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Mr. Win Griffiths: I will arrange for the hon. Gentleman to receive a copy of our document, which explains those matters. Basically, however, the Welsh Assembly will assume the duties and responsibilities that are currently held by the Welsh Office.
Mr. Richards: Is the hon. Gentleman saying that an assembly would have no executive but merely advisory powers? Is he saying that it would have only the power to advise the Secretary of State?
Mr. Richards: Will the hon. Gentleman clarify what he is saying? If a Welsh Assembly would take the place of the Welsh Office, it would have no executive powers and merely advise the Secretary of State. Perhaps he does not understand how the Welsh Office works.
Mr. Griffiths: The powers and responsibilities currently held by the Secretary of State for Wales will be vested in the Welsh Assembly.
Mr. Richards: Therefore a Welsh Assembly would assume the powers of the Secretary of State. Will the hon. Gentleman therefore tell us--[Hon. Members: "No."] The point is very interesting. What would be the Secretary of State's role in the Cabinet? Would he be a messenger boy from the assembly to the Cabinet--or would there be a Secretary of State?
Mr. Richards: I will let the hon. Gentleman think on that for a moment.
My understanding of the proposed assembly is that some of its members would be elected by proportional representation. It would be composed of 60 representatives: 40 of whom will be territorial, representing each constituency in Wales, and 20 of whom will be elected in a list. I should like to ask a question from the point of view of my and other hon. Members' constituents. If a constituent has an issue that he would like to raise with an assembly--with the executive powers that have been described very loosely by the hon. Member for Bridgend--should he contact his territorial, constituency representative or a list representative--or would there be a two-tier system? How would it operate? We do not know the answer. If the hon. Gentleman or the hon. Member for Cardiff, West have an answer, we should very much like to hear it in the reply to this debate.
Mr. Alex Carlile (Montgomery):
In the early evening a year from now--on the occasion of the next Welsh day debate--I suspect that I shall be putting my feet on the domestic fender, pouring a glass of wine for my wife, talking to the children about the day they have had at school and at university and suffering from a little bit of withdrawal at not being in the House to take part in it. I have now been an hon. Member for 14 years, although I do not even pretend to possess anything like the distinction of the right hon. Member for Conwy(Sir W. Roberts) or to have the respect that he has earned from all hon. Members. I think that many hon. Members--particularly those of us who know north and mid-Wales well--look on him as the best Secretary of State that Wales never had.
As I look back on my 14 years in the House, I think that I will regard occasions such as this--Welsh day debates, Welsh Grand Committee debates and similar occasions--as perhaps not making very much everyday difference to the way of life of people in Wales, but as demonstrating that a tradition of political understanding and lively political debate continues in Wales as expressed in the House, as it did 100 years ago--when the early ferment of Welsh politics, which was exemplified by Lloyd George, was beginning to develop, and when Welsh politics really began to have an enormous impact on the wider politics of the United Kingdom.
Indeed, I would say to those who have ambitions or are interested in a political career--if that is the right noun to ascribe to it; I have always thought that politics was more an activity than a job or a career--that they could start in no better fashion than by reading the early speeches of David Lloyd George, the speeches of people such as Tom Ellis, the very distinguished former hon. Member who served Merionethshire, or those of other of our Welsh political forebears, on whom of course I look with particular affection.
On the wall of my office in the House is a map--from the "Daily Graphic" of that time--of the result of the 1892 general election, which was presented to me by a
constituent during the 1992 general election campaign. It shows every single seat in Wales having fallen to the Liberal party. As I leave the House, I wish that I could deliver the same result to the Welsh Liberal Democrats. I will leave it to the public to judge how well the Welsh Liberal Democrats should do at the next general election. I say without fear, however, that I think that we still have a very important role to play in Welsh politics.
When a Welsh regional tier of government--with its democratic element, in whatever form--is established, I look forward to the flowering within that arena of young talents coming from the Welsh Liberal Democrats. I hope that they will be able to make a very considerable contribution to the politics of Wales. Like, I suspect, the right hon. Member for Conwy and other hon. and right hon. Members leaving the House at the forthcoming general election, I shall miss the House enormously. However, like them, I am beginning to discover that opportunities lie outside the House, which perhaps have around them the framework of real life.
On such an occasion, the temptation is of course to indulge oneself in an exegesis of the breadth of Welsh politics, to offer a blueprint for the future and to try to teach some lessons about mistakes made during one's time in the House, but I do not propose to go down that road. I want to talk about only one specific subject.
I am the son of a doctor. My father came to this country in early middle life and worked in the Polish hospital in Penley. We lived in Ruabon. Then he took a job in the national health service as a general practitioner, running a practice--at first single-handed--in Burnley, an industrial town in Lancashire. For many decades, we lived in the house that contained his surgery. I remember hearing from my bedroom window the clacking of the clogs as the cotton workers walked along Trafalgar street to the cotton mills at 5.30 every morning. That was a familiar sound until the mid-1950s. Many of my father's patients were cotton workers, until the cotton industry closed. Another large slice of his patients were coal miners, who came not only from Lancashire, but from Wales, Italy, Poland and Hungary. They came from everywhere. Now the coal mines have closed.
