COMMISSION ON THE POWERS AND ELECTORAL ARRANGEMENTS OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY FOR WALES

MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS OF THE EVIDENCE OF:

UNISON

Lord Richard
Eira Davies
Tom Jones
Peter Price
Ted Rowlands
Vivienne Sugar
Paul Valerio
Sir Michael Wheeler-Booth KCB
Huw Vaughan Thomas
Dr Laura McAllister
Mr Bill King
Mr Dominic MacAskill

MR KING: First of all, thank you very much for having us here to take oral evidence from us and to allow us to supplement the written evidence which we have already supplied. I am Bill King, I am Unison's regional convener, which is a senior lay post within the Union in Wales. My colleague is Dominic MacAskill, who heads up our Policy Development and Campaigns Committee, who have had much of the oversight for developing our response to the Commission.

I think we are relatively unique in that you have two lay members, no full-time officers of the trade union, here. I think that is a mark of Unison culture rather than anything else, we like to be lay member led where possible and to an extent it is an expression of confidence in ourselves and also an expression of confidence in the Union as a whole that lay members are able to represent it adequately.

The written submission that we gave you earlier was developed over a period of time, it is not a simple, dry academic tone, it was developed throughout the Unison structure and in particular we held a policy weekend with about 120 activists representing a whole range of branches and certainly all of the major public sector services in Wales where we spent two and half days in workshops beginning to develop our response, looking at the kind of questions that you had laid out in the brief and really beginning to develop stuff.

We certainly then use the academic unit in Swansea University to help tidy things up and brush them. It is essentially a reflection of the Unison position and a grass roots, lay member response to yourselves. I do not know whether you consider that an adequate introduction.

LORD RICHARD: It depends on whether you want to say anything in addition to the paper?

MR KING: The one thing I would really point out is that in many ways Unison sit here as triple stakeholders in the process, we are electors within Wales, we are also consumers of the public services within Wales and our members deliver 94 per cent of them. We have a real keen interest in ensuring that the Assembly has adequate powers and is able it to fulfil its full potential.

MR MACASKILL: Just to supplement that, the issue about how the Assembly is perceived by the Welsh people as a whole, I think we are very well placed to feed back on the undiluted views of people in every single community of Wales. I think Unison is probably unique as a trade union in that it has members and activists in every walk of life and in every community, covering the urban and the rural. I think the comments that are included in the document do reflect that wide breadth of Welsh life.

LORD RICHARD: Thank you very much. Can I launch straight into the issue, if I may, of what it is that we are trying to look at, it is basically the last sentence of paragraph 13, where you say, "effective communication is only one part of the equation, additionally the Assembly needs to be equipped with the necessary powers and resources to make devolved government effective." That is fine. You then go on to make the case that it would only be effective if it gets powers of primary legislation. Can you tell us a bit more about the link between those two?

MR MACASKILL: There was a certain public perception when the Assembly was formed that the limited powers of the Assembly were part of the explanation for the low level of public engagement. There is an impression that the devolution process in Wales was a bit like bolt-on thinking, there was definitely a commitment in Parliament to Scottish Parliament, and this was clearly and frequently restated by the Government, but the commitment was not that forthcoming for Wales. There was not a high profile campaign that existed in Scotland and no senior government figure appeared in Wales to rally support. Indeed from a distance, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair's comments could be seen as perhaps unhelpful as well when he linked the powers of the Assembly to those of a parish council. So I think there is that perception from the start. I think also in terms of preparation for creating a National Assembly of Wales we are not as thorough and rooted in the local community as they were in Scotland. There was a constitutional Assembly in Scotland with cross-party involvement, community groups and churches all involved in preparing the way and having very clear ideas on what the Scottish Parliament would be able to deliver.

In terms of Wales the only way that you could put together proposals in such a short timescale was really just to look at the transfer of powers which were held by the Secretary of State for Wales. It was clear that the Assembly would be extremely limited in its powers and this gave opponents of devolution the ability to criticise and to portray the Assembly as an extra tier of bureaucracy and in effect, in Welsh terms, as a Mid Glamorgan Council writ large. Throughout the campaign it was reiterated that the Assembly would have neither primary legislative powers nor tax-varying abilities. Frankly, the public did not engage because they believed the Assembly to be a weak institution and a foil for nationalist aspirations. So the granting of primary legislative powers would give the ---

LORD RICHARD: Where is the evidence for your previous statement?

