April 21, 2021 • 15 mins
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm with Helen Mary John'spliedcamrie in Fanetti. Helen Mary wiils
in a very bad situation as we speak. Plied Camrie
have been quite critical of the first Minister and welshle
was handling of the pandemic. Is it political point scoring
or do you really have concerns, real concerns here and
(00:20):
if so, would it not be better to spend more
time and energy working together.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Well that's what we've tried to do, Alan, is to
try to work with them. I think it's fair to
say that different ministers have taken a slightly different approach.
I have been able to have some private conversations as
the Shadow Minister for the Economy with Ken Skates, the
Economy Minister, and when we've been able to give him
evidence about how certain support schemes are not reaching, so
(00:48):
he has been prepared to listen. At the beginning of
the pandemic, Plied was broadly supportive of the approach that
the Welsh government has taken. But there have been some
mistakes since then and we have to acknowledge that mistakes
to put them right. I mean, when we had the
fire break in the autumn, the scientists were telling us
that two weeks wasn't long enough. Now in fairness to
(01:09):
Welsh Government, of course they didn't know at that stage
that the furlough scheme was going to be extended, so
there might have been an argument. But we came out
of that too fast, and we said at the time
we were coming out of it too fast. And I
would want to reassure your listeners really that any points
that we're raising in public will always been raised in
private with Welsh ministers first, because you know, nobody wants
(01:32):
you know, we all want Welsh government to succeed at
the moment, don't we, And I think the public quite
rightly expect us to cooperate whenever we can, and that's
exactly what we've done. But we felt since sorry, Alan,
yeah no, but.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
They're not going to cover everything, are they. You know,
you're you're there. The very purpose of being there is
that you're an additional set of eyes years brains to
analyze to come up with those suggestions and ideas. So
one would think that you would be very welcome around
the table at all costs.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
You know, well, I think what I speaking from my
own experience in the economy, that that has been the
case and I've been able to talk to the Minister,
and when I've been able to give him evidence, he's
been prepared to look again at things and we have
had an influence the moment we're worried about the vaccine
rollout because we don't think Wales is getting our fair
share of the vaccines. The staff are doing a brilliant job.
(02:23):
Health Board's working really hard, but the allocation of the
vaccines only goes by the number of people in the population.
It doesn't take into account the fact that we have
a much higher percentage of older people of people with
chronic underlying conditions. Now, I think the people of Wales
would expect us to point that out to Welsh Government
and ask them to raise it with the UK government.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
I think it has been pointed out several times, certainly
by the press as well, that kind of situation. But
how much work have you done looking at some of
the signifiers of what the main bulk of people who've
contracted COVID nineteen a halo four You were saying there
about these are health and dulling health issues. They be
a business is also so on.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
It was true at the first start of the pandemic,
the first phase that we did see more older people,
we did see more people with underlying health conditions. Mind you,
that's a wide category. I mean I'd be treated for
an underactive thyroid and I would count in that category
as somebody with underlying health conditions. Somebody with perfectly well
managed diabetes would. But now, between the new variant and
(03:24):
the number of people we've seen working in occupations for example,
like taxi drivers, people working in care, this is not
just a flu. This is not just the kind of
death rate that we would expect. And I don't think
it is fair when people accused Welsh government of overreacting.
I think this is a really serious crisis. I've spent
a lot of time in the last year Alan writing
(03:46):
letters to people who've lost members of their families. And
some of those members of the families were in their
eighties and nineties, but some of them were in their
thirties and forties. This is an illness that can affect anyone.
We've seen very small children get get very ill. That's unusual,
but it can happen, and I think it's important that
we all take it seriously. This is something that no
government has had to face in a century, and That's
(04:09):
why we've tried to cooperate where we can. But it
is important that we understand how serious this is.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
I think we see places like New Zealand and Western Australia,
parts of Indonesia. You're having very few or all cases
at all in some But what sets them apart from wills?
