think a point that I wish to emphasise is that
we certainly, in my experience, working in the Royal College of
Nursing over the last six years, have never had to go banging at
the door of HR directors and chief execs demanding paid
hours. It’s usually them offering that resource to us,
because there is a consequence, as Lisa has alluded to, in terms of
the volunteer model. From our membership, we’re largely
talking about front-liners, they’re working very long hours,
so that when they’re doing the volunteering, it’s in
their own time. So, it’s a measure of, again, the partnership
that the employers recognise that; they want to put some money into
the pot that can buy some time to free those people up in terms of
key pieces of work. It addresses an opportunity cost, doesn’t
it, as well, because some of the work that needs to be done can put
pressure on the front-line service? So the way that that facility
time works: we’re not talking about people who are pulling a
salary because of the union work they’re doing, it’s
usually creating a sum of money to pay this medical ward to release
that staff nurse or this sister to do union work, where they can
buy some bank or agency time or what have you. It would be great if
the staffing were so great in Wales that we could accommodate those
pressures. So, I think that’s worth understanding.
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[404] We do not, in
any aggressive way, say, ‘We’re not going to
participate in partnership unless you give us hours.’ These
are negotiated agreements. I’m personally aware of all our
paid agreements across Wales, and always, when I have discussions
with directors of HR—I meet them usually twice a year on my
rounds—we have conversations about how that’s working,
whether they feel they’re getting good value out of that,
because there’s an interest in us doing that, in terms of
ensuring that that money is spent efficiently and that we’re
getting good value out of that. If it’s working well,
we’re very often able to get a bit more cash out of them. But
they’re not huge sums of money—really interestingly,
when I looked at it, they’re not massive.
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[405] The other point
to make—
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[406] Sian
Gwenllian: Sorry to interrupt, but it would be interesting for
us to have some idea of the costings.
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[407] Mr
Meredith-Smith: I’m on tricky ground here, because I
always get a slapped wrist when I disclose stuff like that, but I
looked at it today: we represent 25,000 members in Wales,
we’re involved in every NHS organisation in Wales and, at the
moment, in terms of the data that I ran off this morning,
it’s the equivalent of—the paid hours, not the
volunteer—about 12 whole-time equivalents of staff. If you
could get 12 NHS consultancy workers for the money that
you’re paying out and the value you’re getting from
those reps, I think you’d be well pleased as a member of the
Welsh public. It’s money that’s very, very well spent
and, as I say, I don’t get HR directors or chief execs
banging on my door saying, ‘We need to claw this money back
to pay for front-line services because it’s of no value to
us.’ It’s recognised as money well spent in terms of
engendering a culture of partnership and co-operation in a service
that is really complex and dealing with extremely challenging
issues at the moment.
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[408] John
Griffiths: Okay, Peter, and I think Jenny—.
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[409] Jenny
Rathbone: Clearly, the important work being done during
facility time, I think, is not the issue. The issue is how onerous
would it be to publish information relating to it. If I could just
ask the BMA: your members elect the people who are going to
represent them on the local negotiating committees, and presumably
you backfill these independent practitioners with locums; is that
how it works?
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[410] Mr Cross:
Not quite. There’s obviously another whole cadre of trainees
and also what we call non-consultant career grades who work in
teams with our consultants, so it would depend on the matter. The
first thing to be said is our members have to give six weeks’
notice to go to a trade union meeting, so you don’t just drop
tools. You can’t cancel an operating list or a clinic, as
obviously people, all of us, who use the NHS wouldn’t be best
pleased that our long-awaited appointment had been cancelled. So,
that has to be done, and such backfill as there is has to be done
by the team. It does put pressure on our members who are involved.
This is one of the difficulties that we have in getting people
involved in negotiating activity, because, clearly, when
you’ve studied for lots and lots of years, as our members
have, the top priority isn’t necessarily going to be
negotiating with the HR department. Some do do that, but it is
difficult, because the members, by and large, want to be doing
their clinical work first and foremost, so the rest of it gets done
in their own time and around the edges. So, that’s why we
don’t really get into this situation of facility time.
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[411] Jenny
Rathbone: So, even when you’ve got people representing
your members on the local negotiating committees, the BMA
doesn’t normally backfill the locum required; it’s
normally the health board—
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[412] Mr Cross:
The local negotiating committee tends to take place out of working
hours, so it’s not when operating is taking place, by and
large. Also, if it’s an external meeting where we’re
having to meet with management in a proper face-to-face
negotiation, then that’s going to have been done with notice.
So, arrangements will have been made; so, this will have been
shifted to fulfil that.
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13:30
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[413] Jenny
Rathbone: What I’m trying to ascertain is who might have
the information. Who is the guardian of the information about how
much time your members are spending on facility time? Is it
something that’s easily obtainable, or is it a variety of
people doing it in their own time after work?
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[414] Mr Cross:
The HR departments obviously have all the job planning information,
and it all goes to the Welsh Government. So, it’s all
stored—all of that information. So, yes, it’s all
there; it’s all open. Every consultant has an annual
job-planning meeting and this is one of the factors, if they do BMA
activities that comes up. As I say, by and large we don’t
sort of negotiate a specified number of sessions for trade union
work. We have looked at that, but it’s so few and far
between, it’s quite hard to get a handle on what it would be
regularly. It’s really at the minimal level, you see, for our
people. That’s why they have full-time officials like myself
to assist with that. That’s how we manage it.
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[415] Jenny
Rathbone: So, as far as you’re concerned, the whole thing
is an irrelevance because there’s such a tiny amount of time
involved, and the RCN have already—[Inaudible.]
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[416] Mr Cross:
I wouldn’t say ‘irrelevant’, but it’s not
the biggest thing on anybody’s agenda, I think.
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[417] Jenny
Rathbone: If the cost of collating the information is more
than—you know—it’s—.
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[418] Mr Cross:
Oh, yes; it’s disproportionate. Yes, possibly.
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[419] Mr
Meredith-Smith: Can I come in on that point?
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[420] John
Griffiths: Peter, yes.
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[421] Mr
Meredith-Smith: I think it’s a really, really important
question, clearly, in terms of transparency, the information
that’s available to the public that we serve through the NHS,
and whether we’re spending money appropriately, particularly
in really tough times. I do have a worry about it. I don’t
think it would be a complicated thing, and I could go into some
detail in terms of the way we govern that, and I think you’d
be happy with that. I think there’s a bigger issue. What
we’re talking about here is something that concerns us,
because what we’re talking about here today wasn’t an
issue. Somewhere else has made this an issue. Right? It’s a
really difficult sort of situation, and it’s an element of
using the NHS as a political football. I think that that’s
the risk that we’ve got in terms of how we handle this
information. We’re all for transparency. As I said, having a
look at this in terms of preparing for this, and checking that I
can look you in the eye and say these things, I think people would
be very impressed by the value for money that they get. But the
only time we get asked these questions, our chief
executives—. It’s the Taxpayer’s Alliance doing
freedom of information checks. It further makes the NHS a political
football; it further undermines very productive employment
relations in the NHS. I think that we need to think that through. I
think we do need to think about how we’re transparent about
these issues. As I said, that money effectively is public money. We
need to be answerable for that. There are other far more important
things that we need to be giving detail on in local health board
annual reports and so forth. It’s not that it’s a
secret issue for me; it’s an issue about why we’re
having this conversation and where that takes us, because we
don’t want the NHS in Wales to be a political football
distracting us. We want to be working together to sort out these
very difficult situations to take the service where we want it to
be for the benefit of the citizens of Wales. The real risk is that,
once you get into that, all of us will be involved in press
inquiries and freedom of information and what have you. It’s
unnecessary. The scale of it is small.
