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ORAL EVIDENCE Taken before the Welsh Affairs Committee on Tuesday 28 April 2020 Members present: Rt Hon Stephen Crabb (Chair) Tonia Antoniazzi Simon Baynes Virginia Crosbie Geraint Davies Ben Lake Robin Millar Rob Roberts Dr Jamie Wallis Beth Winter ________________ EXAMINATION OF WITNESSES Witnesses: Rt Hon Simon Hart MP, Secretary of State for Wales, and David TC Davies MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Wales. Chair: Can I start with a huge thanks to you, Secretary state, and Minister David Davis for making your time available to us for this session this afternoon. Not quite how we’d originally envisaged your first evidence session to the committee, Simon. David obviously you're you are returning to a former parish here. But we're delighted that you're on the on the call, as well. To reiterate, this is a private meeting, in the sense that it's not being broadcast live. However, a transcript will be made available in due course. For members of the committee, when we finish the call you may see on your screens a button that refers to a recording of this session. I'd be grateful if you didn't download that recording. That's purely to help the Clerk, and his team get an accurate transcript following this. Q1 Chair: So can I just start by apologising to you ministers and to the Committee, those of you who would normally wish to speak in Welsh in these sessions I apologise that translation facilities are not available to us this afternoon. But, thank you to the Clerk, and his team for their efforts in making this session happen. My hope is that the next time we do this, Secretary of State, we will be doing it, If not actually physically in the chamber, we'll be able to do it live at least by videoconferencing and I hope that you would continue to be generous in terms of the time you make available to us. So, we'll crack on and, if it's okay Secretary of State, I'll start off with questions. And to get the discussion going, Secretary of State could you just briefly describe how you've reconfigured the organisation of the Wales Office, the work of your department to help support the UK wide response to COVID-19? Simon Hart: Thank you very much Chairman and can I just extend my sort of gratitude and welcome to everybody on the Committee too. We're all in uncharted territory in terms of technology and these things, so I hope we can create something which is helpful and meaningful for the Committee and I look forward, as you pointed out, to doing this in person sooner rather than later. To deal with your question specifically, when all of this started, and it seems an age ago now, yet it was only a matter of weeks, one of the very early things we did in the Wales Office, because we are not a spending department as such, is to look at the department, what its role could be should be within the UK government but also the relationship that it needed to then have, as a matter of urgency, with Welsh Government, and, as a matter of probably increased urgency, with hundreds, even thousands of stakeholders around Wales, from big business to smaller to individual concerns. So we started the process of forming - those relationships obviously existed, up to a point but they needed to exist in a rather different context, and they need to be depoliticised quite rapidly we felt, but we also had a key role in communication. And I suspect it might come up in this committee session, but we felt very strongly that such are the complexities, in some ways, of the devolution settlement, the one thing that we could really help with was to try and decode and declutter and simplify a multitude of messages coming out, either in official form or through the noise of the media, so that our audience, our businesses and our residents in Wales, had a really clear idea of exactly what was going on, and who was responsible for what. And that, you won't be surprised to hear, is as much of a challenge for us today as it was on day one. Q2 Chair: Thank you Secretary of State. Could you just perhaps briefly describe how you're sharing responsibilities amongst the ministerial team at the Wales Office and also give us a sense of how often you, specifically, are talking to the First Minister and other Welsh ministers in Cardiff? Give us a sense of the day to day work and interactions of the Governments. Simon Hart: You’ve been in this role before, you'll probably know more by about this than me. One of the things we did again on day one, was what we sort of jokingly in the office described the separation of powers. That's the responsibilities which fell with my colleague David TC, and those responsibilities that fell to me, but the important decision that we took, I would impart to you, is that actually nothing was sacred, and we very much wanted this to be a team effort. Which is why David and I tried, as far as possible, to be sort of joint attendees at all of the critical meetings as they come up and have an impact on Wales. So there is just a set of subjects which are exclusively David’s, and certain subjects which are exclusively mine. Everything overlaps. Everything requires a degree of collaboration and cooperation between us as the two ministers of the Department and, of course, our small but dedicated team in London, but also our small and dedicated team sat in Caspian Point in in Cardiff. Which leads me to the second part of your question about the relationship with Welsh Government. Everybody on this call will know that right from the day that the devolution settlement was signed and sealed there have always been tensions around the relationship. It was my intention before coronavirus, as far it was possible, to create a set of circumstances in which our customers, and I hate using that word, but our customers in this instance are employers, businesses, public sector, private sector, charitable, you name it. I wanted, if nothing else to be able to look them in the face and say that we are here to create the right circumstances for their particular businesses or charitable interests, whatever it might be, to flourish and to not have the sort of the constant news coverage of the relationship between UK Government and Welsh Government epitomised by cheap political point scoring. And I just felt that the 2019 election taught us, yet again, an important lesson that what the public expect of us is not always what we actually expect of ourselves. And what we should expect of ourselves is to provide a competent, grown-up service, respecting the limitations and advantages of the devolution settlement and because that was the best way we could achieve what the public are looking for us to achieve: which is to bring in jobs and prosperity. Then, of course, COVID came along and blew a hole in the whole plan, but what it has done is forced us, at even greater pace, to say, park some of our political differences in the course of the greater ambition, which is dealing with COVID. Now, it'll be interesting to see if we can sustain that in a post- COVID situation. Q3 Chair: Do you feel like you're on the same team, as the First Minister, in this effort, or would you more appropriately describe it as different teams with identical goals, or are they not identical? I mean, how would you characterise it in a neat phrase? Simon Hart: I should have answered your question that just now about how many times we meet. At the moment we have a conversation on the phone probably every 10 days or so. We communicate at official level probably almost daily. We have, I have at least one, normally two, conversations with Ken Skates, in a week. Matt Hancock and his team talk regularly to Vaughan Gething. There is probably more direct communication between Welsh and UK Governments than there has ever been, out of necessity. And we're on the same team in that we both want the same outcome, which is to deal with coronavirus as permanently and as rapidly and as safely as we can. Does that mean that we are absolutely joined to the hip in what the post-COVID economic recovery might look like? Time will tell. There are still, you know, and there always will be political differences, but I think the nation of Wales expects of us, whilst coronavirus is hanging over us in the dreadful way that it is, to focus our attentions on dealing with it, rather than being tempted down the route of scoring the odd cheap political point which is, which is tempting, and sometimes even almost justified but we've resisted it hitherto and I think that, I would like to think, has been appreciated by our stakeholders. Q3 Chair: Can I can I ask you about something that the Welsh Chief Medical Officer, Dr Frank Atherton told us on the Science and Technology Committee last Friday afternoon? I was asking him about who is who is running the testing strategy in Wales, and I asked him about the launch of the new UK Government testing portal that had happened earlier on Friday, and he said to me that “we in Wales would like to have had a little earlier notification of the practical details”.