MR MACASKILL: This is what the perception is. We are taking views from our members about how they perceived the setting up of the Assembly so these are, in effect, perceptions which we have picked up. Further on in the submission we go into some more detail but in terms of the starting point this really reflects how the Assembly has been perceived in our members' views. In terms of the detail and more specifically on powers, we come to that later on.

LORD RICHARD: Really what you are saying is emerging from this conference which you had with180 activists over two days, from that the perception you got of what they believed was that if the Assembly had been presented as a Scottish-style Parliament, if I can call it that, and if there had been a serious engagement in the referendum, that is what people would have been voting for and there would be greater enthusiasm for the Assembly now?

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Can I ask a question on a very interesting phrase you used just now, the change in culture between a Welsh Office thinking to an Assembly way of thinking. What do you mean by that?

MR MACASKILL: In terms of culture, the Welsh Office was an arm of Westminster and it was serviced by civil servants who were part of the UK civil service network. In civil service terms you could question whether the career loyalties would lie outside of Wales. So in terms of the culture it could be seen that in the initial transition it was in a sense just an arm - a slightly devolved arm but just an arm - of Westminster. What I think our members and the public at large generally feel is that if we were going to go down this line then it had to have meaning for them, so therefore in order to engage people in a very Welsh-focused policy forum you need to have the people in place who are prepared to drive that forward, and in some cases that may mean driving forward something which is going against the grain of what is coming from Westminster. There is certainly no doubt in my mind and my members' minds that the civil service culture at the time and probably still at this time is able to do that.

TED ROWLANDS: One of the areas as I understand it - and you might be able to advise us how far this is still the case - which has not been devolved is the whole issue of national pay, remuneration, pensions and conditions of service agreements in much of the public services, like health to take that as an example. In consulting your membership, how far does Unison wish those areas of responsibility to be devolved - pay, conditions of service, et cetera, which as I understand it remain a UK nationally negotiated arrangement?

MR KING: Certainly some areas of pay do remain at UK level, most are at England and Wales level, for example the NHS, teachers, lecturers, fire fighters. Our policy is that we would wish to support national bargaining as it stands at the moment.

TED ROWLANDS: England and Wales bargaining?

MR KING: England and Wales bargaining. However we recognise without a doubt that there is a logic to bargaining with the paymaster who in the case of 94 per cent of us in Wales is effectively the Assembly. Already there have been moves by the Assembly to get into a Wales-wide bargaining position.

If we look back at last September when there was a dispute in further education colleges across England and Wales, the Minister in Wales put a new and different settlement on the table. We do not believe that was necessarily an attempt to break away from national bargaining but I think it was a recognition that in some areas Wales is different and must be seen to be different. So we are almost in a best of both words scenario. Whilst we see clear advantages in remaining within national negotiating arrangements - because if we broke away there is always the danger that Wales may not do as well - what we also have to accept though is that Wales is a low wage economy without a doubt. The reason we qualify for Objective 1 is because we have got a GDP of less than 75 per cent of the rest of Britain. The area in which I live Torfaen has something like 65,000 households, 53 per cent of which live on a household income of less than 10,000 a year. Whilst in some areas we support national bargaining we also take a far wider view as well. We are not just concerned about our members in the public service and we feel that the Assembly could be granted additional powers to introduce not the minimum wage but a living wage to address some of the issues of bargaining in the private sector as well as the public sector which might address the fact that we have got a low wage economy.

TED ROWLANDS: It is very hard to transfer a bit of a function; you either transfer or you do not. The national minimum wage, even in Scotland I think it is right, is totally reserved and I did not know it was your thought that that should be devolved. But if you had to choose now, if you were saying to this Commission in the list of transfer of functions, would you transfer remuneration, pay and conditions across to the Welsh Assembly?

MR MACASKILL: I do not think we see it as an all-or-nothing scenario. In terms of national collective bargaining in public services such as local government and health there is obviously a large percentage of our members affected by that and it has a fairly large impact on the local community. As Bill said, there is a danger if we separate from that although in the short term we may be able to sustain the same pay levels as the rest of England it is likely there will be a drive down due to the low wage nature of the Welsh economy. The powers that would be useful is where the National Assembly either contracts out services or public money is used to finance services to be able to put prescriptive requirements on people who, in effect, spend this money and deliver the services on behalf of the National Assembly to have minimum employment expectations on pay, on pensions, on workers' rights, et cetera, and at the moment we are caught up with what policy is presented at a Westminster level, that sort of devolution, which we believe in Wales would be able to extend the benefits of the collective bargaining which we have in, say, the Health Service and local government out further into the workforce in Wales so that we actually try to raise up the wages of the general economy.