And can we learn the essence? I know I've asked
this question to Minister. Are we getting enough information from
those places? Are we doing enough analysis of what's working elsewhere?
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Well, we don't think implied that we are doing enough
of that, and we have raised that with the First Minister,
and we've raised it publicly as well. When you look
at what those countries that have been successful did, they
were very hard and fast in going into their original lockdown.
They also those supported people. They made sure I mean
a country that's not a rich country like Vietnam. If
(04:54):
you had to self isolate in Vietnam, you go into
a hotel, You're fully catered for, You're fully looked after.
They don't fuss about with trying to work out are
you richer you poor? They just put you in that isolation.
They enable you to stay there. If you're a bread winner,
they look after your family while you're in there, so
we should have shut down much faster. Our track and
trace in Wales has not been bad at all, but
(05:16):
then we haven't really supported people to isolate. The hoops
that you have to go through to prove that you
need a payment are really difficult and many many more
people cut out of that. So we you know, at
the very beginning there was some dithering. You know, we
go back to the big pop concerts and things that
were allowed to go on. Now you talk to the
(05:37):
people in the industry and they say they couldn't afford
to shut those down because they would have lost their insurance.
But if the government had instructed them to shut down,
they would have been able to do that. So there
are lessons we can learn from elsewhere. There are still
lessons that we can learn from elsewhere. The speed at
which we need to get the vaccines out, that extra
support for people who need to isolate so they can
(05:59):
afford to stay at home. As there are things that
we can do better, and that's why as an opposition
we have to raise those with ministers and get them
to look at what's happened elsewhere, what's worked, and what
hasn't we know?
Speaker 1 (06:10):
We've seen the job losses Top Shop and so on
a debunum as the economies in the downward slide, more
businesses said to clause, more jobs lost, they may never return.
What work is applied doing to plan for the mass
and employment on the horizon.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
I've commissioned several papers as the Minister for Shadow Minister
for the Economy. I took that job on just over
a year ago and it wasn't a field I was
very familiar with, so I felt I had to do
lots of research. We've developed an action plan as to
what we think needs to be done straight away and
as to what we think we need to be done
longer term. Crucial for us is that Wales needs to
(06:46):
be allowed to borrow money to invest. It's really cheap
to borrow money on the international markets at the moment,
so if we did that, we could pow a massive
investment into our care system that would create thousands of jobs,
also pay those care workers the real living wage. Lots
of money recycled into our economy and improve our care system.
We can make a massive investment in the green economy.
(07:08):
I had really interesting meetings just last this last week
with people in marine energy. Whales apparently has got huge
potential for that, but we need public money to kick
it off. Then when it starts to make a profit,
you can take that public money back. We need to
invest you. And we have so many older homes in Wales.
We spend a lot of energy heating the fresh air outside.
(07:29):
We would put millions and millions into a national plan
to retrofit all our old homes and you think of
them in the Flanti area, all those long terraced streets
that were built one hundred and fifty years ago. Retrofit
all of those create lots of jobs, highly skilled jobs
that would pay well, but at the same time helping
to tackle climate change by reducing the amount of energy
(07:50):
we use. Lots and lots of practical ideas that we
can put into action and to do that, I've been
convinced that we need a free standing agency, free standing
economic development agency for Wales. You know that I'm not
a fan of the quango on the whole. I think
that in a democracy the decisions ought to be made
by the people. The people can sack that's the politicians.
