Committee for the Scrutiny of the First Minister

So, Chair, I'm joined for this session by Stuart Evans and by Claire Bennett, who are the deputy director and the director in the part of the Welsh Government that covers the material we will be talking about this morning.

Thank you, and, because of our timings, we will go straight into questions. I'm going to be a bit strict, if I can, today, and ask the First Minister in both sessions, the second session in particular, if we can have as succinct answers as possible so we can get through as many items as possible. So, over to Jenny to start the questions on the equality and human rights session today.

Bore da. First Minister, I wondered what discussions you may have had with the UK Government about the constantly moving feast of the UK Bill of Rights Bill.

Well, Chair, thank you. We've had a succession of contacts with the UK Government on this subject. I myself took the very first phone call on it, which was a call from the Deputy Prime Minister at the time, Dominic Raab, who was responsible for the development of the Bill. As Jenny Rathbone has suggested, since then the Bill has been in and out of successive legislative programmes. The most recent contact with UK Government came on Monday of this week. Lord Bellamy, who is a junior Minister with responsibility for the Bill of Rights Bill, came to Cardiff, and he offered to do that, to talk about the Bill of Rights Bill, so let's be positive about the fact that that offer was made, and he has undertaken to make a further visit to Wales once the Second Reading of the Bill has been completed.

The meeting was attended by my colleagues the Counsel General and by the Minister for Social Justice. I think, to be fair, we didn't learn a great deal from the meeting. Lord Bellamy said we were to expect the Bill to be introduced in short order, but I see since then there have been a series of media reports that the Bill is to be delayed and that Downing Street hasn't denied—it hasn't confirmed that either, but it hasn't denied—the delay. And certainly we didn't learn anything about content. So, while there has been contact—recent contact and promises of more—I don't think I could say that we're much further forward in understanding what the Bill of Rights Bill, the latest version of it, will be intended to do or how its parliamentary passage will be planned.

Okay. Two brief supplementaries on that. One is: any indication from Lord Bellamy, or anybody else, that, were they to actually produce what they're going to put before Parliament, there might be due consideration given to any amendments from either devolved Governments or devolved Parliaments.

We continue to work with the Scottish Government, Chair, on potential amendments to any Bill. I don't think I could say that we got an indication from Lord Bellamy on that issue, because, as I say, I don't think he was in a strong position to explain to us what the content of any latest version of the Bill would be. But we will pursue an amendment strategy if the Bill is introduced. The Counsel General is due to be in the House of Lords on, I think it is 9 January, and that is a meeting that has been partly organised through Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, cross-bench peers. It'll be open to all peers with an interest in Welsh matters, and it'll be an opportunity for the Counsel General to let peers know of our concerns with the Bill and to prepare the ground for any action we may wish to stimulate and support in the House of Lords, should amendments be necessary.

Well, that's very useful to know. I just wondered what your assessment is of the impact of this suggested Bill on UK-EU relations, given that we've got the Home Secretary openly saying that she wants to withdraw from the European convention on human rights, and the Secretary of State for Justice saying that there is no intention to do that. It seems that—. Two very high-level Ministers with contradictory views. What impact is that having on our relations with the EU?

Well, on one level, Chair, I think you could argue that it shouldn't have much of an impact. The Human Rights Act 1998 is not contingent upon membership of the European Union; it comes from the 1951 convention that the United Kingdom was a founding signatory of, and it's the Strasbourg court, not the European Court of Justice, that is responsible for the judicial oversight of it at an international level, and the TCA—the trade and co-operation agreement—that was reached when the United Kingdom left the European Union contains a commitment on both sides to respecting human rights as a shared principle. So, on that level, I think you could argue that the two things ought not to have a connection directly one with the other. The problem is, as I think Jenny Rathbone was suggesting, that the UK Government's recent willingness to breach international law and to say that that's what they intend to do, and to challenge the TCA, means that there is a cloud of suspicion that hangs around the UK Government's actions in these international arenas. So, I think that's how it intrudes upon UK-EU relations—that the actions of the UK Government in the human rights field will be seen through the lens of its recent behaviour in relation to international matters and the damage that has been done to the reputation of the United Kingdom as a country that, when it enters into an agreement, has every intention of sustaining that agreement.

What impact do you think it will have on human rights if the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill goes ahead and all EU law automatically expires at the end of next year?

Well, Chair, here I think it probably does depend upon—. Sorry to sound as though I'm back in an academic seminar, but it depends what we mean by human rights. So, if what Jenny Rathbone means is the broad swathe of consumer rights, environmental rights, workers' rights, that those are the things that, in the end, make up what we mean by human rights, then we should be very worried about that Bill, because the pace at which it is being taken forward, and the recklessness, I believe, that is inherent in the UK Government's strategy in relation to retained EU law, every day, every time that we look at it, has the potential to do harm to the rights that Welsh citizens have in those areas. If you took a narrower definition of what do we mean by human rights—if we meant the article rights, the convention rights—then, actually, I don't think that the EU retained law Bill really does bite on that. There's an indirect relationship between the things I've just mentioned—the consumer rights and the environmental rights and so on and the convention rights, the article rights—but I don't think that that piece of legislation directly has an impact upon the ability of Welsh citizens to exercise their article and their convention rights.

But—. Yes, it's more all the other rights that you've described. I'll pass it over to another Member.

