Public ownership and control

One of the best lines in Leanne Wood's speech at the Plaid Cymru conference last month was:

"The Wales that we want to create will be operated by a fairly fundamental principle: that services run for the benefit of people can only be properly managed in the interests of the people."

Leanne's speech to Conference, October 2013

She didn't use the exact word "owned" by the people, but it was clear from what she went on to say that the model that best seems to fit our circumstances now is that of a non-profit-distributing company along the lines of Glas Cymru ... which is effectively the same thing.

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I don't quite know how I missed it at the time, but only a few weeks ago YouGov conducted a survey about public ownership and control of key sectors and services. The results are summarized here, and the full details are here.

These are the levels of support for public ownership and management of four key sectors:
 

     

This graphic shows the level of support for public ownership and management of energy and rail services by voting intention for political parties:
 

     

I think two things are surprising. The first is that even a majority of Conservative voters support nationalization of energy and rail services. In fact the margin of support is bigger than the graphic might suggest, for only 39% of Conservative voters wanted railways to continue to be run by private companies, and only 38% wanted energy to continue to be run by private companies. The rest were undecided.

The second surprise, to me at least, is that such a high percentage of UKIP voters are in favour of nationalization.

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Another set of questions was about whether government should have the power to control prices:
 

     

Although the margin favour of private sector rent control was quite small, public opinion ties in exactly with what Leanne said at conference:

"Due to the failure of successive Governments to build sufficient council housing and cool the housing market, many young people are forced to rent from private landlords well into their twenties and thirties. This is Generation Rent.

"There are 190,000 households renting in Wales. 14% of all households are in the private rented sector.

"Even during this long recession, rent rises have continued to outstrip inflation. In Wales over the last year rent has on average risen by 5%, well above the UK average.

"This is completely unsustainable. I am therefore announcing our intention today to reintroduce rent control for the private rented sector during the next Assembly term."

These are ideas whose time has come, and it should be clear to everyone that we in Plaid Cymru have our finger on the pulse of public opinion to a far greater extent than other parties.

Catering for demand

Work on the new Ysgol Treganna in Cardiff is progressing nicely. But it looks like the number of parents clamouring to move into the catchment area so that their children will get a Welsh-medium place is so great that a new housing development is going to be built right next to the school (on the right in the first picture) to accommodate them.

     

     

And very pleasant it is too. But at this rate another new Welsh-medium school will be needed. How about just the other side of that footbridge?

Right to Cry

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this story in the Guardian:

'Right-to-buy' council house policy reviewed to appease Lib Dems

Exclusive: Key Margaret Thatcher policy could be ended by coalition looking for ways to increase available housing stock

Guardian, 16 September 2010

It looks like the ConDem coalition might be about to put an end to Right to Buy in order to increase the stock available for the increasing numbers on housing waiting lists. And of course, if it ever came to a vote in the Commons, most Labour MPs would be fighting among themselves to be the first into the lobby to vote to abolish it.

So what do we have? We have the LibDems in favour of abolition; the Tories probably prepared to give it up, because they don't want to spend a penny more on new housing than they have to; English Labour MPs keen to hammer one more nail into the undead effigy of Margaret Thatcher ...

... and Welsh Labour MPs?

Ah yes, Welsh Labour MPs. They were the ones that managed to hold up the Housing LCO for a whole three years to make sure that we couldn't even suspend Right to Buy in Wales, let alone get rid of it.

They thought they'd managed to pull it off, too: by leaving it all until it was too late to get it through Westminster in the normal course of business—even though they had a large majority, and could have passed it without trouble if they'd wanted to—in an attempt to point the finger of blame at the Tories for not including it in the wash up. Little did they know that the Tories would not only back down on the LCO ... but they'd think about scrapping the whole policy.

Poor Peter Hain, he must be in tears. He does his very best to stop us in Wales getting the powers to do things better ... but then even the Tories show themselves to be less enthusiastic about the Right to Buy than he and his colleagues in Welsh Labour had been. I look forward to him explaining that the abolition of Right to Buy in both England and Wales is what the Labour Party had really wanted all along. There won't be a dry eye in the House.

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I can't wait for March. By finally getting over the obstacle to a proper Parliament that Peter Hain has so carefully constructed, we will be able to move on from his dog's breakfast of a Government of Wales Act 2006 to a new Act. One that will give us the same sort of Parliament that Scotland has had from the beginning.

The Loss Leader

Last week I said that what the Tories lack in principle, they often make up for in pragmatism. A perfect example of that trait unfolded this evening. Vaughan Roderick gave us the first insight with this one-liner:

Mae Llywodraeth y Cynulliad wedi ennill ei brwydr ynghylch yr LCO Tai.