TED ROWLANDS: You can educate me in this respect. This idea of producing a minimum requirement in the contracted out services, minimum pay and conditions, at the moment is totally non-devolved, the Assembly government does not have that power at the moment, as far as you understand it?

MR KING: No.

TED ROWLANDS: And it is identifiable in some regulation somewhere that we could find and we could say whether or not we wish to recommend transferring that?

MR KING: It is identifiable in the deal that was done in Glasgow about a month ago between Unison and the Prime Minister in terms of contracts being won out of the public sector to stop the two-tier workforce.

TED ROWLANDS: That fell within the competence of a Scottish government to do that?

MR KING: It was announced in Glasgow at the Labour Party Conference but it only applies to England at the moment. If I can give you an example, Torfaen social services recently contracted out some of its home care responsibilities. The people who were transferred directly went out on a TUPE transfer and consequently retained their pay and conditions, et cetera. There was a big issue over pension rights but eventually that was won. The company that is operating them operates in three areas of Torfaen which basically is three area. Blaenavon at the north of the borough, Pontypool in the middle and Cwmbran in the south and that company has already said for new staff they recognise in Cwmbran they will probably have to match the local government rate, in Pontypool they feel they can pay 50 pence an hour less than that, and in Blaenavon because of extreme unemployment they can get away with paying the minimum wage. We consider that to be totally unjustifiable, that you can have three people doing the same job on three different rates of pay. We believe that transfer of power will be very important to ensure that in future when things go out people coming into a company or coming into an organisation maintain the same terms and conditions as those that are already there and we believe that that is a power which has been agreed for England, it has not been transferred over to Wales. We believe that that is the kind of power that should be transferred down.

LORD RICHARD: It is a policy issue, it is not a structural issue. You are not saying that the powers of the Assembly have to be changed to do this. What you are saying is that you hope that the Assembly would behave in a much better way to those groups of workers than the existing system provides?

MR MACASKILL: That policy has come out of Westminster. The way we understand it, in terms of the application of it, the National Assembly has some influence over it but the National Assembly would not have been able to create that policy themselves. We do not believe the policy goes far enough and there are not the powers within the National Assembly to increase the remit and the breadth of that Act. I think it is an amendment to the Local Government Act. In a sense it is being driven by Westminster and it is welcome but we believe it can go further and there is nothing the National Assembly can do about that.

LAURA McALLISTER: Two questions if I may, one about Scotland because you referred to that quite extensively in the evidence you have given. Could you illuminate us on the issue of the partnership agreement that the Scottish Executive has with the Scottish TUC. Following on from that, can you tell us whether from your own experience your colleagues in Unison in Scotland had benefited from working with a Parliament with primary legislative powers as opposed to your situation? That is the first question.

The second question, and I think this relates to a big theme for you as a union, is on the question of the whole new politics phenomenon generally and issues of representativeness and inclusiveness and so on. What would your appraisal be of the Assembly having come to the end of its first term? To what extent do you feel the kind of people you represent have warmed to the whole idea of the Assembly and its operation?

MR KING: If I can deal with the first part. The memorandum of understanding between the Scottish TUC and the Scottish Parliament is a unique agreement in that it was the first there. It commits both sides to meet on a regular basis and to discuss a very wide range of issues such as the economy and also to look at terms, conditions of employment, et cetera. It establishes a mechanism by which the civil servants are actually engaged in the process and there are regular meetings at officer level between the partners within it. In Wales Rhodri Morgan did sign off an agreement with the Wales TUC last month. It does not go nearly as far as the Scottish agreement. I have a copy of the Scottish agreement which I would be more than happy to leave with you afterwards. It covers the whole range. There is the context, the aims, the roles and responsibilities of both sides, the benefits, partnership values, shared priorities and the commitments from the Scottish Executive and STUC, and delivery and monitoring. One of the key things comes in the "working arrangements" section of the document in that it says:

"Scottish Ministers will meet the STUC twice a year for the purpose of exchanging views and information about policy issues. At these meetings items may be placed on the agenda by either side." That has not been adopted in that form about Wales. There is an agreement that there will be a series of regular meetings but there is no clear indication that it will be to discuss policy.