(08:12):
But I've been convinced by looking at international research an
example of the Republic of Ireland is one, for example,
that you can't expect civil servants to do the right
thing by the economy. The whole point of a civil
servant is to be a bit risk averse. You can't
run an enterprise based economy on that basis. So our
plan is to establish a freestanding economic development and entity
(08:33):
called Prosperity Wales, answerable of course to Welsh Government, scrutinized
by the senev but with three jobs to do, not
only with the job of creating prosperity, but with the
job of sharing that prosperity more fairly between individuals and
between communities in Wales, and with the job of decarbonizing
our economy. And we would have around the table experts
(08:56):
in all those three fields. So you'd have your business leaders,
but you'd also have green thinkers and your innovators, and
you'd have your experts in tackling and ending poverty. And
we think that could be a really effective tool to
better use the resources we've got at the moment. I
mean applied will go hard if we form the government
to the Westminster Government and say you have to give
us the right to borrow but even if we don't
(09:17):
get that, or if it takes time, we can still
use the resources that we put now into the economy
much more effectively. And I think I suppose I'd say,
you wouldn't see applied Minister giving billions of millions of
pounds to Aston Martin, but you would see applied Minister
through prosperity Wales developing and growing our local businesses. Now,
if every one of our small and medium sized enterprises
(09:39):
in Wales took on one and a half people, we
wouldn't have an unemployment problem even post COVID. So it's
about growing our own economy, I think, and I think
you can hear this wasn't a job. I was entirely
sure I was the right person for and I said
to Adam know me, I always thought I'd be a
spending minister. And what he said was he wanted us
a fresh pair of eyes on our economy policy. And
(10:01):
hopefully I've done that, and I've become really enthusiastic about
it because in the end it's creating prosperity, sharing that
prosperity that will give us the resources in Wales to
have the world class public services that we want and
I think we can do that. We can do a
lot within existing resources, and if we can get the
chance to borrow and incidentally park control over the benefit
(10:22):
system like they have in Scotland, so we can help
deal with people getting trapped in poverty because they can't
afford to go out to work. We'd pay the parents
of all the poorest children in Wales thirty five pounds
a week just to get them because the best way
to get prosperity to a child is to give the
money to her mother. So there are practical things that
we could do with some additional powers, but even within
(10:44):
the powers that the Senate has. Now we've got a
plan for rebuilding Wales's economy and rebuilding it in a way.
We talk about building back better, don't we. Well, you know,
if we can't do better than a quarter of our
children living in poverty, we may as well all go
back and go home. I prefer to talk about building
back well, buying that logic.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Then let's look at Laneshi, a town that's had its
fair share of problems. The council are plowing ahead with
schemes which were devised before the pandemic. Do you think
that a number of these high price ticket items now
should be put on hold until such time as we
know where the money is, we know how we can
pay people and where it should be spent. Much in
(11:23):
what you've just said, really.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Well, I think it depends partly on where the funding
is coming from and what the conditions are for that funding. Now,
some of those projects that you're talking about are funded
as part of the City Deal agreement through the UK Government.
They wouldn't tolerate a pause or a reset, But I'm
very conscious that the local authority is looking at all
of those looking to make sure that the people that
(11:46):
we need to have opportunities through those projects will get
those opportunities. The big redevelopment in Station Road in Finecia,
I think is important because that's become a set of
communities where very unfairly I think, but a part of
community that have got a bad reputation, places where people
don't necessarily want to live, so they are making the
(12:06):
investments in the right place. I think some of those
high ticket items we might say, well, would we have
done that differently if we were planning them now. But
if the UK Government doesn't allow a pause, then the
county councils in Wales would be foolish not to take
those resources, you know, and that's a bigger problem about now.
You know, after Brexit we're supposed to have this new
(12:28):
fund from the UK government. You know, how much of
that are they going to allow us to spend on
Welsh priorities or is it going to be will you
have to spend it on what we think is good
for you or you don't get the money. And that
is going to be a big challenge I think for
local authorities but also for the next government in the
Senate going forward.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
You talk about spreading the prosperity earlier on there one
could share the prosperity, but we have seen historically that
that has a price and usually like we're seeing with
applied station in Yamon Valley set to raise the council
tax in command Issha. Do you think that this kind
(13:07):
of rise in taxes within pled Camry as a group
and within the plate administration is going to lose you
vote at the next Senate elections.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Nobody wants to be putting taxes up. Nobody wants to
be doing that. But local government budgets have been massively
hit by COVID some of the sources of income that
they would have had, things like the leisure centers that
the theaters, those of course haven't been able to make
a penny. They've been having to reschedule, move staffter different areas.