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[422] John
Griffiths: Okay. Well, thanks for that, Peter. We need to move
on. Bethan, you had some questions on ballot thresholds.
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[423] Bethan
Jenkins: Well, I think it’s quite timely to ask this
question today, when some of the staff at Abertawe Bro Morgannwg
University Local Health Board have gone on strike in relation to
pay. I just wanted to understand your views on the 40 per cent
marker that’s in the Act from the UK Government. I think
you’ve all more or less said the same thing, saying that
it’s unreasonable, unnecessary and has no basis, but I wanted
to understand why exactly you said that and whether you could
comment on the UK Government saying that they wanted to focus on
the fact that it could jeopardise people’s security and
health if this wasn’t put in place—that’s part of
their rationale for putting this 40 per cent limit or bar on the
ballot for industrial action.
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[424] Ms Watts:
Shall I comment?
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[425] John
Griffiths: Okay. Yes.
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|
[426] Ms Watts:
Where was I going to go with this? I think I would like to bat the
question back to the UK Government: what evidence do they have for
bringing this measure in, despite what might have happened today,
or indeed what happened with the junior doctors? So, I think there
have been fewer strikes taking place within public services over
recent years than there have ever been before, and that’s
despite austerity and the extremely challenging times that
we’re all working in and we’re all up against in terms
of cuts and so on. Nevertheless, we still carried on; we still work
very hard; we still provide the service to the public, who are the
most important people here. So, why is it necessary? It’s
back to that same question: why is it necessary to introduce this
just for public services? You know, what is the Government’s
agenda? Where is their evidence for this requirement? I certainly
know that social workers aren’t prone to taking industrial
action, and I think I probably would say it’s the same with
my colleagues. We’re in—for the want of a better
expression—the caring professions. Our service users are the
most important people, but we would want to reserve the right, as a
last resort, to take action as necessary, in the same way as any
other employee should be able to in this country. Again, it goes
back to the feeling about the importance of trade unions and what
they do. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there are going to
be more strikes or there’s suddenly going to be this outbreak
of industrial action. For me, on the contrary. I think it’s
more likely to cause such resentment and be seen as another attack
on the trade unions. There is the potential that it could make
members even more inclined towards militancy.
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[427] Mr
Meredith-Smith: I can’t answer for the UK
Government—as a trade union manager or a mental health nurse,
actually. I couldn’t comment on the logic for some of their
thinking. It is disrespectful in terms of—. You know, is it
for us to set legislation to dictate the democratic processes of
organisations such as ours? I think it shows a naivety in terms of
the way industrial relations work. We don’t have a tendency
to strike. We never have, actually. It’s within our gift to
do so, although we’ve got very severe restrictions in terms
of what industrial action that we can take. But it’s a
no-brainer. When we have had recourse to ballot, any person with
any experience of working in a trade union is hardly going to be
recommending strike action if you’ve got a 15 per cent
response rate on a ballot. It just beggars belief, really. We very
seldom need to get to that situation. It’s just unnecessary.
I just do not know what the thinking is. For it to be done in the
public sector is discriminatory, isn’t it? What’s wrong
with all sectors? With a predominantly female workforce, and all
those issues, we could sort of think that through. But again, I
don’t understand the logic for doing it. If it ain’t
broke, why seek to fix it? But we would be absolutely insane if we
proposed any form of industrial action—and that doesn’t
need to be a strike; it can be other things—on the basis of
flimsy ballot results. It beggars belief, really.
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|
[428] Ms
Turnbull: If I can just add as well in terms of any kind of
negotiation that takes place, one of the things that’s really
helpful is to be able to say, ‘Start with what you have in
common’. So, the interest of the patient, the interest of the
public. The second thing that’s really helpful in forming
common ground is to be able to say, ‘We’re taking this
off the table’, and that really does help in that
relationship of trust, that stability of the relationship. Now, if
you don’t have the ability to say, ‘We’re taking
this off the table’, you can’t claim the credit for it.
So, in a sense, it undermines that relationship of trust right from
the start because it implies that the trade union people might be
irrational or take action that would damage the public interest.
So, by being able to have the ability to say, ‘We could do
this, but we are not going to’, then I think that actually
really does help in terms of that negotiation process. I think that
kind of negative action—
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|
[429] Bethan
Jenkins: Couldn’t that still happen, though, about
getting to the 40 per cent marker? It could still happen, but the
bar would raise—to be devil’s advocate.
|
|
[430] Ms
Turnbull: Yes, and I think what we’re saying is that
it’s unnecessary to make that—
|
|
[431] Bethan
Jenkins: To make that arbitrary—
|
|
[432] Ms
Turnbull: Precisely, because that is part of that
relationship—the overall relationship of trust. So, I think
that’s possibly a different angle in perceiving why people
would want to retain that ability. It’s almost because
it’s that gesture of trust that you have that ability;
that’s not an ability that you’re necessarily going to
use wilfully or against the public interest, which we certainly
would never do.
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|
[433] Mr
Meredith-Smith: Are our members in Wales so disenfranchised
that we’d do this? Do we have this long history of forcing
people to take industrial action that we need to be talking about
this in legislation? It’s really—
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|
[434] Bethan
Jenkins: So, you dispute—. Obviously, from the TUC
evidence, they quote that the UK Government said it could estimate
annual savings of £85,000 through reduced days lost to strike
action. You dispute that potential saving and that this could
create more problems down the line.
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|
[435] Mr
Meredith-Smith: Certainly in the Welsh context. We’ve
never been on strike. In terms of when those situations do arise,
industrial action has been taken by other unions. We’ve
always got this life-and-limb agreement. We support each other in
that. Interestingly, there’s a very symbiotic relationship
between TUC unions and the RCN, because there's a
recognition—. We don’t have any difficulty crossing
picket lines, because unions reserve the right to demonstrate, to
make a protest, but we’ve got a healthily bizarre situation
in the health sector, don’t we, where we’re having
conversations, within partnership, across the unions, saying,
‘Right, we’ve got to send a message that this is so
important that we have to have some sort of industrial
action’—not the RCN—
|
|
[436] Bethan
Jenkins: But you are providing the life-and-limb element, then,
when they’re off, is it?
|
|
[437] Mr
Meredith-Smith: Yes, and they’re saying,
‘We’re not going to be giving you any grief when you
cross the picket line.’ It’s the life-and-limb thing,
and, in fairness, the other unions in the health
sector—I’ve never seen them anything but responsible in
those circumstances. The TUC unions are what we’re talking
about.
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|
[438] John
Griffiths: Stephen, did you want to come in?
|
|
[439] Dr
Monaghan: In the BMA’s experience, when we’ve taken
industrial action, it has been on decisions above this threshold,
as it so happens—very strong, like with the junior doctors,
who were above this. So, it wouldn’t really have made much
difference to us. However, it does seem odd that this would be
applied only to the public sector when, arguably, even bigger
decisions were made in referenda on devolution, on Brexit,
without—they wouldn’t have reached the 40 per cent
threshold, and yet, we made huge decisions with both of those.
Possibly all of our MPs wouldn’t be elected, because they
don’t get to the 40 per cent threshold, et cetera. So, it
does seem a little bit odd, or maybe even draconian. However, it
wouldn’t have been a problem, but we still wonder why one
would do this only for trade unions and not for any other
democratic decisions.