"Scottish ministers will meet with the STUC as necessary to discuss specific issues around their portfolios. In addition, either may request an ad hoc meeting on a specific subject at any time." In the Welsh agreement there is no commitment that individual ministers will meet.

"As well as the ministerial meeting, the Permanent Secretarial Management Group will meet the General Council on an annual basis." Again, lacking in Wales.

"The STUC and officials will meet as necessary to discuss specific policy issues." Again, not included in the Welsh agreement.

"The numbers and composition of meetings will be such as to contribute to meaningful discussion and debate on the issues outlined in the agenda which will lead to agreed outcomes." Again, not there. So there is an agreement to sit and talk about things but not necessarily to reach agreed outcomes.

TOM JONES: But that has got nothing to do with more powers or lack of powers because we have in Wales the three partnership councils which involve the local government sector and the business sector, and what you describe as agreements in Scotland is exactly what happens in those partnership councils.

MR KING: The partnership council really does not come down, I do not believe, to the degree of involvement of individual ministers. Certainly as far as we are aware, the reason that we have not got the commitment to the meetings with civil servants in Wales is because the Assembly were uncertain as to their power to be able to establish that. If they had a clear remit to be able to establish officer level meetings to discuss things, I think that would be a great improvement. It is not there and that is the reason we were given as to why it had not been included in the original settlement for Wales.

LORD RICHARD: Can I follow on this on just a little bit. You obviously take the view that the Assembly should have primary legislative powers?

MR KING: Yes.

LORD RICHARD: What specific policy changes that you would support are actually prevented by the Assembly not having those powers?

MR MACASKILL: I think there are a number of issues which affect our members directly and some of these we spent some time on in the policy weekends because in terms of looking at powers we wanted to focus on how this could specifically affect our members, probably predicting this question. So we looked at issues such as free care for the elderly, we looked at the driving force behind the private finance initiative, we looked at the issue of best value, we looked at the issue of housing stock transfers. The thing that prevents us going down the Scottish route of free care for the elderly is very much linked to powers. The issue politically in Wales is that there is no favour for private finance initiatives or any desire to go down the housing stock transfer route, but they are obliged to manage the situation so that where we get the fact that we have a "borrow from Peter to pay Paul" scenario in order to avoid setting off any new PFI contracts. It puts additional pressure because they cannot change the ability to provide that type of resource of that sort of magnitude that PFI does free up. In our members' views there are a lot of associated negative issues which come along with any private finance initiative deal and obviously that can relate directly to our members being transferred out of the public sector into the private sector, with the issue about how strong TUPE is and pension rights and all the rest of it. On best value I think there is an indication that the best value regime would not have been introduced in Wales if it had not come from Westminster. With the Wales Programme for Improvement you could say there is a dilution or a reinterpretation of best value but still they are having to work under the best value framework which has been presented by Westminster. There are a number of issues which are very core to our members' livelihoods which in some cases have been directly affected by Westminster and over which they have no influence.

On the political representation, the feeling of our members is that --- let's give how it is at the moment. I think there has been a welcome on the number of women who are members of the Assembly in Wales but the belief is that that is down to one political party taking a stance on twinning of constituencies to ensure that 50 per cent of their candidates were women. Without that the likelihood is that the make-up of the National Assembly would not be as balanced as it is at the moment. Unison is very keen in its own structures on proportionality in terms of ensuring that our structures, although it is quite ironic we have got two men sitting here talking to you ---

TOM JONES: We were all thinking the same!

MR MACASKILL: In terms of our committees it so happens we head up certain committees but in terms of our committees there is a requirement for two-thirds of all our representative committees to be women because two thirds of our membership is women. As I say, it is ironic that Bill and I are sitting here talking to you. With 60 members it is nigh on impossible to be prescriptive about that and certainly in terms of the vision that we have for increasing the scope of the National Assembly we believe that in order to function it would require more members. So we are looking at 100 members of the National Assembly, with 80 constituency based and 20 top-up whereby you would be able to have two members from each constituency and it would be defined that one would be male and one would be female, so you automatically have of the 80 members 40 women and 40 men and the 20 additional seats would be divided up not as it is now on the old European constituencies but on a Wales level. I think there is some criticism on the regional basis of the divvying up of the regional seats because it can sometimes distort the actual political balance and so therefore if this were set up on an all-Wales basis it more accurately reflects the public support of the varying political parties.