Could I just ask one question on that, First Minister? I'll go to Peter in a second. You've indicated that you don't think the revocation Bill will have the impact upon the convention, but, therefore, would you expect a UK Bill to include the aspects that will be revoked, to build upon, so that all of those rights will be put into a UK bill of rights, full stop?

Oh, I wish I did. As I think you indicated, Chair, in an earlier question, the UK Government doesn't always speak with a single voice on lots of these things. There are messages that come out of Whitehall that what is planned is a transposition into domestic law of the rights that Welsh citizens and UK citizens have enjoyed through their membership of the European Union. That's the point of the Bill—it's not to do away with those rights, it's just to restate them in domestic law rather than relying on retained EU law. But there are plenty of other voices that you hear coming out of Whitehall that talk about this as an opportunity to deregulate the United Kingdom, to roll back the things that are there in the retained law, and that we shouldn't expect that there will be a straightforward transposition of those rights from retained law into domestic law.

It's a huge undertaking, Chair. It's why I said earlier that this is such a reckless course of action, to be doing this at the speed and with the consequences that the UK Government currently continues to say it intends to carry out this exercise. This is all to be done by this time next year, and there are literally thousands of individual strands of retained EU law that will have to be transposed by then or will simply fall away at the end of the next calendar year. I think that that is an effort that will overwhelm many Whitehall departments. I should probably, particularly in this forum, just sound a warning note to say that, if all this did proceed as the UK Government currently suggests, then it would have an overwhelming impact upon the ability of both the Welsh Government and the Senedd to take forward our own legislative programmes. There simply will not be enough lawyers and civil servants to be able to do the transposition work that will be necessary while continuing to do all the things to which the Government and the Senedd is already committed. That's why I think we must hope very much that the UK Government will not stand back from the intention—I don't expect them to do that—but to stand back from the timetable that they've currently declared in order to allow the whole effort to be carried out in a way that gives it the time that it's going to need.

Thank you. Peter.

Good morning, First Minister. I just to ask a couple of questions around UN conventions in Welsh law. Obviously, the Welsh Government made a commitment to incorporate the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the convention on the rights of disabled people into Welsh law. I just wondered how we're getting on with that, and when they will be incorporated.

I thank Peter Fox for that. There is a bit of history here that I'll very briefly rehearse for colleagues. In the final part of the last Senedd term we established a group to give us some advice on all of this, to review the different conventions and how they could be incorporated into Welsh law. It then reported in 2021, published its research report, and we published the Welsh Government's response to all of that in May of this year. We then established a human rights advisory group to oversee the five different strands—of which legislation is only one—in the work of that research group. We took the steering group that was working on all of this, and it has morphed into, if I can put it that way, the human rights advisory group. One of the big changes in that is that it is now ministerially chaired, so the human rights advisory group is ministerially chaired by the Counsel General and by Jane Hutt as the Minister for Social Justice. It meets quarterly. It last met in November. It will meet next in February. It has created its own legislation options sub-group, chaired by Charles Whitmore of the Welsh human rights consortium [correction: Wales civil society forum]. The legislation group, particularly, is populated by people with legal and academic expertise, and they will be providing advice to us on how we can take that commitment forward. I'm sure colleagues here will know that that work goes beyond the two dimensions that we identified in my party's manifesto and in the programme for government to look at other human rights conventions that we may wish to be able to take forward here in Wales. What I'm trying to convey, Chair, is that a lot of work is going on. It's going on purposefully, it's ministerially led, and it will produce the advice we need as to the best way in which we can take forward the commitments that Peter Fox has asked me about.

Thank you, First Minister, for that. That was helpful to understand where we are in the journey of that. I wondered how you might respond to concerns from contributors to the ‘Strengthening and Advancing Equality and Human Rights’ report who commented that the existing selective incorporation of human rights was denying protection to some groups. Do you have any reflections on that comment?

I understand the basic point that is being made, but I probably don't see the argument in quite the same way. If the argument is that by helping some people, where other people aren't getting helped, that somehow that's a denial of rights to people not being helped, I probably see the world slightly differently. I'm just trying to grapple with an example I could offer you, really. Imagine that you were walking down a pavement and you saw a car accident and there were two people hurt, and you could only attend to one of them, what would you do? Would you go and help the one person you could help, or would you not help them on the grounds that to help one person is to disadvantage the person that you haven't been able to help? I think I know what I would do. I wouldn't stand back and help nobody because I couldn't help everybody. I think that's where that argument gets you in the end if you're not careful.

We want to do more. We want to draw within the human rights ambit more examples of human rights in Wales. But do I think we were wrong earlier in devolution to focus on children's rights, because we weren't at the same time able to attend to all the other strands in the human rights panoply? No, I don't. I think in the end, in Government—and in the work of the Senedd, really—you take forward the work that you are able to take forward, and then you try and strengthen it in areas where you haven't been able to make the same progress. But it's not an argument, I believe, for not doing the things you can do.

Thank you. If you were to add further convention rights, which ones would the Government plan to do, or which might be your priority?

Amongst the additional strands that the group that is helping us are looking at will be older persons' rights. I met with the Older People's Commissioner for Wales in the last couple of weeks, alongside the publication of her annual report. She has a strong focus on the rights of older people and is a powerful advocate for us doing more to incorporate the rights of older people into this agenda. We will publish our LGBTQ+ action plan early next year, and, again, that's another strong candidate for being included in an expanded range of human rights strands that we will take forward together. There will be more, I'm sure, that the group will want to advise us on where there are underrepresented groups, alongside the two groups that we have already committed to taking forward.