(13:41):
There'll be a huge catch up to do in areas
like social care and in education. I think they were
right to reduce the proposed increase a bit and implied
we don't like the council tax as a mechanism. It's
it's regressive, it doesn't it doesn't target the right people,
you know. I would like us to see it replaced
(14:02):
with the local income tax, and of course that's more
doable now because we've got the Welsh income tax code.
But in the end, if we want public services, we've
got to pay for them and the money's got to
come from somewhere. I don't know what we will say
as a party going into the next Senate election. I
think if we were to be asking people to pay
(14:24):
additional Welsh income tax, I think we need to be
really clear what we were spending that on, because I
think people in Wales, you know, historically they've voted for
parties who are relatively high tax relatively high spend. But
if we're asking people to pay more tax, they've got
to see very clearly what they're getting for it. And
that's the challenge I think in local government, where they're
(14:46):
having to raise more revenue just to stand still in
terms of their services. And it's not what anybody wants
to be doing. But you know, if we want our
schools to reopen, if we want our libraries to be there,
if we want our Leister centers to be there, it's
got to be paid for. And you know, I'm not
going to start talking about the Barnet formula and the
way the money comes down from Westminster to England, because
(15:07):
to to Wales, because in the end, the answer is
to grow our own economy so that we can afford
to tax those of us who are well enough off
to provide those really world class public services as they
do in Scandinavian countries. And of course in those countries,
nobody minds paying high rates of tax because you speak,
streets are spotlessly clean, you get free childcare from the
age of one years old. You know you can see,
(15:29):
and if you're well enough to pay the tax, you
don't mind paying it. It's more of a struggle here
in Wales, Hell.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
And Marry John's. Thank you very much for speaking to
Clanettie Online.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Thank you, Jo, thank you very much.
I'm with Helen Mary John'spliedcamrie in Fanetti. Helen Mary wiils
in a very bad situation as we speak. Plied Camrie
have been quite critical of the first Minister and welshle
was handling of the pandemic. Is it political point scoring
or do you really have concerns, real concerns here and
(00:20):
if so, would it not be better to spend more
time and energy working together.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Well that's what we've tried to do, Alan, is to
try to work with them. I think it's fair to
say that different ministers have taken a slightly different approach.
I have been able to have some private conversations as
the Shadow Minister for the Economy with Ken Skates, the
Economy Minister, and when we've been able to give him
evidence about how certain support schemes are not reaching, so
(00:48):
he has been prepared to listen. At the beginning of
the pandemic, Plied was broadly supportive of the approach that
the Welsh government has taken. But there have been some
mistakes since then and we have to acknowledge that mistakes
to put them right. I mean, when we had the
fire break in the autumn, the scientists were telling us
that two weeks wasn't long enough. Now in fairness to
(01:09):
Welsh Government, of course they didn't know at that stage
that the furlough scheme was going to be extended, so
there might have been an argument. But we came out
of that too fast, and we said at the time
we were coming out of it too fast. And I
would want to reassure your listeners really that any points
that we're raising in public will always been raised in
private with Welsh ministers first, because you know, nobody wants
(01:32):
you know, we all want Welsh government to succeed at
the moment, don't we, And I think the public quite
rightly expect us to cooperate whenever we can, and that's
exactly what we've done. But we felt since sorry, Alan,
yeah no, but.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
They're not going to cover everything, are they. You know,
you're you're there. The very purpose of being there is
that you're an additional set of eyes years brains to
analyze to come up with those suggestions and ideas. So
one would think that you would be very welcome around
the table at all costs.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
You know, well, I think what I speaking from my
own experience in the economy, that that has been the
case and I've been able to talk to the Minister,
and when I've been able to give him evidence, he's
been prepared to look again at things and we have
had an influence the moment we're worried about the vaccine
rollout because we don't think Wales is getting our fair
share of the vaccines. The staff are doing a brilliant job.
