Part of 1. 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government – in the Senedd at 1:32 pm on 5 July 2017.
Mark Drakeford
Labour
1:32,
5 July 2017
Well, I thank Jenny Rathbone for that question. I saw the advice that the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, with Public Health England, had published last week, with guidelines calling for clean air zones to be set up outside schools, hospitals and care homes, for example. They don’t, I think, in that document, refer directly to a fixed-penalty regime; they talk about the possible use of bye-Laws and other actions to support no-vehicle-idling areas. Given what we know about the pressure on air quality, this seems to me a very valuable report, and I know that colleagues in the Welsh Government will be looking at it, to see whether there are any actions from it that we should think of taking in Wales, including making powers available to local authorities, if that is thought to be the best way of enforcing such a regime.
The cabinet is the group of twenty or so (and no more than 22) senior government ministers who are responsible for running the departments of state and deciding government policy.
It is chaired by the prime minister.
The cabinet is bound by collective responsibility, which means that all its members must abide by and defend the decisions it takes, despite any private doubts that they might have.
Cabinet ministers are appointed by the prime minister and chosen from MPs or peers of the governing party.
However, during periods of national emergency, or when no single party gains a large enough majority to govern alone, coalition governments have been formed with cabinets containing members from more than one political party.
War cabinets have sometimes been formed with a much smaller membership than the full cabinet.
From time to time the prime minister will reorganise the cabinet in order to bring in new members, or to move existing members around. This reorganisation is known as a cabinet re-shuffle.
The cabinet normally meets once a week in the cabinet room at Downing Street.
Laws are the rules by which a country is governed. Britain has a long history of law making and the laws of this country can be divided into three types:- 1) Statute Laws are the laws that have been made by Parliament. 2) Case Law is law that has been established from cases tried in the courts - the laws arise from test cases. The result of the test case creates a precedent on which future cases are judged. 3) Common Law is a part of English Law, which has not come from Parliament. It consists of rules of law which have developed from customs or judgements made in courts over hundreds of years. For example until 1861 Parliament had never passed a law saying that murder was an offence. From the earliest times courts had judged that murder was a crime so there was no need to make a law.