Thank you. Thank you, Chair.

First Minister, before I move on to Jenny, I'm going to talk about another recommendation from the advisory group. You mentioned in an earlier answer to Jenny Rathbone the capacity the Welsh Government would have to undertake a variety of its own legislation if the EU revocation—. Even if some of that came through, it would obviously impact upon capacity. Where would the capacity be to be able to ensure that any convention is included in the legislation of the Welsh Government?

The capacity comes in two main ways, Chair. I probably will ask Claire to set out for you some of the new arrangements regarding the way the civil service that works with the Welsh Government on this has been structured to support it. The two basic strands are, first, legal services, and a huge amount of the analysis that has to be carried out on the EU retained law front draws on our legal services. They did a heroic job, I think, in making sure that the transposition of that EU law earlier in the Brexit process was successfully carried out here in Wales. And as, Chair, you will remember, certainly from some of your previous chairing roles, that involved a very high volume of secondary legislation having to come in front of the Senedd. Our legal services colleagues have demonstrated in the past their ability to do this job successfully. It's just the volume of it; that's the point that I was trying to emphasise. I think I saw a note that, in advice to UK Ministers recently, civil servants were saying to them that they had discovered another 1,400 pieces of legislation within retained EU law that would have to be redesignated by December next year, if the current timetables are to be sustained. So, it's whether we would have to take people away from other pieces of legislation that they're currently working on in order to cope with the volume of EU retained law that we would have to deal with within the timescale that we have to work within. That was the point I was trying to make, that—

I was just trying to make sure that, if recommendations came forward for inclusion in legislation, you would have the capacity to make that happen.

Well, no. I just want to be clear: the only way we would have that capacity is by making choices. There's no spare capacity sitting around waiting to do this. There is a capacity there already and, as I said, it has demonstrated its capability, but if the floodgates were to open and we suddenly had to deal with this huge volume in a very constrained time frame, there is no spare capacity for that, it would be diverted capacity—capacity diverted away from all the other things that we as a Government are trying to bring to the Senedd and that, very regularly, individual Senedd Members and Senedd committees ask us to do more. So, that's where the direct impact would come.

The second strand in that, Chair, is, as I said, the way in which we've organised civil service capacity to support this agenda. I don't know whether you want Claire to just very briefly say something on that.

If you don't mind, Claire, I'll come back to you if I need to. I'm just conscious of the time. Jenny.

I just want to move to a slightly different focus, which is on the quality of equality impact assessments. Earlier this year, the Equality and Social Justice Committee did an inquiry into the childcare policy, and there was a concern that no equality impact assessment had been done of the impact on the child, as opposed to the situation of the adult. Those who are in work get childcare, but those children whose parents are not in work, or latterly now in training or education, don't get that valuable quality childcare. So, I wondered if you could just tell us what your overall strategy is on improving equality impact assessments, whether it's in relation to childcare or anything else.

Well, first of all, Chair, to recognise that there is always work that we need to do to improve the impact assessments that go alongside major policy developments and legislation, and the recently published report of the Auditor General for Wales is very helpful to us in this regard. He has a series of recommendations as to how we can improve particularly the integration of different strands in equality impact assessments.

So, the current focus of Welsh Government's efforts to improve the way that impact assessments are made is to draw on the recommendations of that report. We are organising additional training sessions with our civil service colleagues on all of that, and within it, as I say, there's a focus on improving impact assessments in general, but particularly in the way in which we produce integrated equality impact assessments, so that we don't have—as the Auditor General says can happen in the less successful cases—a series of stand-alone assessments without recognising that all of these come together and have a single combined impact, whether that is on children, or whether it's on families, or whatever other aspect we are looking to assess. And that's where the focus of our current work to improve the system currently rests.

Okay. Thank you. In light of the time, I just want to move on briefly to talk about European citizens' rights, and particularly to focus on the 38,000 Europeans living in Wales who've only got pre-settled status and they need to make a second application if they want to stay beyond the five-year period, and I just wondered how the Welsh Government plans to ensure that these people are supported to understand that they must make that second application.

First of all, Chair, just to be as accurate as I can, it isn't really in the capacity of the Welsh Government to ensure that outcome, and it's not actually our responsibility to do it at all; this remains a responsibility of the UK Government and the Home Office, who continue to say that they will take all necessary action to make sure that those thousands of EU citizens in Wales who have pre-settled status, which expires after five years, will be contacted and reminded and offered assistance to make sure that they can apply for full settled status. And actually, it is only the UK Government that has access to the data about who those pre-settled citizens are; the UK Government will have and has a legitimate right to have the names and the addresses of those people, and we don't. Data protection reasons probably quite properly mean that we don't have access to that level of detail.

What we will do, Chair, is to do the things that we did when we supported EU citizens in Wales in the immediate aftermath of Brexit. And I think some of the figures that Jenny Rathbone quoted demonstrate some of the success we had. We managed to get tens of thousands more EU citizens registered in this way than was originally anticipated, and that was partly because of the efforts that we took. The publicity efforts, the way in which we mobilised, for example, the Catholic school sector, where we knew there would be a disproportionate number of people—parents who have children from Poland—there to reach them, and the investment that we made in providing general advice services through the CABx, specialist legal advice services through Newfields Law. We've extended the contract with Newfields Law into next year so that that specialist advice will be available for people who already find themselves needing to reapply, because the clock has ticked away; they've had pre-settled status, now they have to apply again, and we'll continue to play our part in making sure that that happens.