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|
[440] John
Griffiths: I think we’d better move on, then, to our
final area of questioning, and that’s agency workers, and
Sian Gwenllian has some questions.
|
|
[441]
Sian Gwenllian:
Roeddwn i jest isio clywed beth yw
eich barn chi ynglŷn â gwahardd gweithwyr asiantaeth i
gyflenwi yn ystod gweithredu diwydiannol. Beth yw eich barn chi am
hynny? Hefyd, wedyn, a ydych chi’n credu y dylid cynnwys
adran am hyn yn y Bil newydd yng Nghymru? Hynny yw, a ddylem ni fod
yn parhau efo gwahardd gweithwyr asiantaeth yn ystod gweithredu
diwydiannol fel rhan o’r Bil yng Nghymru?
|
Sian
Gwenllian: I just wanted to hear what your opinion is regarding
the use of agency workers during industrial action and your opinion
on that, banning the use of such workers. Then, do you think that a
section should be included in the Welsh Bill? Should we be
continuing with this ban on the use of agency work during
industrial action as part of this Bill in Wales?
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|
[442] Mr
Meredith-Smith: Shall I go first? Diolch yn fawr. Our position
is quite clear: that we don’t want to see a situation where
agency workers are being brought in to strike-break. My previous
comments apply. It’s a thing that does need fixing anyway in
terms of the way that industrial disputes are managed. Where you
get these people from, I’m quite doubtful about anyway,
because there’s not a huge pool of nurses that I’m
aware of, and if we can find them, we’ll pass them out some
RCN membership forms, I think, because we need to make sure that
they’re protected. It’s not a good way of doing things.
We ensure that life-and-limb services are provided during
industrial action. Again, from the RCN’s point of view,
we’ve never taken that form of action, anyway.
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|
[443] We have concerns
about the use of agency staff anyway, in the NHS, because there are
huge issues of clinical governance there in terms of continuity of
care and people being parachuted into clinical areas that
they’re not familiar with. So, in really practical terms,
it’s not a good way of solving a problem that doesn’t
exist. It is not a sensible thing to do. I don’t know where
you’re going to get them from, because, as I keep explaining
to people, we don’t have this huge resource of nurses in
Wales who have chosen to opt out of the public sector, to which
they are all extremely dedicated, to make a fortune doing agency.
They’re usually doing it to supplement the poor wages that
they get in the NHS for the work that they put in. Being RCN
members, if they were in dispute, they wouldn’t be able to do
it on the agency as well. So, it’s not a practical solution,
but it’s not a good thing to do. Again, it’s a further
indication of a message being sent out that we’ve got such
dreadful industrial relations and employment relations in
Wales—and our members are being taken advantage of because of
a lack of democracy—that this needs to be done. That’s
not a problem.
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|
[444] For nurses and
front-line staff generally, whichever union they are in, it’s
never been a problem in Wales. It’s a problem that does need
fixing. If we do look to that as a fix in these circumstances,
there are a lot of significant risks to patients in that, because
if you can’t use our members to do it, I don’t know
where you’re going to get these members from. They’re
going to be parachuted in to circumstances that are very unfamiliar
to them; all sorts of risks around continuity care and patient
safety.
|
|
13:45
|
|
[445]
John Griffiths:
Okay, well, we’re over time,
I’m afraid, but I can see, I think, general agreement with
the points that have just been made. Is that the case, or has
anybody got a contrary view?
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|
[446]
Sian Gwenllian:
I’d just like to have your view,
because I don’t think the view of your union is in black and
white yet.
|
|
[447]
Ms Watts: Okay. I’m not aware of agency staff being
brought in. As I said earlier on, I can’t think of a time
when social workers have gone on strike in recent history. I have
actually gone on strike as a social worker, but it was many years
ago, and there was certainly no appetite at all to use agency staff
at that time. Generally, social workers—there are a lot of
agency social workers in the service across the country. I’m
not quite sure of numbers, certainly not within Wales, but I would
say in England a large number of social workers are moving across
to agency work. That’s a whole other subject.
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|
[448]
Sian Gwenllian:
I’m just interested because the UK
legislation would allow the use of agency workers during strikes,
and the Welsh Government is minded to bring in legislation as part
of the Bill that would ban it in Wales.
|
|
[449]
Ms Watts: Again, I think it’s undermining the
relationship between trade unions and employers, and it’s
this negative—‘Let’s make life difficult for the
trade unions because they’re the bad guys.’ Actually,
there is no risk to the public and I think, like my colleagues
across the table, we would take action to mitigate any risks, and
we wouldn’t do it lightly. So, I don’t think we would
support anything that undermines our rights to take that action if
we were actually in that element of very last resort.
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|
[450]
John Griffiths:
Is that okay, Sian? Thank you very much
indeed. Thank you all for giving evidence to the committee this
afternoon. You will be sent a transcript to check for factual
accuracy. Thank you all very much.
|
|
13:49
|
|
Bil yr Undebau Llafur
(Cymru): Sesiwn Dystiolaeth 4
Trade Union (Wales) Bill: Evidence Session 4
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[451] John Griffiths: We are now at item 7, then, evidence session 4 in our
evidence-taking on the Trade Union (Wales) Bill. I’m very
pleased to welcome Wales TUC here today: Martin Mansfield, the
general secretary, and Margaret Thomas, who is vice-president of
Wales TUC. Thank you both for coming along. Let me begin by
asking a question in terms of general principles and the need for
legislation. Could you expand on how the social partnership, in the
view of Wales TUC, helps the effective delivery of public services
in Wales, and how the provisions of the UK Trade Union Act 2016 are
likely to impact upon that?
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|
[452] Mr
Mansfield: Thanks, Chair. I think perhaps before we describe
the social partnership, it’s probably best to describe what
we are as Wales TUC because I know you’re receiving evidence
from some individual unions—we saw some before us—and
you’ll also be receiving written evidence from individual
affiliates of the Wales TUC. So, I think it’s best if we just
outline what we are and who we’re representing in this
evidence, if you bear with me.
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|
[453] John
Griffiths: Yes, certainly.
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|
[454] Mr
Mansfield: So, the Wales TUC is the voluntary federation of
trade unions in Wales. We’re part of the wider UK TUC, but
have devolved responsibility for Wales and make our own policy on
Welsh-specific issues. The membership of the 50 unions affiliated
to us amounts to over 400,000, and we have a democratic process by
which we establish the shared policy of those affiliated unions on
behalf of their members, and they consult their members
democratically. So, what we present to you today will be the shared
voice of over 400,000 trade unionists in Wales and 50 affiliated
unions. Obviously, there may be some specific priorities or
specific areas that individual affiliates will want to raise, and
I’m sure they’ll do that through their own written
evidence. So, it may be that the committee would want to see other
affiliated unions of the Wales TUC, but this is our shared
collective voice.
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|
[455]
John Griffiths:
Okay, that’s fine.
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|
[456]
Mr Mansfield: So, from a social partnership point of view,
we’ve worked very hard with Welsh Government and
employers—economic, private sector and public sector
employers—in Wales to try and find a Welsh way to do
employment relations, to try and ensure that what is mutually
beneficial is delivered, and that we work to the benefit in the
public sector of the services that our citizens and members rely
on. We believe that that is the best way to deliver fairness at
work for our members, but also effective delivery of public
services.
