WHEN you elected me in May, I said I had come to listen and to serve. Now that the Senedd has broken up for the Summer, with debates and committee meetings paused until the Autumn, this is a fitting moment to set out what that promise has meant in practice.
Since May, I have tabled 67 written questions, made 20 speeches in the Chamber, taken on 54 pieces of casework and made 30 visits across Bridgend and the Vale. Most of the work is not adversarial, asking the questions a Government would rather not answer and reading the replies with the care that shows whether anything is genuinely working.
The casework is where the job becomes real; a benefit gone wrong, a school place refused, a repair left undone.
I asked why, in 27 years of devolution, no Welsh Government has ever commissioned an independent, published review of its own civil service, when Westminster has had the Maude Review, Scotland the Christie Commission, and Wales neither. The people who pay for it, in Bridgend, in Porthcawl and across the Vale, are entitled to know whether the system they fund works as it should.
The work I am proudest of came on 8th July, when the Senedd backed my motion on children in care and care leavers, which extends corporate parenting duties beyond councils to bodies such as our health boards, and brings Wales closer to the protections available in England.
Every party voted for it, and nobody voted against. For me this is personal. I was born in Newport, raised in care and adopted at seven, and I know what those protections mean and what their absence means.
I now chair the Senedd’s Legislation Committee, whose job is to check, clause by clause, that new laws will do what they claim; it is quiet and unglamorous work, but it matters, because a badly-drafted Act does not fail in the Chamber. It fails years later, in someone’s life.
That motion passed because all four parties backed it, and I make no apology for that, because how the state treats the children it is responsible for should never be party politics. Recess is not a holiday. I am out across the constituency all Summer, and if I can help you with something, please get in touch. Come the Autumn, I will keep pressing on what this Plaid Government publishes, and whether the promises made to care-experienced young people are kept.
By Sarah Cooper-Lesadd, MS
The views expressed by columnists of this newspaper do not necessarily reflect the views of the Glamorgan Star, its employees or its proprietors.
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