The other thing that we will do, Chair, is to support the IMA, the Independent Monitoring Authority for the Citizens Rights Agreement, based, of course, in Swansea, and with a Welsh member on that authority. There may be some colleagues—I see John Griffiths on my screen, John will certainly remember Ronnie Alexander, who was the chief environmental officer for Wales in the first decade of devolution. Ronnie is the Welsh member on the IMA. It has recently received permission from the High Court to proceed with its judicial review claim against the Home Office. So, the IMA believes that the Home Office is acting illegally in its conclusion that people who failed to upgrade their pre-settled status to settled status will automatically lose all their rights. So, we support the IMA in that effort, and that's a slightly separate strand in the efforts that we will be taking to try to make sure that people with pre-settled status don't just allow that status to lapse and then find themselves in a very, very difficult position indeed. These can be people who have lived in Wales for decades and decades, so this will be very serious stuff indeed.

The committee I chair works very closely with the IMA and, in fact, I'm hosting an event in the Senedd in the first week back after Christmas. So, just one final thing on this, which is that many families took the decision back in February or March last year to stay in Ukraine, particularly if they weren't in the immediate line of battle on the east side of Ukraine, but given the impact of the war on basic services throughout the whole country, there are concerns about the EU settlement scheme family permit now being closed to Ukrainian family members unless they meet very narrow late application criteria. I just wondered if the Government has raised this with the new Prime Minister, given that this may become a really acute problem.

I've had two conversations with the new Prime Minister, and Ukraine was certainly touched upon in the second of those meetings and in the council of Ministers that the new Prime Minister chaired as part of the new inter-governmental relations machinery. We didn't, though, dwell on the issue that Jenny Rathbone has just raised with me.

Again, Chair, Claire will correct me if I've not got this right, because Claire has led lots of the work we have done in Wales to welcome people from Ukraine. If I've got this right, while the EUSS family permit scheme is now closed to Ukrainian family members, they are still able to come to the United Kingdom under the Ukraine family scheme, and the Ukraine family scheme very significantly mitigates the loss of the EUSS route into the United Kingdom. So, of all the many things that we are right to worry about in relation to the awful circumstances in Ukraine and our wish to go on providing what help we can, I don't think that the EUSS family permit closure is the biggest issue, because that alternative route has opened up for families instead.

Okay. Thank you.

Llyr, did you want to ask a supplementary question?

Thank you, Chair. Good morning, First Minister. Just to return to pre-settled status, last year, you wrote an open letter to European citizens explaining that they were warmly welcomed in Wales, and that is something that we're all eager to convey. But as the first round of applications at the end of the first five years of pre-settled status will come most likely at the middle of next year, do you have an intention to send a similar message again to underline how much we appreciate the presence of these groups in Wales? And also, of course, whether we like it or not, it's likely that some people will move, and that will have implications for some sectors of the economy. Are you as a Government thinking of some sort of contingency plan, or are you aware already what sectors we're reliant on in terms of European citizens? So, what thinking is going on now, before we find ourselves with a shortage in certain sectors in months to come?

I thank Llyr Gruffydd for those questions. On the first one, of course, we do want to do more to draw attention to the fact that people with pre-settled status will have to make another application to remain in Wales. The situation isn't quite the same. When the original letter was published, everyone nearly was on the same timetable, so we knew when to publish the letter to draw people's attention to what they had to do. The problem with pre-settled status is that the time period is different for everybody. So, it's not quite as simple as publishing one letter that has the same impact for everyone. So, of course, we are going to do more to draw attention to this and to work with people. If we can do it again through another open letter, I'm not sure, because the situation is a lot more complex because the timetable for every person can be different.

One of the ways open to us to try to help people is, as Llyr Gruffydd said, working with people who are working here in Wales in public services. That was one of the things that we could do last time around. And I'm sure that, in the area of health, for example, the health boards will be aware of people who are working with them now where they will have to make another application when the pre-settled period comes to an end. Of course, after this meeting, I'm willing to emphasise that with public services here in Wales to ensure that, when we do know who is in that situation and when we as a Government or local authorities can do more to help people to reapply for settled status, that we will do everything that we can do to help people along that journey.

Thank you. That takes us quite nicely on to the next topic of refugees and asylum seekers, and I will hand over to John Griffiths.

Diolch, Cadeirydd. Bore da, Prif Weinidog. Thankfully, Wales is a nation of sanctuary now, with a progressive plan from Welsh Government to work with communities, local authorities and the third sector to make sure that it is a positive experience and a welcoming experience for asylum seekers and refugees coming to our country. But, I'm sure you're aware, First Minister, there is a deal of concern at the moment that the UK Nationality and Borders Act will adversely impact on that experience here in Wales. I wonder whether the Welsh Government has made an assessment of the impact of that legislation on the ability of the Welsh Government to realise the ambitions in the nation of sanctuary plan.