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|
[457]
On the economy side, we’ve worked
very closely together on ensuring that the skills agenda reflects
fairness for employer and employee, and in the public sector, as
we’ve detailed in the evidence, we work to ensure that
disputes in the public sector are resolved at the earliest possible
stage, fairly and with equity, and that the people who work in our
public services have a direct voice in decisions that impact on
them and their working lives. We see social partnership not just as
a relationship between the employer and the trade unions that they
recognise, but a tripartite approach for the whole of Wales that
involves the employers collectively, the union voice collectively
and Welsh Government, all working together to try and ensure that
the best possible services are delivered and that change, as
required, is accommodated properly.
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|
[458]
To do that, we have to have some very
serious and challenging discussions, and I think the perception
that there is of those who aren’t involved in those social
partnership discussions is of a very easy, tick the box, we all
share together, it’s apple pie, we all agree that social
partnerships are a good thing. Actually, those discussions are very
challenging and contested, and very serious issues are dealt with
so that you can arrive at a fair and settled approach, without
leading to individual disputes. It doesn’t prevent dispute,
but it does prevent unnecessary dispute or disputes arising where
they could be settled. I think that’s—
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|
[459]
John Griffiths:
Yes. So, how would you consider the UK
Government’s trade union Act would impact on that social
partnership and the delivery of public services in
Wales?
|
|
[460]
Mr Mansfield: Well, it comes from a very different position. If you
track back to the intention of the Act, rather than the specific
provisions, it’s very clear that there’s a view from
the UK Government that trade union activism and trade union
representation and trade union disputes need to be prevented, and
that trade union involvement is not necessarily a positive in any
workplace. Certainly, in terms of some of the provisions of the
Act, it would impact on how we deliver social partnership in
Wales.
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|
[461] Now, as part of the UK TUC, we’ve opposed many
of the provisions of the Act, but in terms of how it impacts on
Wales specifically and the devolved public services in
particular, that is the area where we have been most engaged
with Welsh Government and with the political parties in Wales to
say that these impact directly on the very well-supported social
partnership approach that we have, supported by Government, by the
Senedd as a whole and by the employer and trade union side.
Specifically, the two areas that impact on the day-to-day working
of social partnership would be check-off and facility time, but
also in terms of equity and the ability, at the end of the day, to
be an equal partner, there is also the additional ballot threshold
of 40 per cent of entitled members. So, those are the three areas
that would specifically impact on how we deliver social
partnership, both in terms of us as an equal partner, but also in
terms of us delivering that on the ground and in the workplace.
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|
[462]
John Griffiths:
Okay. We’ll come on to each of
those. Before we do, are there any provisions in the UK Trade Union
Act that the Wales Bill does not seek to disapply that you would
like to see disapplied?
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|
[463]
Mr Mansfield: In the Act itself, we very carefully reviewed it and
we provided some of the background legal evidence from the legal
opinion that we gathered. We would have liked, as our policy
position, to disapply the whole Act for the whole of the private
sector and for the whole of the public sector, but we do recognise
that there are matters of competence for this body. We have looked
very carefully at the 50 per cent threshold as being potentially
one that could have been part of Welsh legislation, but it was a
grey area in terms of whether that could actually be defined as
being specifically impacting on devolved Welsh public services as
opposed to impacting right across the economy. So, we felt that we
would be suggesting, and Welsh Government and the political
parties, in their manifesto commitments, looking at those areas
that are clearly within competence. So, we would accept that the
three areas highlighted are the three areas there is competence for
the National Assembly to legislate on and with the provisions of
the UK Act. What isn’t in the UK Act, of course, is the
agency workers regulations. I think you wanted to come on to that
at another point.
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|
[464]
John Griffiths:
Yes, absolutely. That’s fine. Thank
you very much. We’ll move on then to some of the particular
provisions. Firstly, the check-off restrictions and Rhianon
Passmore.
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|
[465]
Rhianon Passmore:
You’ve quite clearly articulated
that you feel that the UK Act, unless I’ve got this wrong, is
an attack on trade unionism. Can you outline how restricting
check-off as the UK Act does, if I read this:
|
|
[466]
‘Has the potential to fundamentally
challenge the social partnership model in Wales.’
|
|
[467]
Because it’s something that we
value here greatly. How do you evidence that statement?
|
|
[468]
Mr Mansfield: Margaret is vice-president of the Wales TUC, I should
have said, and is our lead on public services. She’s also the
Wales secretary of Unison, which is the biggest and the leading
public sector union in Wales. I’ll be looking to Margaret to
detail how this works on the ground in particular, and so, on
check-off—she’d certainly have a
contribution.
|
|
[469]
Just generally, this is about the
voluntary decision of individual trade union members on how they
pay their subscription and the voluntary decision between an
employer and a trade union that they see the benefit in offering an
opportunity for trade union members to pay their subscriptions via
check-off.
|
|
[470]
This was an early approach in terms of
direct deduction from salary—it’s been ongoing for at
least 100 years among various employers right across sectors,
public and private. But it’s now not an unusual benefit for
an employee to see from their employer: from travel to the payment
of bicycles to childcare to gym memberships—a range of
facilities are able to be deducted from an employee’s salary
directly. We think it’s totally unequitable that the trade
union subscription should be singled out in this way—that, in
some way, this is a benefit for a trade union as opposed to a
benefit for the member.
|
|
[471]
Rhianon Passmore:
So, you feel that there’s a
disparity in terms of how this has been singled out.
|
|
[472] Mr Mansfield: And it’s certainly being presented that the
whole cost of any arrangement for payroll deduction should be
applied to check-off, when clearly it’s one element of a
number and then a voluntary arrangement. So, really, in the context
of the Bill and the original consultations at UK level, it was seen
as a way of restricting and damaging trade union
organisation, another tool in the armoury of preventing trade
unions from effectively operating—
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|
14:00
|
|
[473] Rhianon
Passmore: Okay, thank you.
|
|
[474] Mr
Mansfield: —and what it does is it prevents individuals
having a choice in how they relate to their trade union, and it
prevents public sector employers deciding that they want to work
co-operatively with trade unions.
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|
[475] Rhianon
Passmore: So, how does it undermine that principle of social
partnership and the actual operation of social partnership if we
did not have that system of check-off in place in Wales?
|
|
[476] Ms
Thomas: Because the likelihood is that the trade union
membership would fall off, because people wouldn’t have
access in terms of paying their subscriptions. So, for example, we
have more women trade union members in the public service than men,
we have lots of women on low pay, and there are bank accounts that
many of our Unison members use where they don’t have the
facility to pay direct debit payments. So, the only way they would
be able to pay their membership subscriptions is through check-off
or via cash payments. Now, we all know that trying to collect cash
payments, you know, across 400,000 members in Wales would be very,
very difficult, and so they would become disenfranchised, because
they wouldn’t be trade union members. If the trade union
membership reduces, it has an impact on the social partnership with
the employers, because the employers would then start to argue that
we’re not representing the voice of the people they employ,
and we do represent the voice of the people, so it’s very,
very important that our members—and as Martin has said, this
is a voluntary arrangement, so our members choose, when they join,
to have their subscriptions deducted from their salary. It enables
lots of them to manage their household budgets better, because
it’s deducted before the money goes into their bank account.
They have the facility at any stage to change from check-off
arrangements. So, they don’t have to stay on it; if they
choose to change, they can. Again, that is a voluntary arrangement.
