Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:27 pm on 30 January 2024.
Mark Drakeford
Labour
3:27,
30 January 2024
What a difference, Dirprwy Lywydd dros dro, in the quality of two contributions we've heard, one after the other. Many of the things Adam Price has said this afternoon I think we should think about. I think the possibility of the national school of government, for example, becoming a way in which we educate the civic leaders of the future, not simply the public service leaders of the future, is one we certainly should debate and consider. And he is right, isn't he, about the democratic crisis that we see across the world? If we're not careful, we simply believe that democracy is bound to continue, that it's inevitable that we will go on having a country where the people who end up here are here because they've been chosen by people in Wales to do the jobs that we're chosen to do. But democracy only flourishes if you tend the garden in which it is sown. And that's what this report was intended to do. To be optimistic, the reason I said in my opening statement that if there was only one chapter for colleagues to read it would be that third chapter is because of what that third chapter says: that when the commission had a room full of people who didn't quite know why they were being asked their views about these things and couldn't quite see why a discussion about constitutional futures meant anything in their lives, what they found was that it wasn't many minutes into that conversation before those links became completely evident to people—how they could see that the pethau bara menyn, the things that happen in everyday life, are rooted in the structures that the report was concerned with. And I think that is a source of optimism, but it tells us, as the report does, that that won't happen unless we're all prepared to think imaginatively and creatively, and then invest new energy in it.
Ministers make up the Government and almost all are members of the House of Lords or the House of Commons. There are three main types of Minister. Departmental Ministers are in charge of Government Departments. The Government is divided into different Departments which have responsibilities for different areas. For example the Treasury is in charge of Government spending. Departmental Ministers in the Cabinet are generally called 'Secretary of State' but some have special titles such as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Ministers of State and Junior Ministers assist the ministers in charge of the department. They normally have responsibility for a particular area within the department and are sometimes given a title that reflects this - for example Minister of Transport.