Well, we have made an assessment, Chair, and, unsurprisingly, given the discussions that we've had on the floor of the Senedd on this matter, we believe that the Nationality and Borders Act will have a detrimental impact upon on our ambitions to be, as John Griffiths said, a nation of sanctuary. Our analysis is pretty bleak of all of this, because of the way in which the Act treats people coming to the United Kingdom. It will increase destitution; it will create more people who have no access to public funds and no way of meeting their most basis needs. When you have a group of people who are in that desperate situation, then the second detrimental impact of the Bill will be to increase the risk of exploitation of those people, because, unfortunately and very sadly, there are people out there, we know, who prey upon the most vulnerable. The Act creates new vulnerabilities for people who find their way to the United Kingdom, and they will be on the lookout for people to exploit them. The figures of reports from Wales to the modern slavery authorities are really very concerning. We've had, I think, over 80 children reported to the modern slavery authorities in Wales in the last 12 months. Our fear is that the Nationality and Borders Act increases destitution, increases exploitation of migrants and increases homelessness because of the way people don't have access to public services.

I find myself baffled, really, at the way in which the UK Government has forgotten the lessons it learnt so fast during the pandemic—that all of that increases the danger to public health, because where you have populations that are fearful of coming forward when they need help, then, if those people have communicable diseases, they're not going to get the treatment that they need. To be fair, in the early stages of the pandemic, the UK Government worked hard to make sure that people who were in this position, fearful of coming forward to authorities, were able to do so without fear of reprisals, and they did that because they didn't want those people to be a risk to everybody else. In the Nationality and Borders Act, they recreate that source of potential harm, not simply for people who've arrived in the United Kingdom, but for everybody else who is here already. So, I'm afraid, for all of those reasons and more, we think that the effect of the Act is to undermine the ambitions that we would have in Wales for the way that we would respond to the needs of those people and live up to our ambition to be a nation of sanctuary.

Thank you for that, First Minister. If I can move on, then, again in terms of asylum seekers and refugees, and the experience here in Wales, I think many people, many groups, involved in showing a good welcome and a good experience have been quite impressed by what we've been able to offer to refugees from Ukraine. But, they're concerned that we're not always able to offer that level of assistance and help to asylum seekers and refugees from other countries, and they would like to see us ensure more equality of experience, really, no matter which country people are coming from. Is there anything that you could say, First Minister, in terms of Welsh Government's ability, working with others, to ensure a more equal experience for all in those circumstances?

Chair, the first thing I would say is that a more equal response doesn't mean treating everybody the same, because groups of people who arrive in the United Kingdom come here from very different contexts, and you need to be able to calibrate a response to their experience that tries to be sympathetic to the circumstances that bring them here in the first place. So, we have, in the last 12 months, we believe—there's an important point there that I'll come to in just a moment—about 1,000 people from Hong Kong now living in Wales. The circumstances in Hong Kong have been pretty horrific in many ways, but they are very different from the circumstances that have created 6,000 people from Ukraine coming to live in Wales. So, saying that we're treating people differently and that means that that's unequal, I would just have a slightly different take on that. In some ways it's right to treat people differently when their needs are different, and treating everybody the same is not my idea of equality. But one of the reasons why we have been able to act differently in relation to people from Ukraine is that a space has been created for us to do that. So, I can tell you exactly how many people have arrived from Ukraine, exactly how many people have come through the family route, exactly how many people have come through the Welsh platform, exactly how many visas there still are in the system, and so on, because we had an agreement with the UK Government that we would have that level of involvement in the response to the Ukrainian emergency.

I said to you that we think about 1,000 people have come from Hong Kong, because that space has not been opened up for us in relation to that group of people. There we are making estimates, because there are no figures available from the UK Government as to exactly how many people are in Wales. It is true—and I understand the anxiety that people express—that we have in some ways been able to do more for people coming from Ukraine, but that is because the space for us to do more has been available to us, and it isn't available for every person who comes to Wales, because immigration, refugee, asylum seeker responsibilities are not devolved to us, and the space we have to operate depends upon what agreements we have with the UK Government, and they vary from different group to different group.

Okay. Thank you for that, First Minister. It does raise a lot of issues, which I'm sure we'll return to in different fora in due course. If I could move on to free expert immigration advice, there is a report from the Refugee Action organisation that said that, outside the main dispersal areas, our cities in Wales, it's difficult to access legal aid because of lack of good transport links, very often. And in fact, in all of mid and north-west Wales, there's no provision at all. So, I wonder what action Welsh Government would take to address that situation.

Well, Chair, first of all let me say that the Welsh Government does do whatever we can in these areas. I spoke earlier about the millions of pounds we invested in making sure that EU citizens had access to properly qualified advice to help them with the settled status applications, and I'll come back in a moment to what we are doing specifically in the area that John Griffiths has asked me about. But I think it's really important that I make two points. First of all, the Welsh Government is not responsible for legal aid and it's not responsible for these advice services. The Thomas commission did some detailed analysis of the extent to which Welsh Government funds are now used to fill gaps in UK provision, and it comes to many, many millions of pounds. And I've got two hesitations always about that. No. 1 is that every time we divert money to pay for a responsibility that isn't ours, that's less money to pay for the responsibilities that are ours. So, these things are never cost free. To do more of the sort that John Griffiths has just outlined means there is less to do the things for which we are responsible. And I worry about that every time. We've come to the conclusion, as the Thomas commission report said, that sometimes those needs are so compelling that we have to do that, but I don't think we should think of it as some sort of free hit—it's not at all. If we find money to provide expert immigration advice in mid and north-west Wales, which is not our responsibility, then we will have less money to do things elsewhere. And the second worry I have is that I think there's a real moral hazard. Every time we step in to fill a gap created by somebody else, the risk is that the message it sends to the UK Government is that when they fail to meet their responsibilities, they needn't worry because the Welsh Government will step in and do it instead. And that's not a lesson I think we would want them to draw. I'm just trying to say, Chair, that doing what John has suggested isn't straightforward, and we should think hard about it and make sure we've weighed up the costs as well as the benefits of it.