And, altogether, it is about maintaining the opportunity for
individuals to be trade union members and for the trade union to
then conduct all those very, very important consultations and
negotiations with the employer, which has a major impact on the
social partnership approach that we promote for Wales across the
whole of the United Kingdom.
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|
[477] Rhianon
Passmore: So, how significant an issue is it if that facility
wasn’t to be there in terms of check-off, and do you think
are disproportionately affects women?
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|
[478] Ms
Thomas: It does, yes.
|
|
[479] Rhianon
Passmore: Okay. You think there’s inequality in it.
|
|
[480] Ms
Thomas: Potentially, I think it’s discriminatory, because
it does disproportionately affect women, and the impact would be
massive. A number of years ago, there was a requirement from the UK
Government—we’re going back to the 1990s—where
trade unions had to sign up their members again, and it was a
massive task, and we lost members as a result of that, and it did
impact on the relationship that we had with employers and the
social partnership working that occurred within the
workplace—not necessarily in the wider context of the social
partnership, but specifically in the workplace, it had a massive
impact. And that’s where most of the issues are discussed and
resolved. They’re not escalated to the Government. We try to
deal with things as close to the ground as we possibly can, and if
we lose that ability, then matters will escalate.
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|
[481] Rhianon
Passmore: Thank you.
|
|
[482] John
Griffiths: Just one question on cost: do you believe it’s
reasonable for trade unions to cover the cost to public sector
employers of providing check-off services?
|
|
[483] Ms
Thomas: There are a number of facility agreements where
agreement has been reached that costs will be covered. The
difficulty we have is that employers haven’t to date been
able to provide any of the trade unions with any of the evidence of
how much it actually costs to deduct our member subscriptions. Now,
years ago, when payroll systems were manual systems, then there was
a resource issue and there was a cost to that. But now, with
everything that can be done, virtually at the touch of a
button—. For example, lots of employers, as Martin outlined,
offer the facility for travel passes, to give them a loan and to
have that deducted, and credit unions, which, again, helps our
members. That doesn’t cost, because, as soon as somebody
joins an organisation, their information is input on the payroll
system. If one thing is added or one thing is taken away it’s
one exercise and then, each payroll run, it’s the push of a
button. So, we believe that the cost to employers is actually
negligible. We have never said that we won’t pay for it and
we have several examples of where we do pay. But we’re not
able to get the information from the employer on how much it costs,
so we reach agreement on a percentage figure, which most of the
time we believe is unfair because the employer’s being paid
for something that isn’t costing them that much.
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|
[484]
John Griffiths:
Margaret, would you be able to tell the
committee how much is involved in these trade union payments to
cover the cost of check-off? Would you know the figures or would
you be able to provide them to the committee with a
note?
|
|
[485]
Ms Thomas: I could probably provide the financial cost.
Generally, it’s agreed on a percentage basis. So, for
example, it may be that we would pay 1 per cent of the
contributions collected to the employer.
|
|
[486]
John Griffiths:
I see.
|
|
[487]
Ms Thomas: Now, if you’re talking about a big health board
where we’ve got over 5,000, 6,000, members, then
they’re getting quite a lot of money. I think the health
boards take 2 per cent or 2.5 per cent of subscriptions. I think
that’s outrageous, to be honest, because I don’t
believe it costs them that much to process our members’
subscriptions. If that is something that will continue to be
pursued, I’m sure the trade unions will come back and say,
‘Well, if we have to pay over and above what we believe it
costs to make those deductions, then we want something else on top
of that’.
|
|
[488]
Mr Mansfield: I think, in terms of equity in the approach,
historically, when there were paper payroll systems, you could
identify a member of staff, particularly in a big unionised
employer, who was maybe dedicated to providing that service, and
that is a cost. Historically, there were arrangements put in place
to cover that. It’s impossible to identify a cost in
automated systems now. Trade unions are being singled out in the UK
legislation and in attempts to ask for an administration fee in a
way that others are not. So, for example, if the gym membership is
deducted, does the employer go to the gym and ask for a percentage?
Are Arriva Trains Wales paying? This is an equity issue, and
it’s not about whether it costs the employer substantial
amounts of money to provide the check-off system, it’s about,
‘Is there a hurdle we can put in the way of encouraging
people to join trade unions?’
|
|
[489]
Joyce Watson: Can I ask—?
|
|
[490]
John Griffiths:
If it’s very brief, Joyce, because
we do need to move on.
|
|
[491]
Joyce Watson: It’s very brief and it’s on this. If
you’ve identified that as an issue, an unfair issue, have you
asked UK Government for a response as to the reasoning? If you have
and you’ve got it, would you be willing to share it with
us?
|
|
[492]
Mr Mansfield: We have certainly asked at UK level, and, as part of
the TUC, we were part of the engagement at that level. It’s
safe to say that the response wasn’t adequate in terms of the
evidence behind the proposal. As with much of the evidence behind
the proposal when it was the Trade Union Bill, there were a lot of
assertions not necessarily supported by a great deal of
evidence.
|
|
[493]
Joyce Watson: Thank you.
|
|
[494]
John Griffiths:
Okay, and we move on then to facility
time and to Jenny Rathbone.
|
|
[495] Jenny Rathbone: You’ve given some excellent evidence in your
written submission about the importance of facility time in
delivering the social partnership, and particularly around the fact
that workplace injuries are lower, workplace-related illnesses are
lower, and time wasted on employment tribunals is a lot lower, in
unionised workplaces. So, clearly, facility time is an important
part of delivering that social partnership. My only
question, really, is just whether—in the interests of
transparency, what is the problem in publishing the amount of time
that is spent on facility time, so that trade union members realise
what contribution their union is making to enabling them to have
this safer workplace? Or is it as burdensome as trying to identify
what it costs to check off the subs?
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|
[496] Mr
Mansfield: Certainly, we’re in no way afraid of
transparency in terms of what time trade union activists spend on
representation duties. These are again voluntary arrangements
between employers and trade unions and their members to allow the
functioning of social partnership and all the benefits that accrue.
Employers, I know, including the WLGA, have identified very
strongly the importance that they attach to that, and they identify
this as being a cost saving for them, that the money that they
invest in releasing employees to carry out that function as trade
union reps is, in effect, a cost saving for them. So, that is the
issue that we return to.
|
|
[497] You have to
think about the intent of this UK Act in these circumstances. The
intent is not to say, ‘This is the cost and benefit of having
paid release for trade unions.’ We quote in our evidence the
UK Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform in
2007. It did a proper study of the costs and the benefits. We were
very happy to participate in that and completely accept the
results. What this is about is disregarding the benefits and very
specifically trying to identify costs. It’s difficult to be
precise on the cost because it varies according to the
requirements. So, if, for example, there was a massive
organisational change ongoing in a health board or a local
authority, it would be expected that the employer would seek to
ensure that the trade union representatives had more facility time
to ensure that the workforce’s voice was heard and people
were represented. So, it varies according to requirements.