There is evidence that the additional member system does tend to put the threshold quite high for one of the minor political parties to gain representation and this would perhaps alleviate that. The potential that gives with the additional top-up seats is that it allows for looking at ethnic balance as well on the National Assembly. One of the issues which has been highlighted in the past is that there are no black members on the National Assembly.

So in basis we believe that the representation is inadequate at the moment. We think that the perception of the current situation is positive but in order to maintain that positive view with adequate involvement of women and ethnic members in the Assembly then the structures need to change.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Just a follow up to that, if you had 80/20 would that not have meant at the last election that the Labour Party would have had an overall majority straightaway?

MR KING: I do not think we have looked at it in party political terms.

LORD RICHARD: Labour have.

MR KING: What we were looking at is the actual structure.

MR MACASKILL: I think yes, not yes to the answer because I have not done the analysis but in proportion you would be reducing the number of additional member seats. If you break it down from the national to the regional you may iron out some of the regional differences which are present.

LAURA McALLISTER: You would have been adopting a far less proportional system by your recommendation than that which exists and that is a consideration for us because we have to look at representation issues.

MR KING: When you say proportional do you mean men or women or PR generally?

LAURA McALLISTER: In terms of reflecting the votes cast in the seats allocated.

MR KING: Sorry, yes.

VIVIENNE SUGAR: I want to go back to the question that Lord Richard asked you about on functions and powers. Just for the record, I ought to say I am a Unison member and to prove my complete impartiality I am going to attack you for your answer, which seemed to me when you talked about housing stock transfer, best value and PFI to completely mix up the issue of policy and powers. The Welsh Assembly has currently got the ability to repair all council houses in Wales without any stock transfer if it chooses to spend £1 billion to do it because that is the current estimate. So that is not an issue of powers; it is an issue of choices over the public expenditure that is available. No tweaking of Barnett on a needs basis is going to produce that sort of money into the system given the current favourable economic circumstances, never mind what might happen in a year or two down the line. I would like you to be a bit more specific, if you could, about where it is an issue of the power to do things rather than the policy.

MR KING: Perhaps if we go back and look at free care for the elderly which is clear Assembly policy but blocked by UK legislation. They said they could not do it.

MR MACASKILL: In terms of PFI and housing stock transfer, yes, there is the power to build hospitals with direct funding and to avoid going down the PFI route but, as I said, that puts the scenario of where do you find the money from. There are national resources within PFI schemes with regard to national resources with regard to writing off local authorities' housing debts and the key to those resources is following PFI and following housing stock transfer. If you do not unlock those resources with the PFI key and the housing stock transfer key those resources stay in Westminster and do not get devolved down to Wales. They are policy decisions but it is not a very nice position to be in to say we will choose not to go down housing stock transfer or choose not to go down PFI and as a nation we will lose £1 billion worth of funding.

VIVIENNE SUGAR: There was a problem we heard evidence about in Scotland where they did choose to make the policy decisions because they had the power to do it to provide free care to the elderly but they still got themselves into a bit of a mess because of the benefits system and social security which is not a devolved matter. I would like to suggest that you could perhaps come back to us with some more worked out examples of exactly what you think the Assembly needs the power to do and where it is a policy decision to be able to do it.

TED ROWLANDS: On the back of that question, is that the reason why you want tax varying powers? You are saying that this is not a question of the power to legislate or not to legislate, it is a resource issue and if it is a resource issue you are saying you want these tax varying powers to fund these schemes or what?

TED ROWLANDS: It has been devolved, has it not?

MR MACASKILL: It is attached to the PFI and housing stock thing. You can only unlock it if you go down the PFI route or the housing stock transfer route.

TED ROWLANDS: Is that attached to the block grant?

MR MACASKILL: It is outside that. It is attached to conditions, so I think the PFI and housing stock do not necessarily raise any additional resources. With regard to free care for the elderly, yes, that may well be an issue where that would be something you would take to the electorate and say if you want to have then this will cost this amount and this is what we are proposing.

In a sense we cannot really do any comparisons because we have not used any of those powers, but in terms of engaging with the electorate if you had politicians on the one hand arguing for using the powers that have been devolved, the tax-raising powers, and you have another party arguing against it, then you have got a much more lively and principled debate, whereas at the moment we do not have that, so there is an engagement issue as well.

