, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
They will be separate decisions for local authorities. You couldn't consult just once on whether to introduce and to change the level at the same time. You would have to consult as the Bill requires on whether or not you wish to introduce the levy, and you…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Well, at the heart of the Bill, Chair, is the relationship between this Government in Cardiff and local authorities, and the relationship that I want to see is one where there is a great deal of trust. In my view, we can depend on local authorities to use the…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Well, Chair, section 13 is complex and there are many things included in it, so I'll ask the officials to help me with this question. But just one point for me to make: as I explained to Laura Anne Jones, there are powers in the Bill to deal with the…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
No. The intention of the power, as drafted, is to allow us simply to keep the current levels, to sustain their real value, not in order to be able to increase them. If I can go back just very briefly to a point I think, Chair, you asked me in the very…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Yes, the higher and the lower rate, and they're there on the face of the Bill at £1.25 and 75p. And I've seen the suggestions to which Laura Anne referred from some that we should have on the face of the Bill a period in which those rates could not be…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Thank you, Chair. I think I'll try and answer the two points separately, if I could. In relation to changing existing accommodation as far as the visitor levy is concerned, as I said, the power in the Bill is designed to take account of unforeseen…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Thank you, Chair. In general, the answer is the answer I gave to Mick Antoniw, that you need to futureproof the operation of the Bill. There are two powers in the Bill that are closely related, but different. The power to which Laura Anne Jones refers is…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Thank you, Chair. So, as I rehearsed a little earlier with Adam Price, the Government has published, made available, clauses that we will intend to introduce as Stage 2 amendments. If those amendments succeed, then, instead of the regulation-making power that…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
I don't believe it is, Chair. How do I put this in the most diplomatic way? Sometimes, Government can find ourselves in the crossfires of two sorts of criticism. There is the sort of criticism that Mick just reflected: the Bill isn't sufficiently definite, it…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Thank you. I think there's a great deal of information on the face of this Bill—the register, the parameters of the Bill, the amount of money that can be charged and so on. All of that is on the face of the Bill. The secondary legislative powers, almost all…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Yes, I do.
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Thank you. I'm going to turn to Anna or David on this one, because I may have misremembered the details, but what I remember is that we can share data of that kind with local authorities, for example, without having that data available in a public register…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
No. It's a good question. The register will be a public document, but not everything will be included in it publicly. Especially when people provide accommodation for people in their own homes, I don't think that will be something that we'll want to make…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
I wrote to the Chair of the Finance Committee back in December in order to explain further and to provide more details on what exactly we will be bringing to Stage 2 in order to set powers on the face of the Bill. And it will be the draft affirmative that we…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
I think the most obvious example is in the relationship between the register and the licensing scheme. Accommodation providers will register now as part of this Bill. You would not want businesses who have gone to the trouble of doing all of that to have to…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Thank you very much. One of the things that we hear all the time, and we heard the same thing in the consultation period, is that businesses and citizens—. What they don't want to do is to provide the same data time and time again. So, we are taking powers in…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Yes, the draft affirmative. The same process.
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
I think if I remember correctly, there are 20 powers, as Adam Price has explained, on the face of the Bill, and for 17 of them, we will be using the draft affirmative. So, only three of the 20 will not be used in that way, and the three that aren't are things…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Internally, we have gone through that process fully. That work wasn't reflected in the original explanatory memorandum, but the intention, Chair, as usual, is to republish that explanatory memorandum after Stage 2, and the new information that we already have…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Well, I thank Adam Price for that question, Chair. So, there are two specific reasons why we didn't do that. As Adam Price will be aware, in the co-operation agreement there are two things that are connected. There's the Bill in front of the Senedd at the…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Thanks to Laura Anne for that, Chair. So, there is a definition on the face of the Bill of the broad purposes for which any tax collected must be applied, and it is destination management of the tourism experience. It will be for local authorities within that…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
I thank the Member for that question. Certainly the Bill has been informed by the Scottish experience, and Welsh Government officials were able to meet with their counterparts in Scotland on a monthly basis during the passage of the Visitor Levy (Scotland)…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Chair, I didn't think there was a strong case for a draft Bill, given that this is a matter that had been under consideration in the Senedd for over a decade, one way or another. There was nothing in the Bill that was likely to come as a surprise to the…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Chair, I think the consultation was decisive in a number of ways, because a clear message that we received through the consultation exercise was that if a visitor levy in Wales were to go ahead, it needed to be as simple and clear as we could make it. There…
, Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee
Evidence session on the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill
Chair, Laura Anne Jones is right—of course, it is an enabling Bill. It provides a permissive power to local authorities, and it's for local authorities to decide whether or not to take up that permissive power. I think it's worth me just briefly reminding the…
