Wales Bill

Debate between David T C Davies and Mark Williams

Tuesday 6th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[David T. C. Davies]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to this amendment because I believe in the national health service. I know that I speak for all members of my political party in saying that we believe in having a truly national health service. The changes I am attempting to insert into the Bill would bring back the national health service that we once had but no longer have. At the moment, contrary to what people think, we have a regionalised health service with different systems in Wales, in Scotland, in England, and in Northern Ireland. It is a sad fact that in Wales, under the leadership of members of the Labour party, the Welsh national health service has been failing patients and letting people down. I care about that.

I also care about the patients who come to see in my surgery. They include Mariana Robinson, who has been speaking out in national newspapers over the past few weeks. I did not ask her to go the press; she came to see me to ask how she could tell the story of the scandalous treatment that she has been receiving. She was treated very well in a nearby hospital in England but then told that she could no longer have that treatment because funding was not available and she would have to be treated in Wales.

Only a few weeks ago, I spoke to a patient who had been suffering from cancer. She had been told that she was terminally ill and would not last more than a few months. She believes that she was, in effect, written off by the national health service in Wales. She found out about experimental treatment in England and accessed it. She is still alive. Her cancer appears to be in remission at the moment, and I wish her all the best. She obviously wants to continue to receive this experimental treatment in the same area, Newcastle, yet she too has been told that there will be no further funding for her.

There has always been a problem in getting cross-border funding, but it seems to have got a lot worse in the past 12 months, when a decision was taken somewhere along the line that meant that virtually anyone with an illness in Wales would have to be treated in Wales. I believe that this is part of the whole National Assembly mindset about doing everything in Wales because it feels that it can do it better.

[Mr Mark Williams]

Does my hon. Friend agree that we should not characterise this as an issue that affects only the borders of England and Wales? I can think of examples of constituents in Ceredigion who have been unable to access services in Gobowen and Frenchay hospitals for exactly the reasons he suggests.

[David T. C. Davies]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. He will have to forgive me; I have been looking at this more from the perspective of a Member of Parliament in a border area where many patients find it much easier and quicker to access hospitals in Hereford—as they have for rheumatology, for example—or in Bristol, but it affects the whole of Wales because health care is becoming a more specialised matter. In an area of 3 million people, we will not have all the specialists we would like, and that means that there will always be those who need to travel in order to get access to the best on offer.

Wales Bill

Debate between David T C Davies and Mark Williams

Monday 31st March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Williams]

I share that sentiment and referendums can also lead to people in different parties working together to make a compelling case. We would all applaud that, and I think even the good people of Monmouthshire voted yes?

[David T. C. Davies]

No.

[Mr Williams]

Sorry, not quite, but the vote was much better than before. I think there was a bit of a swing of opinion. We certainly welcome the fact that people along the borders voted in bigger numbers for this, although I stand corrected. I am still slightly shocked by the glowing appraisal my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (David T. C. Davies) gave of Liberal Democrat policy on federalism; he commended us on that. However, I take on board the point made by the hon. Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones).

Welsh Affairs

Debate between David T C Davies and Mark Williams

Thursday 6th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[David T. C. Davies]

There are certainly differences. I will speak for myself, and others may follow. I think I am right in offering my congratulations to the hon. Gentleman. Has he recently had a child? He is looking a bit worried—perhaps it was someone further along the Opposition Benches. [Interruption.] I am told that it was actually the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards). My congratulations to him. He, too, will no doubt be experiencing the state education sector in Wales shortly.

My recommendation is that we look at what has gone wrong in that sector. There are not enough schools inspections, and far too much notice is given of those that are taking place. That practice has been done away with in England. I worked with the police for many years, as Members know. We could not have a situation in which a policy custody unit was told weeks in advance that it was going to be inspected; people just turned up and did it. That is how it should be with schools, and with hospitals. That is not what is happening in Wales, however.

I have been told by head teachers, and by schools improvement officers, that it is difficult for people to go in and assess how a teacher is doing in a classroom because the unions do not like it. Similarly, the unions do not like league tests, or testing of any other sort, and they are making it very difficult for people to go in and make the kind of changes that are required.

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

I spent 12 years working in the classroom, and I am still a paid-up member of a teaching trade union. My experience of the unions is that they were certainly not obstacles to the inspection regime. I want to probe the hon. Gentleman a little further on the question of education in Wales. What does he see as the main explanation for those PISA results, and for the failings in English literacy and mathematics in particular? Will he tell us what the main failings are that he has identified, rather than giving us the kind of jargon that he was articulating just now?

[David T. C. Davies]

I do not think that I was using jargon; I was spelling it out in fairly simple English. But okay, I will give the hon. Gentleman a list of things. First, I am told that it is difficult for head teachers to go in and assess teachers. They are allowed to do it only a couple of times a year, and they cannot simply walk into a classroom. I have been told that by two senior educationists in Wales, working in totally separate schools, over the past few weeks. Either they are wrong or the hon. Gentleman is wrong.