LORD RICHARD: Can I follow at the end on the tax thing. You are in favour of tax-varying powers?

MR KING: Yes.

LORD RICHARD: You are actually in favour of tax-increasing powers; you would use them, would you not?

MR MACASKILL: I think we probably would but we are not in power. We are not the ministers who are going to make that decision.

LORD RICHARD: It is not the Scottish situation where they have got the powers but say they will never use them. It is not the situation as stated by somebody in the Assembly fairly recently, I think it was Rhodri who said, "We do not mind having the powers but, again, I promise you we will not actually use them." That is not your position?

MR KING: I see very little point in having a power and then committing never to use it. It does not chime true, to be honest. Why bother in the first place but, yes, we are in favour of tax varying powers, and without knowing the full ins and outs of Treasury management systems, I guess it would be possible to vary tax in one area by decreasing in one area and increasing in another, possibly to get a more progressive tax which would benefit the people whilst still retaining revenue. I think that is well beyond my capacities to explain but it is a possibility.

MR MACASKILL: It is an issue about council tax. Council tax is not a progressive taxation, certainly with the rise in house prices you may find you are a low-paid family who happen to be living in your parents' house which has shot up in value and your council tax has gone up beyond your abilities. There is certainly a case and in Scotland there have been arguments voiced in the Scottish Parliament, although I do not think the position won, for a local income tax to replace the council tax. I think there would probably be Unison support for that type of progressive variance of taxation and I think that if it were sold right there could even be public support for that.

PETER PRICE: Can I take up the clarity issue which you mention, and what I am interested in is the practical experience of your members. Are you able to give us any specific feedback about the difficulties that your members have encountered over the lack of clarity and do you as a union attempt to help them in some way, either by the provision of advice when they hit trouble or even referring them to somewhere where they can get such advice?

MR KING: As a trade union we would always be seeking to make sure that our members have clear advice on whatever is required and using a range of sources to do so. In terms of clarity I guess probably the big one - and it hit the papers again today - would have been the foot and mouth crisis. We had a large number of members who were actively involved, some as environmental health officers carrying out inspections, some as members of the Meat Inspection Service, some as people working in National Parks, some as people who were promoting tourism and at the time it was very, very unclear what powers lay with Carwyn Jones and what powers lay with Westminster. There was a distinct lack of clarity about who was running things at the time. We obviously did a lot of work with members at that time and we will continue to do so.

Another issue where there is a lack of clarity, quite clearly Section 120 says the Assembly has a duty to promote equality throughout all public bodies. The question is does that include the police force because the police forces directly managed by the Home Office, not the Assembly, they are a Welsh public body, the Police authorities are a Welsh public body but we have some doubts as to whether they come under Section 120, so there are areas where there is a distinct lack of clarity.

MR MACASKILL: Also with the police issue it can often impact across social campaigns and provisions. Certainly in the Rhondda area there is a big drug problem which requires a social and a health response and there was some criticism when David Blunkett came into Wales on a national agenda regarding policing and police powers which was not linked in with anything that was happening in the local area. So I think that sort of joined-up approach is lacking in certain areas. In terms of our members' perception, I think, generally speaking, they are confused, certainly going back to housing stock transfer and best value where our members have been having campaigns in localities and been concentrating in the first instance in the local authority and then thinking we are going to have to lobby the Assembly, whereas in fact the place you need to lobby is Westminster because that is where the key decisions on those policies are made or sometimes a combination of the two because, in our members= view, you can mitigate some of the worst excesses of these policies which have been driven by Westminster by lobbying the more local end. It ends up being a combination of having to lobby three different institutions, so it is complicated, there is confusion out there. We try to focus our members as best as possible on the experience we have but it is sometimes beyond us as well.

PETER PRICE: Can I just follow that through. I am trying to focus really on the day-to-day experience of your members as local government officers or as health workers hitting problems where they are not sure where the responsibility lies. I have taken those two services but maybe some examples could be in other services where your members are located. You have so far given one example of that kind to do with foot and mouth, which is not something on-going, it happened at that time, it was a big problem, widely recognised. That is a useful example but can we think of other areas where these sort of problems are being encountered day by day and somebody is needing advice?