But Tom Bodden filled in the details in this post:

U-turn or S-bend?

... Last week, with a newly-installed Conservative-Lib Dem Government at Westminster, Welsh Minister David Jones, Clwyd West, announced he had reached an agreement with WAG to amend the [Housing] LCO, withdrawing the abolition [of the right to buy] power.

Plaid's deputy housing minister Jocelyn Davies admitted her 'disappointment and frustration' that further delay could scupper the order, preventing the rest of the powers passing along the M4. Baby out with bath water to continue the plumbing metaphor, so to speak.

Having reluctantly agreed to the amendments, she received a phone call from Mr Jones on Friday admitting that there was insufficient time to make the changes at Westminster and that the LCO should proceed intact.

It's all 'in pursuance of the spirit of mutual respect', an important aspect of the ConLib coalition relationship with Cardiff.

Tory leader in the Assembly Nick Bourne said: "Cheryl (Gillan Welsh secretary) has made the decision that's going through unamended because of procedural difficulties but quite rightly in pursuance of the respect agenda, Cheryl has said without hesitation it has got to go through without amendment."

Jocelyn Davies confessed yesterday that the motivation didn't concern her so much as the decision which would enable the Labour-Plaid government in Wales to deliver a pledge to act on housing.

Gog in the Bay, 29 June 2010

But when you look at the facts in more detail, several things don't quite stack up. If Cheryl Gillan could say "without hesitation" that the draft Housing LCO had to go through without amendment, one can only wonder why the Tories did not let it go through as part of the wash-up just before the Westminster election ... or indeed why David Jones has just wasted the last few weeks proposing the amendments to it.

Mind you, the Tories have managed to get this sorted out after only a few weeks in power. If it hadn't been for Labour's internal differences, the Housing LCO could have been passed a couple of years ago.

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But there are no prizes for guessing what the method in this Tory madness is. If they can con us into believing that they will pass all LCO requests without the refusals and delays that characterized the approach of Labour MPs when they were in power at Westminster, they will then be able to argue that the LCO process is just fine as it is ... and that we don't need to get rid of it.

Still playing politics with the Housing LCO

The pre-election antics of Peter Hain would be amusing if they were not so pathetic, or if the issue wasn't so important to Wales.

Although it doesn't give me much satisfaction, what I said about the Housing LCO in this post in February has proved to be accurate. Following the vote in the Assembly, Peter Hain had little choice but to lay the LCO before Parliament. But since then, the Labour Government has done nothing to prioritize it in order to get it through Parliament in the normal course of business, therefore it now looks inevitable that it will be included in the wash up negotiations, as reported by Tomos Livingstone in today's Western Mail:

     Which party will blink first over new housing powers?

As I said back in February, the Tories had sent the strongest signal that they would not agree to pass the LCO and David Jones simply repeated that position again yesterday ... although he did hold out the compromise that the Tories would allow the LCO through as part of the washing up process if the clauses on the right to buy and traveller sites were removed. It goes without saying that I disagree with the Tories' policy position on these two issues, but they have been quite consistent in their opposition. The problem has been that Labour were so pig-headed that they chose to ignore those warning signs.

And so now we get to the stand-off.

Peter Hain wants to portray the situation as one in which the Tories are being two-faced. But, as is so often true, that description fits himself and his government much better. For if, as he claims

"This is an absolutely critical piece of legislation to tackle homelessness and to deal with the housing shortage, to make sure the key housing problems in Wales are comprehensively tackled. It's backed by all the principal housing organisations in Wales."

... then why has he and his government spent the past two years obstructing it? He's just trying to be cute. If Labour wanted the LCO to be passed, Labour would have used the majority they have in Westminster to vote it through. So the only logical conclusion is that Peter Hain does not want it to be passed. But rather than stand up and oppose it in an honest and straightforward way, he prefers to twist things in order to try and make it appear as if the Tories are the ones to blame instead.

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I don't quite know how things will pan out in the next few weeks. The wash up is a period of horse trading between, as Alex Salmond put it this week, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. It is possible that the Tories will let the LCO through as it stands but, if they do that, it will be because they get their way on another matter that they consider to be of greater importance to them than anything to do with Wales. That would of course be great for us, and it would be exquisite to see Peter Hain and Wayne David saying through gritted teeth that this is what they wanted all along. Who knows, if David Cameron were really smart, he could spin it as an example of the Tories respecting Wales so much that he over-rode the wishes of his three MPs in Wales in favour of the democratic wishes of the majority of people in Wales.