(02:23):
Health Board's working really hard, but the allocation of the
vaccines only goes by the number of people in the population.
It doesn't take into account the fact that we have
a much higher percentage of older people of people with
chronic underlying conditions. Now, I think the people of Wales
would expect us to point that out to Welsh Government
and ask them to raise it with the UK government.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
I think it has been pointed out several times, certainly
by the press as well, that kind of situation. But
how much work have you done looking at some of
the signifiers of what the main bulk of people who've
contracted COVID nineteen a halo four You were saying there
about these are health and dulling health issues. They be
a business is also so on.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
It was true at the first start of the pandemic,
the first phase that we did see more older people,
we did see more people with underlying health conditions. Mind you,
that's a wide category. I mean I'd be treated for
an underactive thyroid and I would count in that category
as somebody with underlying health conditions. Somebody with perfectly well
managed diabetes would. But now, between the new variant and
(03:24):
the number of people we've seen working in occupations for example,
like taxi drivers, people working in care, this is not
just a flu. This is not just the kind of
death rate that we would expect. And I don't think
it is fair when people accused Welsh government of overreacting.
I think this is a really serious crisis. I've spent
a lot of time in the last year Alan writing
(03:46):
letters to people who've lost members of their families. And
some of those members of the families were in their
eighties and nineties, but some of them were in their
thirties and forties. This is an illness that can affect anyone.
We've seen very small children get get very ill. That's unusual,
but it can happen, and I think it's important that
we all take it seriously. This is something that no
government has had to face in a century, and That's
(04:09):
why we've tried to cooperate where we can. But it
is important that we understand how serious this is.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
I think we see places like New Zealand and Western Australia,
parts of Indonesia. You're having very few or all cases
at all in some But what sets them apart from wills?
And can we learn the essence? I know I've asked
this question to Minister. Are we getting enough information from
those places? Are we doing enough analysis of what's working elsewhere?
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Well, we don't think implied that we are doing enough
of that, and we have raised that with the First Minister,
and we've raised it publicly as well. When you look
at what those countries that have been successful did, they
were very hard and fast in going into their original lockdown.
They also those supported people. They made sure I mean
a country that's not a rich country like Vietnam. If
(04:54):
you had to self isolate in Vietnam, you go into
a hotel, You're fully catered for, You're fully looked after.
They don't fuss about with trying to work out are
you richer you poor? They just put you in that isolation.
They enable you to stay there. If you're a bread winner,
they look after your family while you're in there, so
we should have shut down much faster. Our track and
trace in Wales has not been bad at all, but
(05:16):
then we haven't really supported people to isolate. The hoops
that you have to go through to prove that you
need a payment are really difficult and many many more
people cut out of that. So we you know, at
the very beginning there was some dithering. You know, we
go back to the big pop concerts and things that
were allowed to go on. Now you talk to the
(05:37):
people in the industry and they say they couldn't afford
to shut those down because they would have lost their insurance.
But if the government had instructed them to shut down,
they would have been able to do that. So there
are lessons we can learn from elsewhere. There are still
lessons that we can learn from elsewhere. The speed at
which we need to get the vaccines out, that extra
support for people who need to isolate so they can
(05:59):
afford to stay at home. As there are things that
we can do better, and that's why as an opposition
we have to raise those with ministers and get them
to look at what's happened elsewhere, what's worked, and what
hasn't we know?
Speaker 1 (06:10):
We've seen the job losses Top Shop and so on
a debunum as the economies in the downward slide, more
businesses said to clause, more jobs lost, they may never return.