But we do, as I say, and as the Thomas commission vividly illustrates, step in a lot in this area because services are so thin on the ground. Earlier this year, we awarded funding to the Welsh Refugee Council to deliver our Wales-wide sanctuary service. That is funded now until the end of March 2025 at least, and that does provide free immigration legal advice and advice casework teams across Wales. It doesn't make up for the gaps that have opened up in the legal aid system and the specialist advice system in many parts of Wales, but it is a service that we fund and it is available everywhere.

Jack Sargeant wishes to ask us a supplementary to this question.

Diolch, Cadeirydd. First Minister, what John said and what other colleagues have said already clearly shines a light on the need for individuals and groups to access advice, and to seek justice. Perhaps from what was naively hoped for following the Lord Bellamy report, which I think was a good report, from Lord Bellamy, who now is the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, but if we see now—. These are words from the Law Society that I'm going to read. Dominic Raab, the now Secretary of State for Justice, has completely rejected the advice of the UK Government's own independent review on the crisis in the criminal justice system. Now, given that has happened to its own Government review—they completed rejected the advice—does that not call—. I understand the Welsh Government's position and that you agree with the Commission on Justice in Wales that justice should be devolved to Wales. Do you agree with me that, perhaps, that should happen sooner rather than later, so that we can have Welsh legal aid? We then would have control over legal aid in Wales. And perhaps until that journey takes place, First Minister—. I understand what you've said to John about the difficulties with plugging those gaps, and I very much welcome that we have found ways to do that. But we have to strengthen, perhaps, our resource through the single advice fund.

Chair, I just lost the very end of Jack Sargeant's question, but I think I'd heard the full gist of it. Of course, we have invested considerably more money in the single advice fund, and there is always more we know that we could do if we had more money available to us. The budget round, which will culminate in the draft budget that we will lay in front of the Senedd next week, is the most challenging that I've ever been involved in, and I've been involved, I think, in every single one since the start of devolution, one way or another. And it has undoubtedly been the most difficult. The debate has almost never been about where we can find more money; the debate has almost always been about how we can manage to sustain the level of investment that we currently make in different public services in Wales. So, I mustn't hold out any false hopes for Members this morning that there will be much new money for even the most urgent of purposes.

On Jack Sargeant's first point, Chair, about doesn't all of this highlight the case for the devolution of justice services to Wales, well, just two points. One, yes it does, and the policy of the Welsh Government, of course, is that criminal justice should be devolved to Wales—a policy endorsed in the Thomas commission and by many, many other independent commentators. But there is a very important caveat to that, which is that, alongside the transfer of responsibilities must come the transfer of the funds needed to discharge those responsibilities. Being offered responsibility for a completely denuded legal aid service would be a very big challenge for any Government taking on that responsibility. So, I regard the Gordon Brown report's proposals, that an incoming Labour Government should transfer responsibilities for youth justice and probation—. Of course, I regard that simply as the first steps on the journey to full devolution, but one of the advantages of starting in that way is that it would allow us to test that second requirement of any transfer of responsibilities, that they come with the funds that would be needed to discharge them. I don't imagine that that will always be an easy conversation with any Government, and starting with youth justice and probation will allow us, I believe, to develop the ground rules around the financial transfers alongside the responsibility transfers. And we will learn a lot and make sure that, then, as I believe, we will move on to the transfer of policing and then the courts, and so on, that we will have developed a template for the funding side of those things in those more modest services of youth justice and probation. And that will be a useful thing for us to have done.

Laura, did you want to ask a supplementary on this question?

Sorry, not on this section. Thank you.

Okay, thank you. Jenny.

I absolutely agree with you, we need to get some clarity on this, because Lord Bellamy, when he was talking to the legislation and justice committee—the committee chaired by Huw Irranca-Davies—on Monday, he was talking about the Visiting Mum project as if that was something that was funded by the UK Government. Equally, the Welsh Government has committed to house all prisoners leaving prison, on completion of their sentence, and there seems to be a huge gap there between what Lord Bellamy told us, that that happened to all prisoners, and actually it not happening when it related to women leaving either Styal or Eastwood Park. So, how can we make some advances even on the current situation, which seems to be a complete muddle?

Well, Chair, making advances in the current climate has been very difficult. The Thomas commission has a whole series of recommendations that are for the Welsh Government and Welsh authorities to take forward, and we are making progress on those, and we publish information as to the progress we are making. And I don't want to sound as though it is impossible to make progress on some things with the UK Government. We've made genuine progress in youth justice, which is a shared responsibility, and the blueprint approach has underpinned that, and I think that has helped create a strong case for the transfer of those responsibilities here in Wales, because we've been able to demonstrate the success we've made. And the blueprint for women offenders is a shared document, and we have said many times, and I'll say it again this morning, that we are genuinely appreciative of the fact that the UK Government has looked to create the first women's centre here in Wales. And again, I think that's founded on the good relations that there are at official level and at the front line of these services. But Jenny is also right that many of the other advances we've seen in Wales—a drug and alcohol court, a family dispute court—there wouldn't be examples in Wales if the Welsh Government wasn't putting funding into making those things happen, whereas they're fully funded by the UK Government when they happen in England. So, that takes me back into that sort of moral hazard territory; we do it because it's the right thing, we do it because we know it will make a positive difference to families and to the system in Wales, but we are paying for things that, in other places, the UK Government pays for fully and properly, whereas here in Wales, the Welsh Government finds itself always being expected to not just play our part in terms of joint working and so on, but funding things that really are not for us to fund in order to make them happen.