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|
[498] Most trade union
representatives have very little access to paid time from their
duties. Most of that is spent on direct representation of
individuals or a collective view in order to avoid disputes or
industrial tribunals. Most of the rest of it is spent on training
to ensure that there is a professional role there and that disputes
are handled professionally. So, the perception that facility time
is just a cost comes from a perspective of trying to prevent trade
union activism, trade union engagement, and social partnership. It
would be presented as a Tea Party/TaxPayers’ Alliance-type
headline, rather than a properly thought out, ‘How does
facility time impact our public services?’ So, if it were the
cost and benefits, we would be absolutely delighted to participate
in that, and have done. Crucially, though, behind the publication
is the sledgehammer of a UK Minister deciding that they can cap, or
interfere with, the facility time that is crucial to Welsh public
services’ social partnership delivery.
|
|
[499]
Jenny Rathbone:
So, you think that that is a threat
behind the clause in this Act.
|
|
[500]
Mr Mansfield: Yes.
|
|
[501]
Jenny Rathbone:
But it’s not actually in the
Act.
|
|
[502]
Mr Mansfield: But it’s very definitely there as a power for
Ministers at a later stage, following the publication of the
facility time, that they can decide, through regulation, to cap
facility time. Let’s be clear: these are UK Government
Ministers acting throughout the devolved public services of Wales.
We elect our Assembly Members and Welsh Government to deliver our
public services, and they have agreed to deliver that on the basis
of social partnership. It’s absolutely undemocratic for a UK
Minister to decide to cap that and prevent it.
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|
[503] Jenny Rathbone: I’m rather surprised that the UK Parliament
hasn’t insisted on an update of the 2007 report by the
then Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory
Reform, so that we have some slightly more up-to-date information
on the benefits of trade union representation in the workplace. Are
you able to cast any light on why that wasn’t insisted upon
before the UK Trade Union Act was passed?
|
|
[504]
Mr Mansfield: It certainly wasn’t a proposal from the trade
unions. We would certainly support that updating.
|
|
[505]
Jenny Rathbone:
Okay. Because, obviously, it’s very
clear that it’s a much safer place to work if there is a
place where there’s trade union representation.
|
|
[506] Mr Mansfield: It’s certainly a fairer and safer workplace for
individuals, but it’s also a cost saving in the
delivery of quality public services as well.
|
|
14:15
|
|
[507] Jenny Rathbone: Just going back to the
transparency issue on facility time, is it the case that either the
trade union or the employer has these data? The WLGA said that
there were data available. I’m not aware of where one would
find that. Is this something that would be easy to collate, or is
it a burden for you?
|
|
[508] Ms
Thomas: There’s a mixture, because there will be parts of
the public services where the facility time is specific in respect
of the number of people that have paid full-time release. But
there’s also the local representative that will pick up
purely individual issues, representation issues, and whilst
that’s part of the facility agreement and a right under law,
it’s not recorded, because it may only be that they represent
one member a month. And it might be they take two hours to do the
preparation, and then an hour to attend the meeting that is
convened by the employer. In terms of the agreed paid facility time
as in release for individuals, that is readily available. There is
a perception that people like myself are paid for out of the public
purse and as part of the facility agreement. That is completely
untrue. I am paid by the subscription from our members;
there’s no facility time used in that at all. I know that you
will recognise the work that trade union representatives undertake
in terms of avoiding disputes, helping members in the workplace in
relation to—you know, it could be improving working
practices, there could be disability issues, and the union
representative is able to deal with that in a much quicker and
efficient and professional way than if we didn’t have trade
unions representatives with the facility time. And, when facility
time is attacked, we see almost immediately a negative change in
relationships, not just between the trade union and the employer,
but we see that negative change between the employee and the
employer, because they feel that their voluntary choice to be
member of a trade union, where their representative has facility
time to support them in consultation and negotiations with the
employer, is being attacked.
|
|
[509]
John Griffiths:
Could I just ask whether you would be
opposed to the requirement on public sector employers to publish
information on facility time if it weren’t for the
accompanying reserved powers for Ministers of the Crown to restrict
that facility time?
|
|
[510] Ms
Thomas: It depends on what basis you’re going to produce
the information, because, as Martin said, if you’re purely
going to look at how much it costs the public purse, then it
becomes a TaxPayers’ Alliance issue, and, if you’re not
publishing information in respect of how much it saved the public
purse by having facility time representation, it just distorts
information and it becomes purely a TaxPayers’ Alliance type
issue.
|
|
[511]
Jenny Rathbone:
But if it’s not the money—.
Because I think the money is an absolute side issue; it’s
about the amount of time. Do you think that that would then get it
away from being used as a taxpayer issue?
|
|
[512] Ms
Thomas: I don’t believe employers would be able to
readily identify the amount of time.
|
|
[513]
Jenny Rathbone:
Okay, thank you.
|
|
[514] Ms
Thomas: In terms of—. For example, we may have a facility
agreement where you would have one full-time release for—and
I’ll just use an example—1,000 members. That’s
easily identifiable and could be produced on an annual basis. What
isn’t then produced is the amount of time that
representatives spend over and above their standard working hours,
which they do on a regular basis. That isn’t recorded, and
the employer is then getting the benefit of a trade union
representative working more hours than they pay them to work, for
the benefit of the employer as well as the trade union members.
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[515] Mr
Mansfield: I think proper transparency would not be an issue
for us whatsoever. If we separate it from the intent of this Bill,
and the sledgehammer behind the publication of a very specific set
of data, of UK Government Ministers interfering in our social
partnership—. If that was separated, we would need to say,
‘Let’s look at the real costs and real benefits’,
so Margaret referred to it there: most people who work full time on
trade union business or Wales TUC business are paid for out of the
union subscriptions. We allocate a great deal of our time, at very
senior levels of the trade union movement, to making the social
partnership work and preventing disputes. That money is not from
the public purse. The voluntary time that individual members and
reps put in outside of working hours is not allocated as being time
paid for by the public purse. This is a partnership and the
benefits of the partnership are mutual. Trying to allocate one
particular cost and say that, therefore, that should be capped is
not working in partnership; it’s working to undermine trade
unionism.
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[516]
John Griffiths:
Okay, and Rhianon.
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[517]
Rhianon Passmore:
Thank you, Chair. So, you feel that it
would be divisive to publish facility time, although you are very
open, on a transparency basis, to cost and benefit. Am I right,
then, in summarising what you say, then, that you believe that the
whole intent behind the UK Act has caused a distrust in terms of
where you feel that is moving us towards? Is that correct to say?
So in terms of being divisive around facility time, do you think
that there would be issues within the workplace as well, in
publication of facility time?
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[518]
Ms Thomas: It brings me back to the issue about the accuracy of
the publication. If the information is inaccurate, then it does
become divisive.
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[519]
Rhianon Passmore:
Okay, thank you, Chair.
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[520]
John Griffiths:
Okay. We will move on then. I think,
Bethan, you have some questions on ballot thresholds.
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[521]
Bethan Jenkins:
Thanks. Obviously I’ve read your
evidence in relation to this, and I just wanted your views, really,
for the record, in relation to your opposition to the 40 per cent
marker for triggering industrial strike action, in the context of
the spirit in which you conduct industrial relations here in Wales,
and your comments, really, I think, on the estimation of the
savings that the UK Government have quoted, and whether you
potentially have done any of your own research into—. You say
quite clearly that it could actually lead to more issues with
industrial relations. Can you tell me if you’ve got evidence,
or if you’ve looked into that in an in-depth way, or is that
just a view that you’ve taken anecdotally from
members?
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[522]
Mr Mansfield: Specifically on the 40 per cent threshold, this is a
new proposal. The status quo is not the 40 per cent threshold. Our
concern, and the concern of the UK Regulatory Policy Committee, was
that the move to the 40 per cent threshold was not supported, and
the estimate of cost savings was not fit for purpose, and that the
analysis done was not fit for purpose. It’s for the UK
Government, in making the proposal to change from the status quo to
a new situation, to prove their claim that there would be
substantial cost savings, and they’ve made an estimate based
on the number of days they believe would be saved from strike
action.