I have also been told that schools get a great deal of notice before an inspection takes place, and I think that is wrong. Inspectors ought to be able to go in without any notice whatsoever and find out what is going wrong. I know for a fact that when I was in the Welsh Assembly the unions and everyone else seemed to be totally against testing, but testing is a good thing. If my children are failing in tests, I want to know about it and to get involved. There is also a problem with sickness, whereby too many teachers are taking too many sick days in schools in Wales and that is not being properly investigated afterwards by the personnel departments. It is also far too difficult to get rid of bad teachers who are not up to the job. That situation can occur in any walk of life, but in most others someone who is not up to a job will be got rid of by someone higher up. That does not seem to happen in teaching. I do not think all that is jargon; those are fairly simple matters.

May I make one last point on this, which is the most important one of all? In England, there is a recognition that parents have a right to have some say over their children’s education, and they can exercise that most drastically by taking their children out of the state system and putting them into some kind of an academy. As a parent, I welcome that, because it is my taxpayer’s money that is being spent and I ought to have a say. If the school is not up to the job, I ought to have the right to take my child out and put them somewhere else. I do not have that right in Wales, and that is taking away an incentive for teachers to improve.

[David T. C. Davies]

My hon. Friend is, of course, absolutely right. The Labour party has generally been the lead party in the Assembly since it was set up, but at other times Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats have been involved.

[Mr Mark Williams]

I respect the sincerity with which the hon. Gentleman makes those remarks, but I spent 12 years in the classroom and no head teacher was ever prevented from inspecting any lessons I undertook. Does he think that he could add to his list the issue of resources? Our Government have addressed that in part through the pupil premium, and Liberals in Wales, along with Labour colleagues, have pursued a similar policy there. That has been a good measure. Resources are important, but so, too, is maintaining properly motivated and confident staff. One challenge to this Government in Westminster is to retain that well-motivated staff, because the jury is out so far on that.

[David T. C. Davies]

I am grateful to my friend—I am not sure whether he is an hon. Friend, a colleague or what under this coalition, but he is that—for the compliment. I agree that both those matters are important. On resources, the Government have rightly made cuts to all sorts of departments, except to foreign aid; I could launch into another speech on that, but will not do so. Generally speaking, the Government have had to make cuts—we have done so rightly—to try to balance the books, but we have not cut money to the Welsh Assembly. The amount of money that it has had overall has increased slightly, although people there will try to argue that when inflation is factored in it is not quite as much as it once was. So that is certainly not an issue that can be laid at the door of either of us in this coalition Government. Of course I completely agree that it is important that staff are motivated, and I would regret it if anything were ever done to stop that happening, but there is a difference between de-motivating people and allowing them to get away with things.

May I just move on to health, Madam Deputy Speaker, because it is the other big area of which the Welsh Assembly has control?

Welsh Affairs

Debate between David T C Davies and Mark Williams

Thursday 1st March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

My hon. Friend made a slightly negative characterisation of higher education, but will he acknowledge that we also heard some good stories about universities engaging with the business community and building spin-off companies in their locality? There is some good news in the PISA results on higher education rather than on schools.

[David T. C. Davies]

I absolutely accept that. There is a lot of detail in the Select Committee report, and I am just skipping through it in my speech. The hon. Gentleman will probably recall that when we were in Brussels we were told that some Welsh universities were not doing quite as much to get European Union research grant funding as those in England. The picture is mixed, as usual.

We should be very clear that if we are to sell Wales and persuade businesses that it is a good place to come to, we need to show co-operation. I was not going to mention this today, but I feel that I have to because of other things that have happened: the Committee was disappointed that the Welsh Economic Development Minister felt unable to come and give evidence. I can accept that slight once, but there seems to be a pattern of the Welsh Government not wanting to do anything with the UK Government.

For example, a tourism seminar was held recently, I believe at No. 10, to encourage the devolved regions of the UK to do more to get tourism going during the Olympics. Nobody from Wales came. I have heard that when a broadband grant scheme was set up and a special grant was made available for pilot broadband schemes across England and Wales, the Welsh Assembly did not really bother to fill in the forms, so we did not end up with one of the pilot areas.

The Welsh Affairs Committee was due to visit Cardiff next week to take evidence, along with a Welsh Assembly Committee, which had asked us to go there and told us when would be convenient. Of course, we were more than happy to do so. We enjoy going down to Cardiff to visit the Welsh Assembly and work with our colleagues in the devolved regions. We were not expecting Ministers, but we expected officials from Edwina Hart’s Department to give evidence about ports. Today, I have been told—I have e-mailed members of the Committee, so they will know this—that the officials will not turn up because Members of Parliament will be present. I find that extraordinary. The Welsh Assembly Government want to make speeches in the City, telling people to come to Wales and an Assembly Minister is calling for the green bank to be set up in Wales, yet they are not willing to send officials down a few flights of steps to come and see us at the Welsh Assembly. We are not asking them to visit us—we will go to them, at their convenience—yet they still do not want to talk to us. What sort of message are we sending the world through that complete lack of co-operation?