I want to move on to the next theme now, which is children and young people, and the first question will come from Laura Anne Jones, and then Jack Sargeant will follow on.

Thank you, Chair. If I may just have two quick ones, including this one. First Minister, the Rights of Children and Young Persons (Wales) Measure 2011 imposes a duty on our Welsh Ministers to give due regard to children's rights, but it does not in turn impose any duties on public bodies, through which many ministerial functions, of course, are discharged. Given the increasing financial pressures on public bodies, such as health boards and local authorities, are you confident that they can deliver services to ensure children get their rights to education, health and social care, and will they be protected in line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child? Thank you.

I thank Laura Anne Jones for those two questions, Chair. I probably should have said in answering an earlier question about the human rights advisory group and the way they're taking forward the research report is that it also offers us an opportunity to revisit that debate that lay behind the 2011 measure, which is that due regard debate. The Senedd—or the Assembly as it was then—decided that the due regard approach was the right one to adopt here in Wales, because it means that front-line workers are not put in a position of carrying the responsibility for those conventions on their shoulders when they knock the door of a family or are dealing with a young person, and back then we decided that that would not be a fair or a proportionate responsibility to place on them, and it was placed better with Welsh Ministers and, through them, public authorities. But the work of the human rights group gives us a chance to revisit that a decade later: is that still the right answer to that debate? So, I thank Laura Anne Jones for drawing attention to that, because I think we have an opportunity to revisit that and to see whether we would come to a different conclusion now, over a decade later.

In the current circumstances, how do we try and ensure that young people and children get the rights to which they are entitled in very tough times? Well, we will rely on the mechanisms that we have in place. So, we were the first country in the United Kingdom to have a children's commissioner. I think that office has demonstrated time and time again the authority that it brings to its work, and the seven-year tenure of Professor Sally Holland, I thought, was an outstandingly successful period in the history of that office. The commissioner will be there to report on, speak up for, hold to account public bodies in exercising those responsibilities, even in these very tough times.

Chair, I attended—was it last weekend? I think it may have been—a conference of care-experienced young people here in Wales, and I was struck, being there, at the very big difference in the way that young people's rights are understood and talked about by young people compared to what is, I know, now, a long time ago, when I was a practising social worker and would have been working with young people in the care system, when the idea that these were young people who had rights was a very small part of the way in which we thought about things. They were the objects, if they were lucky, of the benign concern of the people who looked after them—the passive objects of that concern. Whereas the young people at that conference, the care-experienced young people, used the language of rights all through the day. They are much, much more aware of it, and the children's commissioner's office was there as well. So, I think we shouldn't lose sight of the ground that has been gained over the last 20 years and how young people themselves will play a part in asserting their continued rights.

In other parts of the spectrum, Chair, we have taken recent action—[Inaudible.]—the landscape here. The Curriculum and Assessment (Wales) Act 2021, passed in the current Senedd, placed a duty, as colleagues will know, on governing bodies and headteachers to promote knowledge and understanding of rights in schools. So, that would be another place where new guardians of children's rights will be created for the future.

Laura, do you want to come back on that?

Yes. Thank you, First Minister. If I may just talk to you about—going on the theme of, as you say, in schools, and equality and children's rights—something that was highlighted on the floor of the Senedd yesterday, actually, with the proposed British Sign Language Bill. Due to the great numbers of children requiring to be educated in British Sign Language and our unfortunate inability to hold those BSL exams in Wales, I know that, yesterday, Qualifications Wales said that they were looking into an exam, as did the Government, in the future, but that's quite some years in advance. I'm just thinking about those children's rights and, in the meantime, how we are going to protect those children's rights to an equal education and the right to do those exams in British Sign Language. Thank you.

Well, again, thank you for the question. I wasn't able to be in the Chamber during that debate, but I will definitely be reading the transcript of it and discussing with my ministerial colleagues what more we can do to uphold the rights of the Deaf community, people who choose to live their lives through the use of BSL and other aspects of their lives. I'm familiar with it, to an extent, from the time that I was the health Minister, where we did our best to advance the way in which very basic services—. Sitting in the GP's waiting room, where a very squawky box in the corner of the waiting room tells you who is to come forward next for treatment, well, for Deaf citizens, that didn't work at all.

I think there has been, over the last 10 years, an increasing understanding of the need and the right of those citizens to receive services in a way that makes them accessible to them, and I'm very happy to take up the point that was raised in the debate about the way in which children in those circumstances have access to basic things like examinations in the language that they are best able to use.

Thank you. Thanks, Chair.

Jack.

Diolch, Cadeirydd. First Minister, I'm wondering if you have a response to the calls from the Auditor General for Wales, who's called for a national strategy for alleviating poverty. If the Government is considering this—and we'll tempt that from your response—will there be a focus directly on young people that isn't included in the child poverty strategy?

Chair, my recollection of what the auditor general said was that what he called for was an update of the existing child poverty strategy, and that's the way in which we are taking forward that recommendation. So, in that sense, it will definitely answer Jack Sargeant's point about it having a focus on young people, because it will be an updating and an extension of an existing strategy that has children and young people at its heart. We are working on that new strategy. It will be published next year.