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[523] Our view—and we’ve detailed it in the
evidence—is that it is more likely, although not measureable
because these are not in place, so we can’t prove that there
is a difference in fact, but it’s our view that it would be
more likely that disputes would be longer and more entrenched under
that threshold, and we’ve set out why. So, in the preparation
for a 40 per cent threshold ballot, that would probably take a
longer period, so the dispute goes on for that period. Once
you’ve balloted on that level, the expectation of the
membership in terms of taking the action and delivering a
substantive result is also raised, so it’s harder to settle
the dispute once it gets to that stage, rather than beforehand, in
a mutually beneficial way. The employer side being more likely to
wait and see whether the ballot threshold could be hit, rather than
agreeing to try and voluntarily resolve a dispute, is more
likely. So, all in all, it’s more likely to impact on the
number of days lost in strike action, but also it’s more
likely to damage the morale and the relationship, and that’s
probably the most important long-term impact. So, we believe
there’s no evidence, or no real, proper rationale supporting
this new threshold, and that it’s absolutely appropriate for
the National Assembly and Welsh Government to maintain the status
quo and maintain equality between our important devolved public
services and the rest of the economy in Wales.
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[524] Bethan
Jenkins: Okay, thanks for that. I was just wondering what you
thought about whether the Welsh Government should have had a
cost-benefit analysis in this Bill, as opposed to relying on the
regulatory assessment from the UK Government. Obviously, the
rationale from the UK Government was that they wanted to have a
level playing field between the benefits for the union membership
and then for the public, so to try and balance that out, probably
because of industrial action that’s happened outside of this
country. But, just your views on that.
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[525] Mr
Mansfield: We dispute the £85,000 figure. We’re not
saying that there should have been a full-blown alternative
regulatory assessment process. We’re just drawing attention
to the £85,000 figure—which is based on the UK
Government estimates, and we dispute the basis of those estimates,
as I just mentioned in my last answer. We don’t think it
would be a value-for-money use of public spend to try and carry out
an analysis of something that—in any case—is fairly
difficult to measure because it hasn’t happened yet. So, the
only alternative to a proposal, which is asserted by the UK
Government would save money in strike days, is very complicated
and, itself, not based on actual experience, but based on estimates
of the alternative from our point of view. So, trying to cost out
our estimates and our understanding of what would happen to
relationships would be expensive and probably would not be as
beneficial for the use of money as saying, ‘Actually, you
haven’t proved the need to change. We don’t accept the
supporting evidence behind it, and the figures that you provide to
support a change. UK Government don’t actually support that
change, evidentially.’
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[526] Bethan
Jenkins: We had the evidence from the WLGA today and despite
them agreeing that the 40 per cent should be taken out in this
particular legislation, they still said that there should be some
wider discussion around industrial action in relation to how we can
get more people to engage in the first place. They were mentioning
that some people weren’t getting ballot papers, or they
weren’t getting information correctly from the trade union.
Do you concur with that? Would you like to see some work done on
trying to encourage people to join and to take part in that
democratic process that quite a lot of people are not engaging in
now, unfortunately, for various reasons?
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[527] Mr
Mansfield: I’ll let Margaret answer on the detail of the
process, but I think, overall, in terms of whether there should be
additional methods of encouraging participation, we’re
absolutely for that. We’re democratic organisations, we want
to see the maximum participation of the union members in all of the
decisions that relate to their union and their working lives. The
original imposition of full postal balloting reduced the
involvement of union members in those decisions. We’re not
looking to return to that discussion, but I think, again, the
intent of the Bill is not about trying to encourage trade union
members, and people to join unions and participate in them. So,
yes, and Margaret and I do—
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[528] Bethan
Jenkins: No, it’s just in general—. I’m just
opening it up a tiny bit to see what your thoughts are.
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[529] Mr
Mansfield: In terms of the legislation itself, the intent of
the change from the status quo to the new threshold is not about
trying to encourage people to participate, it’s about trying
to put hurdles in the way of effective industrial action. I think
that’s important for us to think about when we’re
considering the legislation. But the point on participation, I
think, Margaret.
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[530] Ms
Thomas: Yes, I mean, you know, the WLGA say that they agree
with the removal of it, which I’m really pleased about.
Participation: every trade union wants their members to participate
fully in the democratic processes. The difficulties we have in
terms of individuals participating in ballots is, as Martin has
said, because of the need to have a full postal ballot now.
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14:30
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[531] People get so
many envelopes through their letterboxes every day, and we get the
ballot paper and if we don’t open it and fill it in the same
day, the likelihood is it goes on the pile of ‘to deal
with’ post, and before you know it, they’ve missed the
deadline. So, as trade unions, we know we have to do more in terms
of trying to engage our members in that process. We will be doing
that as a result of the TU Act in England. In terms of—.
Sorry, I’ve lost my train of thought.
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[532] In terms of the
balloting, a move to e-balloting will, we believe, assist. In terms
of the postal ballots, our members will change address. They have
an obligation to inform their employer or the HMRC if they change
address. They also have an obligation to tell their trade union,
but lots of people don’t tell their trade union. So, we do
have processes in place so that when ballot papers go out, if they
go to an address where the member is no longer present, they come
back, and then we have to try and find out where the member has
moved to. The difficulty we have there is the employer will often
block giving us the information, and they quote the Data Protection
Act 1998 to us. Our members have already given us their
information, they provide us with their national insurance number,
and we have their permission to seek information. So, there has to
be a greater partnership approach to dealing with participation, if
we’re seeking information from an employer.
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[533] Bethan
Jenkins: Okay, thanks.
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[534]
John Griffiths:
Okay, and if we move on to—. Oh,
did you want to add anything?
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[535]
Mr Mansfield: Are we still on the 40 per cent?
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[536]
John Griffiths:
Yes.
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[537]
Mr Mansfield: Because I just wanted to add one thing.
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[538]
John Griffiths:
Okay.
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[539]
Mr Mansfield: It’s the administrative nightmare of trying to
deliver the definition of what ‘important public
services’ are, and how you would identify which groups of
members you are balloting. So, for example, a teacher who spends 40
per cent of their time on GCSE, and 40 per cent of their time on
A-level, and the rest on an administrative function: the GCSE is an
important public service under the Act, but the A-level is not.
Would you ballot that person under the 40 per cent threshold or
would you ballot them under the existing requirement? Why is it
that, if you’re balloting 1,000 members in the private sector
on industrial action, 500 participate in the ballot, 226 people
vote in favour of action, that action is fair, but if you ballot
1,000 people in an important public service and 500 participate,
you have to have 400 of them voting in favour? It’s equity of
issue, here.
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[540]
People don’t take industrial action
lightly, but in our democratic history, this kind of requirement
has never been placed on any democratic organisation. I don’t
want to talk about MPs and AMs’ turnouts, but look at
referendums as being an equivalent. The National Assembly would
never have been established and it would never have been given
law-making powers, and certainly, the most recent referendum would
not have been able to deliver that kind of percentage threshold to
take us out of the European Union. When trade union officials
receive a knife-edge ballot result on industrial action, they take
full account of the fact that a number—a large proportion; a
large minority—of union members were not in favour of that
action, and they act accordingly. I think people negotiating in
Brexit could take a leaf out of that book.
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[541]
John Griffiths:
Okay.