The second part of my earlier question, the services that you provide; do you have some official who is there at the end of telephone to help in such cases? Has there been a volume of calls? Where do your members go when they are in this sort of difficulty for the advice?

MR KING: Perhaps I can explain the Unison structure. All of our members are in branches. Each branch will have a branch secretary whose telephone number is freely available. We also run three offices in Wales, one in Colwyn Bay, one in Swansea and one in Cardiff which are staffed by full-time officers of the trade union. Each of those is a contact point for members. We also run additionally a service called Unison Direct which is a low-cost free phone help line which is open six in the morning until midnight Monday to Friday and six to nine on Saturdays and Sundays, so there is direct and instant advice available to people from those sources. Normally of course we would encourage them to contact our local branch because all our branches are employer based so if somebody in Dafyd Powys police had a problem, by contacting their branch secretary they would get somebody who not only understood the Unison position but also had the distinct and local knowledge of Dafyd Powys rather than somebody who is an advisor on police issues at a national level. We also of course have within London a headquarters staff who are available to advise on a whole range of issues and indeed we have access to solicitors on a 24-hour a day basis so if a problem is too tricky and we need clear legal opinion that can be obtained. Yes, we gave foot and mouth as an example. I think that the police is an example of where there is a distinct lack of clarity as to who has the power to do what and my colleagues in police branches advise me that they have been getting an increasing number of questions, particularly those who are in front-line services when people come in asking about things that may or may not apply within Wales.

I know that there was a lot of interest recently in David Blunkett's announcement about planning to fine yobs on the street and only yesterday one of the Welsh Assembly Ministers said, "We have no intention whatsoever of bringing that in but already we have had people going into police stations asking when is it going to start and people being unclear whether it would or not." I guess the same would be true of fire authorities which again are one of those awful hybrids. They almost sit in local government, local government employers are their negotiating body, be they fire fighters or support staff, and yet there will be a distinct lack of clarity as to who the employer is and who devises the policies that people are meant to be operating.

TOM JONES: You asked in your paper about an Equality Commission as something you would wish to see if the Assembly had greater powers to deliver that. If there were more powers given to the Assembly are there lots of other bits of legislation you would be pressing for, ie, is there a demand for legislative powers in the Assembly to help your membership?

MR MACASKILL: I think what we are looking at in terms of the National Assembly, yes, there are some specific issues which we have alluded to which directly affect where public services sit and the future of public services, whether local authorities are going to be enabling authorities or whether they are still going to be directly providing services. That is related to policy which has come in specifically from Westminster and we believe that a Welsh focus is much more in tune with public servants/public workers providing public services, which seems to be going in a different direction in England. There are specific issues around the public sector which we believe could be driven on a much more Welsh level. We also feel that if there were the ability to legislate at a primary level, then there would be the engagement of the whole of the Welsh people in a policy type way so that you can engage people in where we are going to go and what policies do we want for Wales? There are distinct problems and a distinct culture in Wales. How can we address those issues? How can we move forward and can you engage people in that? That would be much more of a dynamic process whereas the perception at the moment is reactive, it is almost like a buffer. Certainly at the moment we have a Lib/Lab pact in Wales and we have a Labour government in Westminster. It could be quite a long time away but it may be at some future time we have a Tory government in power in Westminster and that would create immense problems in terms of the way things are going because there is a relationship, albeit sometimes tense, between the policies of Wales at the moment and Westminster and if Westminster went a completely different way the Assembly might be seen as a buffer rather than being able to do things and drive policies forward itself.

VIVIENNE SUGAR: In your paper you talk towards the end about the development of a new breed of civil or public servant in Wales separated from the UK Civil service. Could you expand on what you mean by that?

MR KING: We feel it really does go to the heart of creating the new political institutions. At the moment the civil service are undoubtedly part of the UK civil service and accountable via their permanent secretary back to Whitehall. We believe there could be a major conflict of interest again should we have the situation whereby we have different complexions of government in England and Wales. Where would the loyalties of the civil service necessarily lie in that position? What we believe is that Wales should be developing its own centre of excellence for public sector management in general and indeed promoting the concept of a Welsh civil service. We think there is a logic to that and the devolution process and that the civil service in Wales should be serving the Assembly and the Welsh Assembly government. Currently we do feel that civil servants in Wales will feel closer to Whitehall than to Cardiff. Given that they are part of the UK civil service there is a tendency, we believe, to reduce radical thinking or proposals by the Assembly as career-minded individuals will still be aware at some stage they are going to have to get back to Whitehall for career advancement. We propose that there is a clear break between Whitehall and Cathays. A Welsh civil service working for the Assembly and accountable to the permanent secretary of the Assembly rather than the Cabinet Office, we think would be a way forward. Going right back to the very beginning when we were talking about public perception, many people felt at the outcome of the Assembly - I think it has changed radically since - that the Welsh Assembly was just the Welsh Office with a few politicians bolted on rather than a new existence. I think that there is a case to be made for an independent civil service within Wales.