I'm going to take the chance to just repeat something that I think I ended up being drawn into on the floor of the Senedd this week, though. If I was back working in the university and looking at the history of devolution, I think I'd be inclined to say that we spent an awful lot of our time strategising and maybe are more aware today than we once were of the implementation gap between having a strategy and what actually happens on the ground. We have had a Cabinet group meet every week since the start of the autumn term focusing on poverty issues in the context of the cost-of-living crisis. And what I have said from the beginning and repeat every meeting is that I want those meetings to be about practical ideas—things that we can actually make happen that then have an impact in the lives of people who are facing such a difficult and challenging winter here in Wales. And lots of those practical actions are, of course, in the field of poverty alleviation. If I had to choose between asking my civil service colleagues to spend their time writing another strategy, or helping us to identify those practical actions and working with our colleagues in the third sector, local government and the faith communities and so on to make those actions happen, I know that my preference is for a focus on the things that make a difference. The strategy work goes on alongside it, but strategies are not a substitute in the current context for a focus on the things that actively can happen and make a difference to people who are struggling every day.

Can I thank the First Minister for that answer? We've had many a conversation, First Minister, where I seek practical solutions to things, rather than too many discussions around tables—perhaps that comes from my own personal background. Can I say that I'm particularly proud to hear about the summit with care leavers, because it is important that we speak to those on the ground where the decisions we make in the Senedd and the decisions you make in the Welsh Government have the biggest impact? With that in mind, it's obviously important to speak to young people, and the young person's guarantee—. I'm aware there will be a statement next week to the Senedd from the Minister for Economy. I'm just wondering if I could tempt you—and perhaps I'm being a bit cheeky here as it's towards the end of the year and near Christmas—is there anything you can tell the committee today about the content of that statement?

Chair, thank you. I'm happy to help as much as I can, because the Cabinet has had a paper from Vaughan Gething, as the Minister responsible for the young person's guarantee, which has looked at the different strands in it. And what I think you will hear from the Minister next week is how we are going to place some different emphases on some of the strands within the programme to make sure that it reaches those people who are still the furthest away from the labour market in Wales.

There's a paradox, Chair, isn't there, about the young person's guarantee? The original idea was quite definitely discussed in a context where we believed that, coming out of the pandemic, the problem would be finding work for people who found that the jobs they had done prior to the pandemic were no longer available—that the problem would be a shortage of work. Well, as you know, as we've come out of the pandemic, the problem has turned out to be exactly the opposite. The problem with the Welsh economy is a shortage of workers and not a shortage of work. So, we need to readjust the focus of the young person's guarantee so that it is meeting today's challenge and not necessarily the challenge we thought we would have when the guarantee was first devised. So, it will be about finding ways in which that stubborn group in the Welsh population, including young people, who find themselves without the skills or capacity that they need, take up the jobs that are there and where employers struggle to get people to take them up, and we do more through the guarantee to help those young people to become equipped to take their place in a very tight labour market, where those young people are real assets—they could be and we want them to be, real assets—to the Welsh economy. So, I think you're likely to hear things from the economy Minister about how the young person's guarantee can be adjusted; it is certainly not a matter of tearing it up and starting all over again, because it's been very successful. But we can recalibrate it in some ways, so that it is focused on helping with the challenge we face today, and rethink some of the ways in which we had originally thought of it as being a vehicle for creating loads of opportunities in an economy that was short of them.

Jenny Rathbone has got a short supplementary, and then we have three minutes left.

Okay. Basically, I just wanted to look at the rights of the child to an education. A recent inquiry that the Equality and Social Justice Committee has done is on the numbers of people with communication and speech and language difficulties who are involved in the youth justice service. And the overwhelming evidence is that a lot of this goes back to the poor communication skills that children establish from birth, that are present when they're three, and then that lead to exclusion from school when they get to secondary school. So, I wondered if you could just say something about the rights of the child to an education that's tailored to their needs.

Well, children in Wales have a right to an education. In the youth justice ambit, one of the reasons I think we have succeeded as we have in that radical reduction in the number of young people from Wales who end up in custody is that it was a very early adopter of a trauma-informed approach to working with those young people. So, it very early on recognised what Jenny Rathbone has highlighted in her question—that many of those young people who end up in the jaws of the criminal justice system, that the roots of that lie very for back in their very early experiences. A strong psychological focus and specialist services to help those young people address those difficulties have been part of the way in which we've persuaded the system that a criminal justice response is not the right answer to those young people.

More generally, I have always been concerned—I remain concerned—that we have a system in Wales in which schools do not respond to young people in difficulty by excluding them from education. I think huge efforts are made around Wales in that regard, but, in a way that would be familiar to all members of this committee, those efforts are more successful in some schools and in some authorities than they are in others. And there is still work to be done in Wales to make sure that the techniques and the commitment that some schools demonstrate, where children are almost never excluded, are learnt by schools whose records are less successful. I definitely don't want to underplay the enormous commitment that is shown by the system, but I want to as well recognise what Jenny said, that those children who find themselves excluded have not lost their right to an education, and we need a system that strains every sinew to prevent exclusion happening in the first place, rather than funding new ways to respond to it after it's happened.

Thank you, First Minister. That brings us to the end of the first evidence session we have with you this morning. Can I thank you and your officials for attending this first session? We will now take a five-minute break to prepare for the second session. So, if everyone's okay, five minutes, and we'll continue then.