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[542]
Ms Thomas: And we have very clear processes in place. If the
members vote, and it is—as Martin said—borderline, that
doesn’t automatically mean that industrial action will be
pursued. We will go back to the employer and say, ‘Look, this
is the result we’ve had. Can we not return to the negotiating
table?’ because we don’t want our members to take
industrial action. And the majority of the time, they don’t
want to take industrial action, because why would they want to lose
any pay?
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[543]
John Griffiths:
Sure. Okay, well thanks very much for
that. We’ll move on, then, to Sian Gwenllian and some
questions with regard to agency workers and their use in industrial
action.
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[544] Sian
Gwenllian: Diolch yn fawr. Beth
ydy eich barn chi am ddefnyddio gweithwyr asiantaeth yn ystod
gweithredu diwydiannol? A wnewch chi hefyd jest egluro yn union lle
rydym ni arni efo hyn, o ran Deddf y Deyrnas Unedig? Rydw i’n
meddwl, efallai, fy mod i wedi camarwain y pwyllgor mymryn yn
gynharach—nid ydy o ddim yn Neddf y Deyrnas Unedig, nac ydy?
Ond mae yn y drafodaeth sydd yn mynd ymlaen. A fedrwch chi egluro
beth yw eich barn chi am ddefnyddio gweithwyr
asiantaeth?
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Sian
Gwenllian: Thank you very much. What are your views on the use
of agency workers during industrial action? Will you also just
explain exactly where we are in terms of this and in terms of the
UK Act? I think, perhaps, that I’ve mislead the committee a
little earlier—I don’t think it’s in the UK law,
is it? But it is in the discussion that’s ongoing. Could you
explain your views on using agency workers?
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[545] Mr
Mansfield: Any industrial action is, clearly, a very contested
area, and a very difficult-to-manage situation. Now, if an agency
worker is placed in the position where their livelihood depends on
crossing the picket line because their employer instructs them to
do so, that puts them in an invidious position as an individual. In
workplaces where agency staff are used consistently throughout the
normal process of the normal working year, that produces huge
problems for the ongoing relationships of the collective workforce
with the agency and the employer with the union. That is the reason
why, at UK level, the agency workers regulations prevent agency
workers being used to break strikes. That is what they’re
discussing here.
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[546] That change from
preventing agency workers being used to break strikes is not
actually on the face of the UK Act. However, it was in the
discussions leading up to the Act. The only thing that the UK
Government Minister has to do is to go before the House of Commons
and say, ‘I wish to make the change to the Act’, and
they can vote in favour or against; they cannot amend. So,
it’s a straightforward statutory regulation decision that
could happen at any stage. The UK Government have said that they
wish to make that change, and that would impact on the devolved
public services in Wales. You can imagine the difficulty that that
would present.
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[547] We’ve set
out in our evidence to the agency workers consultation—which
we attached to the evidence to the committee—all of the views
of the agency employer and the industry itself. The industry boards
at global and UK level are opposed to this change; they do not want
to see the appropriate use of agency workers being undermined in
this way. Obviously, the United Nations International Labour
Organization has raised particular concerns about the impact on
freedom of association and on UN conventions. So, it’s
another aspect of a really undemocratic and, we believe,
unconstitutional approach. The National Assembly took a view on the
trade union Bill in its LCM debate. The agency workers regs were
not part of that because it wasn’t part of the Bill. So,
clearly, the Welsh Government—and we totally support
this—has gone for a statutory 12-week consultation on the
agency workers regs, and preventing that approach of allowing
agency workers to break strikes from being applied to Welsh
devolved public services. Our evidence is very supportive of adding
that as a small clause to this Bill, but then providing more
detailed secondary legislation from a Welsh National Assembly
perspective.
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[548] Sian
Gwenllian: So, what you’re saying is that we should
actually pre-empt what may happen on a UK level: that it may become
part of UK legislation so we should be acting now, as part of this
Bill, to have that mitigation?
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[549] Mr
Mansfield: To have the ability to prevent that from being
applied, to prevent a UK Minister acting to intervene in devolved
public services to prevent the operation—in a very visceral
way—of social partnership in the progress of our dispute.
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[550] Ms
Thomas: And in terms of agency workers, there is a health and
safety issue as well, because it may be appropriate to have an
agency worker cover a temporary position for the odd absence, but
to bring a wholesale group of agency workers in to cover a specific
service, when you have the staff who deliver that service taking
industrial action, could prove a big health and safety
issue.
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[551] Sian
Gwenllian: Some would argue that not having any cover at all
would be an even worse situation.
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[552] Ms
Thomas: Not necessarily, because trade unions are very
pragmatic when it comes to taking any industrial action. And we
have a clause that we call ‘life and limb’. So, we will
always look at life and limb situations and my responsibility, as a
senior union official, is to agree those life and limb arrangements
with the employer. And we don’t—. Trade unions will
never just say, ‘You’re all out’, and leave
people in danger; we don’t do that. But what we do, when
members want to take industrial action, is to have an impact that
makes the employer come back to the negotiating table. That’s
the whole purpose of taking industrial action. And we don’t
want it—if we can return to the negotiating table without
taking that industrial action, then that’s what we do.
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[553] Sian
Gwenllian: Okay, thank you.
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[554]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Content? Thank you very
much.
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[555] Bethan
Jenkins: Could I ask one question? It’s just we
haven’t asked in the other evidence sessions about this, but
it just dawned on me we should have asked it. Obviously,
we’re pushing this legislation through before the new Wales
Bill is going to come into operation. What are you fears—do
you have fears—if this is passed, and then the UK Government
under their new powers would say, ‘Well, actually we’ll
just scrap it anyway and we’ll make sure that this
won’t have any effect because of the changes to how Wales
makes laws’? Is that something that you have an opinion
on?
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[556] Mr
Mansfield: We wanted to see the Wales Bill have exemptions to
the employment reservation that made very clear the ongoing ability
of the National Assembly and the Welsh Government to legislate in
this area. There would still be some dispute about grey areas, but
fundamentally you have to work with the situation you have at
present, and this Bill is being discussed in the context of the
existing devolution settlement, which is very clear that you have
competence in these areas. The people of Wales elect AMs to the
National Assembly to make decisions about running our devolved
public services. That’s a very important element of the
decisions they make. The National Assembly in the LCM debate was
very clearly—overwhelmingly—against the implementation
of this UK Act for the devolved public services of Wales. If this
Bill is passed and enacted by the Senedd, clearly it would be
absolutely clear that our elected representatives do not want those
provisions applied to our public services. And I think it would be
a fundamentally unconstitutional, undemocratic act of the UK
Government then to disapply that.
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[557] Bethan
Jenkins: Thanks.
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[558] John Griffiths: Okay, thanks very much for that, and thank you
both for coming along to give evidence today. You will be sent a
transcript to check the factual accuracy. Thank you very much.
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14:43
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Papurau i’w Nodi
Papers to Note
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[559] John
Griffiths: The next item we have is item 8, papers to note.
Paper 7 is correspondence from me to the future generations
commissioner following up on some of the matters arising from the
scrutiny session we held with the commissioner. Paper 8 is further
evidence in relation to Clearsprings Ready Homes Ltd, which we will
consider as part of our refugee and asylum seeker enquiry. Is the
committee happy to note both? Okay, thanks very much.
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14:44
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Cynnig o dan Reol Sefydlog 17.42 (vi) i Benderfynu
Gwahardd y Cyhoedd o Weddill y Cyfarfod
Motion under Standing Order 17.42 (vi) to Resolve to Exclude the
Public from the Remainder of the Meeting
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