VIVIENNE SUGAR: If we invite the civil service unions to give evidence they might have some different views.

MR KING: They may well do.

VIVIENNE SUGAR: Particularly this idea that your impartiality might be affected by being Welsh based or being part of the UK base. Let me just press you on this. At the moment there are 4,000 Welsh civil servants which is very small to be able to grow the people that you would need to support an Assembly, especially if it had greater powers - the level of professional, expert knowledge that you would need and so on. Just on a practical level of how would you do it, has any thought been given to whether what you are describing is a sort of locally employed cadre of administrative and general policy people or whether you are talking about a complete self- contained civil service that only supports the Assembly, because another idea I have heard is the idea that there might be a public service for Wales which would encompass other functions like local government and health and so on, a much bigger group of people providing support to local government, to the Assembly, to health trusts and so on.

MR MACASKILL: There are two issues here. The size as it currently is is small and I think we are aware that it probably would not be able to offer the career opportunities and variety of career opportunities that being part of the UK civil service would do. But, on the one hand, we believe that devolution does come at a price and if you are going to have a democratic element to Welsh life then you need to service it appropriately and I think there is a fair amount of criticism about the level of the servicing that the Assembly gets, whether it is at a high enough level. In the first instance the civil service should be bigger. I think our colleagues in the PCS would probably agree with that, hopefully. Our main concern, though, is the centre of excellence bit where we can keep and retain and develop civil servants who are committed to and are focused on Welsh political life and policy so that they can give that input in service to the politicians which is much more focused and perhaps less connected to what we could call the "small c" conservatism of the UK civil service.

MR KING: Can I point out 4,000 is not many, but you will be as aware as I am that at the beginning of the process many, many of those 4,000 were either subsumed directly from the public sector or indeed moved in from local government, from health, from education. That is where the expertise lay and in many ways one is almost heading towards, as you put it, a public services or, as we put it, a centre of excellence for public service management.

VIVIENNE SUGAR: Just one final point on that and that is a closed Welsh civil service is likely to mitigate against further diversity and equality of opportunity in employment that the people that you will get will not necessarily move towards having more women, more people from ethnic minorities and so on if it is seen as a separate organisation. I am asking the question.

MR MACASKILL: I do not see how that would necessarily be ---

LORD RICHARD: It would be a smaller pool.

MR KING: I think if you advertise on a wide enough basis the pool does not have to be small, does it? No one is saying it will be exclusive and advertised only within Wales. One would expect that jobs would be advertised widely to attract as large a pool as possible.

LORD RICHARD: I do not know want to get embroiled in this argument but are you seriously suggesting that if you advertise for a Welsh civil service somebody is going to come down from Newcastle and commit himself to the future of Wales for the whole of his career? I do not think that is going to happen.

MR MACASKILL: One of my Directors of Children's Services commutes from Northumberland.

LORD RICHARD: One.

MR KING: Many, many people certainly in local government have come from far and wide to work in Wales. The same is true of the Health Service, I guess the same is true of any profession. The mere fact that you are working for a Welsh civil service does not preclude a later move into any other form of civil service.

LORD RICHARD: I thought that was just what you wanted to preclude. You wanted to keep them in Wales in an independent Welsh civil service which has a Welsh orientation, which was less conservative than the one in Westminster. I thought that was exactly what you wanted.

MR KING: I think we were saying what we wanted was a civil service in Wales which is independent of Westminster and actually serves the Welsh Assembly rather than two masters.

LORD RICHARD: Thank you very much. I think you have been illuminating and helpful. It is good for us to have these views from the sharp end of things because there is an awful lot of academic stuff around on the future of the Welsh Assembly but this at least has the advantage of being severely practical.

MR KING: Thank you very much indeed. I will leave the Scottish memorandum of understanding for you.