What work is applied doing to plan for the mass
and employment on the horizon.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
I've commissioned several papers as the Minister for Shadow Minister
for the Economy. I took that job on just over
a year ago and it wasn't a field I was
very familiar with, so I felt I had to do
lots of research. We've developed an action plan as to
what we think needs to be done straight away and
as to what we think we need to be done
longer term. Crucial for us is that Wales needs to
(06:46):
be allowed to borrow money to invest. It's really cheap
to borrow money on the international markets at the moment,
so if we did that, we could pow a massive
investment into our care system that would create thousands of jobs,
also pay those care workers the real living wage. Lots
of money recycled into our economy and improve our care system.
We can make a massive investment in the green economy.
(07:08):
I had really interesting meetings just last this last week
with people in marine energy. Whales apparently has got huge
potential for that, but we need public money to kick
it off. Then when it starts to make a profit,
you can take that public money back. We need to
invest you. And we have so many older homes in Wales.
We spend a lot of energy heating the fresh air outside.
(07:29):
We would put millions and millions into a national plan
to retrofit all our old homes and you think of
them in the Flanti area, all those long terraced streets
that were built one hundred and fifty years ago. Retrofit
all of those create lots of jobs, highly skilled jobs
that would pay well, but at the same time helping
to tackle climate change by reducing the amount of energy
(07:50):
we use. Lots and lots of practical ideas that we
can put into action and to do that, I've been
convinced that we need a free standing agency, free standing
economic development agency for Wales. You know that I'm not
a fan of the quango on the whole. I think
that in a democracy the decisions ought to be made
by the people. The people can sack that's the politicians.
(08:12):
But I've been convinced by looking at international research an
example of the Republic of Ireland is one, for example,
that you can't expect civil servants to do the right
thing by the economy. The whole point of a civil
servant is to be a bit risk averse. You can't
run an enterprise based economy on that basis. So our
plan is to establish a freestanding economic development and entity
(08:33):
called Prosperity Wales, answerable of course to Welsh Government, scrutinized
by the senev but with three jobs to do, not
only with the job of creating prosperity, but with the
job of sharing that prosperity more fairly between individuals and
between communities in Wales, and with the job of decarbonizing
our economy. And we would have around the table experts
(08:56):
in all those three fields. So you'd have your business leaders,
but you'd also have green thinkers and your innovators, and
you'd have your experts in tackling and ending poverty. And
we think that could be a really effective tool to
better use the resources we've got at the moment. I
mean applied will go hard if we form the government
to the Westminster Government and say you have to give
us the right to borrow but even if we don't
(09:17):
get that, or if it takes time, we can still
use the resources that we put now into the economy
much more effectively. And I think I suppose I'd say,
you wouldn't see applied Minister giving billions of millions of
pounds to Aston Martin, but you would see applied Minister
through prosperity Wales developing and growing our local businesses. Now,
if every one of our small and medium sized enterprises
(09:39):
in Wales took on one and a half people, we
wouldn't have an unemployment problem even post COVID. So it's
about growing our own economy, I think, and I think
you can hear this wasn't a job. I was entirely
sure I was the right person for and I said
to Adam know me, I always thought I'd be a
spending minister. And what he said was he wanted us
a fresh pair of eyes on our economy policy. And
(10:01):
hopefully I've done that, and I've become really enthusiastic about
it because in the end it's creating prosperity, sharing that
prosperity that will give us the resources in Wales to
have the world class public services that we want and
I think we can do that. We can do a
lot within existing resources, and if we can get the
chance to borrow and incidentally park control over the benefit
(10:22):
system like they have in Scotland, so we can help
deal with people getting trapped in poverty because they can't
afford to go out to work. We'd pay the parents
of all the poorest children in Wales thirty five pounds
a week just to get them because the best way
to get prosperity to a child is to give the
money to her mother. So there are practical things that
we could do with some additional powers, but even within
(10:44):
the powers that the Senate has. Now we've got a
plan for rebuilding Wales's economy and rebuilding it in a way.