Many of my father's patients lived in streets that evoke in my mind wonderful memories of childhood--Rowley street and Sackville street. They were little slum streets of that great industrial Lancashire town which had already suffered, between the turn of the century and the middle, a decline in its population of almost 50 per cent. The planners--I make no criticism of the political party in charge at the time, although it will not be difficult to guess which party ran Burnley county borough in the 1950s--took the view that the slums should be removed and replaced with beautiful housing estates. Of course, that did not work, and the result was disjointed communities. I still visit Burnley occasionally, because my widowed mother lives there, and I also like to go to Turf Moor, as I have since I was five and a half years old. Burnley still has a community spirit, but it is fighting to retain it.
My father started his life practising medicine as a specialist in central Europe before he became a general practitioner in Lancashire. He used to say to me that the most important social change that had happened in any country this century was the introduction of the national health service. I used to go out on his rounds with him in
his Austin A30, not only because the nice ladies in Rowley street gave me sweets, but because I enjoyed his company and the education he gave me, which has stayed with me throughout my life and long after his death.
My father used to say that whether a person was a prince or a pauper--he told me to remember that all princes were bandits once--the national health service treated him the same. If my father chose, as a general practitioner, to send a patient to Professor Charnley in Preston for one of the early hip replacement operations, he could do so as a matter of right, because that was his diagnosis. If he chose to send a patient for a specialist consultation in London, because he judged that the best thoracic surgeon was there, he could do so, as long as he made his choice intelligently. He was greatly respected for the way in which he ran his practice, and his message about the value of the national health service has been imbued in me.
I have continued to take a close interest in medicine and health issues during my life and during my time in the House. I have done it professionally, through my legal practice, and politically. Like the hon. Member for Gower (Mr. Wardell), I am a lay member of the General Medical Council. I have been one for some eight years now, and I have learnt a lot about the effect of Government policies on the health service from a different viewpoint, well away from the House.
During my representation of the wonderful county of Montgomeryshire, I have seen the treatment of people's health suffer because of the Government's policies. I regret that. I say in all sincerity to the Under-Secretary that I accept that the Government have not been malevolent, but they have got their policies wrong. The national health service, which my father taught me to believe benefited everyone equally, does not benefit everyone equally any more. That principle has been abandoned--wrongly.
The Secretary of State alluded to the community hospitals in the Dyfed Powys health authority area. There could be no worse example of the way in which people have been regarded not as patients, but as pawns, than the behaviour of that health authority. I am delighted to read in my local newspapers that the Under-Secretary has condemned Dyfed Powys health authority for its behaviour, which should be put on record.
On 23 December 1996, the health authority, deliberately behaving in a Scrooge-like fashion, issued a statement that included the judgment from its powerful position that eight community hospitals in the old counties of Dyfed and Powys would have to close. That was an appalling time to issue the statement and it caused widespread anxiety over Christmas and the new year among staff, patients and potential patients.
On the day the press release was issued, I took the trouble to write to Mrs. Vanessa Bourne, the so-called chairman of the authority, to ask her to reveal to me, as a Member of Parliament for the area concerned, which eight community hospitals she intended to close, and to supply the background papers that justified her conclusion. I received a response of an arrogance that would shock even hon. Members. I wrote to her again. I asked again to see the background papers and I asked which hospitals would be closed. After many weeks, I still await a response to that letter.
The health authority released a further press statement in which every member of the health authority had a little sentence quoted, including references to politicians as though we were the ignorant detritus of society. Those arrogant people should remember that they have been appointed by politicians, and that they are accountable through their board and via politicians to the House. The health authority has produced a plan with no background papers, which refers to no individual hospital, which has no quality learning behind it--the health authority has not denied those facts--and which has caused panic throughout mid-Wales.
Last week in Llanidloes, 1,000 people attended a public meeting about the future of Llanidloes hospital, which is a wonderful community hospital which could be held out as an example to the world, let alone to rural Wales. I regret that the Conservative party failed to send a spokesman to that meeting. Unfortunately, excuses were made. The feeling of the meeting was clear.
This afternoon, the Secretary of State issued a severe rebuke to Dyfed Powys health authority. I hope that that rebuke will be carried through to its logical conclusion, which should include the dismissal of the chairman of the health authority, followed by the resignation of her board. Apparently, the Government believe that the disciplines of management and private industry should be applied to the national health service. I do not disagree that management discipline is useful in the public service. However, if that board and that chairman had been employed by a company in Wales--such as Control Techniques or Laura Ashley, which was mentioned by the right hon. Member for Conwy--the major shareholders would have had them out by midnight. The Government should have that lot out by midnight.
I wish to mention one further national health service issue that is more directly related to my upbringing as a general practitioner's son. Since I went to live in the Welshpool and Newtown area of mid-Wales, I have been the patient of a doctor in Llanfair Caereinion. He is a partner in an excellent practice, and a doctor with political principles. I do not know for which party he votes, but I know that his political principles belong on our side, rather than the Conservative side, of the House.
On principle, and with his partners' agreement, my doctor has chosen not to be a fundholder. There is one similar practice in the area at Westbury in Shropshire, on the border, and about half the patients of that practice live in my constituency.
If I want treatment under the national health service, I am now at a disadvantage; the hospitals where it is provided delay my treatment because my general practitioner, on the basis of a well-thought-out belief and judgment, does not wish to follow the Government's encouragement to have a fundholding practice.
That is not the national health service that my father taught me to respect. It is not the national health service that Lloyd George and others created in this country, and taught this country to respect. It is a national health service infected by greed and devil-take-the-hindmost. That is not the national health service that we want.
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