However I think it more likely that Peter Hain will concede the two clauses in order to allow the LCO through in some form. After all, if the LCO is dumped now, it will simply come before the new Secretary of State for Wales after the election ... and will just go round the same roundabout once or twice more. Despite what Peter Hain says now, his track record clearly shows that he doesn't want the Assembly to have the power to suspend the right to buy, so if he concedes that to the Tories now he ends up with exactly what he always wanted. But with the added luxury of being able to point a finger of blame at the Tories ... which, given his inability to see anything except through the lens of Labour-vs-Tory tribalism, probably matters more to him and his career than anything to do with what is right for Wales.

Unfortunately for him, this election offers Wales a greater choice of options than Labour's Tweedle Dumb and the Tories' Tweedle Twee.

A hermit crabb flipping its shell

Some of us are still amazed at how such a small, insignificant creature would be able to flip his home, but this exclusive footage from the shallow waters off the Pembrokeshire coast reveals how it was done:

     

Of course, we'll need to hit the replay button to get the full picture, because this particular specimen managed to flip his home not just once, but twice!

Since his exploits came to light he's found the shame rather hard to live down, and has been told to keep a low profile in the hope we'll all forget about it.

Crabb by name, hermit by ... er ... political necessity.

Accommodating the Housing LCO

News is breaking about the Tories voting against the revised Housing ELO both from Betsan Powys, Gareth Hughes and Vaughan Roderick.

Betsan and Vaughan have pointed out some of the blatant discrepancies in the position taken by Tory AMs. However those don't really matter too much, except as an embarrassment to them ... and another reason not to vote for them. There isn't any need for a two-thirds majority on this matter, so the vote in the Assembly will be passed irrespective of what Tory AMs do.

The problem is in Westminster ... and it's a slightly different problem. The Welsh Affairs Select Committee has eleven members in total, reflecting the composition of the Commons. It has six Labour MPs, three Tories (one from England, because the Tories don't have enough MPs in Wales that are up to the job ... one of them has to keep a very low profile for obvious reasons) one LibDem MP and one Plaid MP. In fact the Plaid MP shouldn't really be there because, even though Plaid have the same number of Welsh MPs as the Tories, all that counts is the overall number of MPs in the Commons. Hywel Williams is only on it because it would be too politically embarrassing for the other parties to deny Plaid a place.

But anyway, the votes of those three Tory MPs wouldn't be enough to defeat the LCO request in the WASC either, so the LCO would go through by 8-3 in the normal course of events. However we are approaching a general election, which means that there isn't time to get every piece of legislation through. So what happens is that the parties do a deal with each other to let some items of business through without forcing time consuming debates or votes on the issue ... a process known as "washing up".

Now we don't know for sure whether this LCO will be included in the washing up or not. It's just one part of the horse trading. But the signs do not look at all good. However this is a constitutional rather than a policy issue and as such it should not be a matter for a few Tory MPs alone, but a matter for the Tory party leadership to decide.

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David Cameron has made a big deal about "not standing in the way" of a request for a referendum on primary lawmaking powers. However, as I have warned on a number of occasions, passively "not standing in the way" is very different from saying that he will give us in Wales the right to decide. Doesn't this show in the clearest possible way that principle will always get thrown to one side if the Tories disagree with any aspect of what is being proposed?

If he wants to show that he is really in favour of us in Wales being able to decide things that affect only Wales for ourselves, he can still include this revised Housing LCO in the washing up. If he won't, it will be yet another example of him wanting to give people the impression of being in favour of downward devolution, while in fact doing absolutely nothing about it.

All mouth and no trousers.

The Right to Buy

The troubles that surrounded the Welsh Government's attempt to secure the right to legislate on housing—and specifically to suspend the right to buy in some areas—are still fresh in our memory ... and the matter still has not been sorted out, even after more than two years of trying. So I thought it would be encouraging to draw attention to what is currently happening in Scotland.

Today the Scottish Government laid out their proposals for a new Housing Bill. As well as establishing a Scottish Housing Regulator and Charter for Social Housing, it will end the right to buy for new tenants of council housing, housing associations and new-build social housing.

     Details are here and here.

Of course it remains to be seem whether the bill will make its way through the Scottish Parliament to become law (although it almost certainly will, because it is backed by both the SNP and Scottish LibDems) but nobody in either Scotland or the remainder of the UK is seriously questioning that this is a matter that the Scots are quite competent to decide for themselves.

Labour and the Tories are dead set against the policy, but neither of them would even dream of opposing this Bill by claiming that the Scottish Parliament shouldn't have the authority to decide these things. So why should it be such a huge problem for the people of Wales to decide how to regulate and improve housing in Wales?

Ask Peter Hain and his fellow Labour MPs. It's one more illustration of how wide the gulf between Labour's AMs and MPs has become ... and one more reason why so many Labour MPs are going to lose their seats in the general election in May.