We talk about building back better, don't we. Well, you know,
if we can't do better than a quarter of our
children living in poverty, we may as well all go
back and go home. I prefer to talk about building
back well, buying that logic.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Then let's look at Laneshi, a town that's had its
fair share of problems. The council are plowing ahead with
schemes which were devised before the pandemic. Do you think
that a number of these high price ticket items now
should be put on hold until such time as we
know where the money is, we know how we can
pay people and where it should be spent. Much in
(11:23):
what you've just said, really.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Well, I think it depends partly on where the funding
is coming from and what the conditions are for that funding. Now,
some of those projects that you're talking about are funded
as part of the City Deal agreement through the UK Government.
They wouldn't tolerate a pause or a reset, But I'm
very conscious that the local authority is looking at all
of those looking to make sure that the people that
(11:46):
we need to have opportunities through those projects will get
those opportunities. The big redevelopment in Station Road in Finecia,
I think is important because that's become a set of
communities where very unfairly I think, but a part of
community that have got a bad reputation, places where people
don't necessarily want to live, so they are making the
(12:06):
investments in the right place. I think some of those
high ticket items we might say, well, would we have
done that differently if we were planning them now. But
if the UK Government doesn't allow a pause, then the
county councils in Wales would be foolish not to take
those resources, you know, and that's a bigger problem about now.
You know, after Brexit we're supposed to have this new
(12:28):
fund from the UK government. You know, how much of
that are they going to allow us to spend on
Welsh priorities or is it going to be will you
have to spend it on what we think is good
for you or you don't get the money. And that
is going to be a big challenge I think for
local authorities but also for the next government in the
Senate going forward.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
You talk about spreading the prosperity earlier on there one
could share the prosperity, but we have seen historically that
that has a price and usually like we're seeing with
applied station in Yamon Valley set to raise the council
tax in command Issha. Do you think that this kind
(13:07):
of rise in taxes within pled Camry as a group
and within the plate administration is going to lose you
vote at the next Senate elections.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Nobody wants to be putting taxes up. Nobody wants to
be doing that. But local government budgets have been massively
hit by COVID some of the sources of income that
they would have had, things like the leisure centers that
the theaters, those of course haven't been able to make
a penny. They've been having to reschedule, move staffter different areas.
(13:41):
There'll be a huge catch up to do in areas
like social care and in education. I think they were
right to reduce the proposed increase a bit and implied
we don't like the council tax as a mechanism. It's
it's regressive, it doesn't it doesn't target the right people,
you know. I would like us to see it replaced
(14:02):
with the local income tax, and of course that's more
doable now because we've got the Welsh income tax code.
But in the end, if we want public services, we've
got to pay for them and the money's got to
come from somewhere. I don't know what we will say
as a party going into the next Senate election. I
think if we were to be asking people to pay
(14:24):
additional Welsh income tax, I think we need to be
really clear what we were spending that on, because I
think people in Wales, you know, historically they've voted for
parties who are relatively high tax relatively high spend. But
if we're asking people to pay more tax, they've got
to see very clearly what they're getting for it. And
that's the challenge I think in local government, where they're
(14:46):
having to raise more revenue just to stand still in
terms of their services. And it's not what anybody wants
to be doing. But you know, if we want our
schools to reopen, if we want our libraries to be there,
if we want our Leister centers to be there, it's
got to be paid for. And you know, I'm not
going to start talking about the Barnet formula and the
way the money comes down from Westminster to England, because
(15:07):
to to Wales, because in the end, the answer is
to grow our own economy so that we can afford
to tax those of us who are well enough off
to provide those really world class public services as they
do in Scandinavian countries. And of course in those countries,
nobody minds paying high rates of tax because you speak,
streets are spotlessly clean, you get free childcare from the
age of one years old. You know you can see,
(15:29):
and if you're well enough to pay the tax, you
don't mind paying it. It's more of a struggle here
in Wales, Hell.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
And Marry John's. Thank you very much for speaking to
Clanettie Online.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Thank you, Jo, thank you very much.
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