JOHN HUMPHRYS:                   When the people of Wales 
voted in favour of their own Assembly they did so with a remarkable lack 
of enthusiasm. Only half bothered to vote at all and the devolutionists 
won by a whisker. The sceptics say very little has been achieved since 
then and the Assembly is not much more than an expensive talking shop. 
The enthusiasts say if that's true it's because it needs more power. Unlike 
Scotland it does not have a Parliament that can pass primary legislation 
or raise income tax.  So what does the man in charge think?  Rhodri Morgan 
is the First Minister and he's in our Cardiff studio. 

                        Good afternoon Mr Morgan.

RHODRI MORGAN MP:            Good afternoon.

HUMPHRYS:                    You've no problem admitting 
to your differences with London, indeed some say that you positively delight 
in them, but you don't have the powers that Scotland has, talking to Jack 
McConnell a few minutes ago as you know.  And that makes it more difficult 
for you to deliver what you might want to deliver.

MORGAN:                    Well we've delivered an 
awful lot with the powers that we've got.  We've delivered Assembly learning 
grants for higher education and further education students, the first children's 
commissioner, an independent ombudsman for children's rights in Wales, 
free bus passes with free bus travel for old age pensioners and disabled 
people in Wales, I could go on.  The list of achievements in three and 
a half years of an action packed programme I think is there as a tribute 
to the powers that we have got and how effectively we've used them.

HUMPHRYS:                    But let me give you an 
example of where - and I gave this suggestion to Jack McConnell as well, 
where you might want to do something different and that is the fire dispute. 
 Now, you would rather like to have the power and it is being talked about 
as I understand at the moment, to deal separately from England with the 
Fire Brigades.

MORGAN:                    Absolutely not, I don't 
know who's told you that, but it couldn't be further from the truth.  We 
have always set our faces against having civil servants from the Welsh 
Assembly government actually conducting pay negotiations separately for 
Wales for Health Service staff, it's all done on an England and Wales basis, 
for teachers that's done on an England and Wales basis and likewise for 
the Fire Brigade, it's slightly mysterious, it is effectively done on a 
UK basis although it's the local government association that does it on 
an England and Wales basis, and Scotland have to come in behind it, as 
Jack McConnell explained. We have no ambitions in that regard to have different 
pay rates for public service workers in Wales.

HUMPHRYS:                    But wouldn't it help 
to in the sense that Mr Gilchrist, the FBU leader wants to get away as 
he puts it, from new Labour and back to real Labour as he puts it.   You'd 
quite like to do that too wouldn't you?

MORGAN:                    Well, I've always described 
myself personally as classic Labour.  I don't recognise the term 'Real 
Labour'.  I mean I'm not sure what game he is playing there, but I do think 
that in terms of the FBU I do fear after the eight day strike now that 
the FBU is in danger of doing what the water workers did to themselves 
when they went on strike twenty or thirty years ago, when what they did 
was to demonstrate that they were not as indispensable as everybody previously 
thought they were including themselves, and there's an enormous danger 
in strike action in the public service, if that's what the outcome is. 
 Don't go down the water workers' road, because I don't think that's very 
wise at all.  We are not involved in the negotiations and have no ambitions 
to be involved in the negotiations.

HUMPHRYS:                    Nonetheless your advice 
would be to them, get back round the table quickly even if it's not our 
table?

MORGAN:                    Absolutely.

HUMPHRYS:                    Let's give you another 
illustration then, perhaps you'd agree with this one, where you could make 
a difference if you had more powers and that's the power to raise taxes 
perhaps.   The National Health Service, the Health Service in Wales.  The 
worst waiting lists in Europe.   You have spent more money of course, but 
you need to spend more don't you?  You promised nobody would wait for more 
than six months for out-patients treatment and eighteen months for in-patient 
care.  At the end of August it was eighty-four thousand, you know the figures 
as well as I, waiting for out-patient care, four thousand for in-patient 
care.  You are not going to meet your target there are you, you could do 
with a bit of extra cash?
                        
MORGAN:                    Yes, but I mean you've 
seen that the Scottish Parliament is not using the power that it has, so 
that's really a very bad example to quote, because if they've got the power 
and they're not using it and we haven't got the power, then I think anybody 
would say that if we did have that power we wouldn't use it either.

HUMPHRYS:                    Wouldn't you?

MORGAN:                    So we have to find the 
solutions in a different way and we are finding those solutions by increasing 
the intake in the medical schools of Wales by eighty nine per cent from 
1999 to 2005.  We would increase it faster if you could recruit lecturers 
in the medical schools, but you can't do it any faster than an eighty nine 
per cent increase and similar increases for growing more of our own nurses, 
professions allied to medicine as well because we don't want to be stripping 
South Africa of all its doctors and the Philippines of its nurses unless 
they actually want us to, so we are expanding the capacity of the National 
Health Service to treat as fast as you humanly can.  It's not a matter 
of taxation, it's the human capacity to treat.  Consultants do not grow 
on trees, it takes ten years to train them and we are training them very 
very rapidly indeed, but they're not there yet and the increase in the 
out-patient waiting list is a consequence of our going for a primary healthcare 
led system with national frameworks, national service frameworks, for coronary 
heart disease, for diabetes, rheumatism and arthritis and as soon as you 
do that, you see consultants having to treat more and more people in the 
community, frail elderly people with heart trouble or diabetes, or arthritis, 
and that makes it very difficult then to handle new cases as they come 
screen.

HUMPHRYS:                    So...but one way or the 
other, you're not going to make that target, are you and you're not saying 
you couldn't do with a bit more cash, surely?

MORGAN:                    Well, we have been given 
a large amount of additional cash by Gordon Brown and we know that as regards 
health from April 1st next year where we are going to be as regards cash 
for five years ahead, so that then you can sensibly...you've got the capacity 
to plan ahead.  The expansion of the staffing capability and therefore 
the treatment capability of the NHS in Wales.  For other public services 
we know where we are for three years ahead from April 1st next year, it's 
a very, very good platform to build on, given the size of the increases 
that Gordon Brown has given us. 

HUMPHRYS:                    But I mean, you knew 
that people got sick before you set these targets, didn't you?

MORGAN:                    Well, we didn't know what 
the consequence of introducing national service frameworks was going to 
be.  What you do with national service frameworks, you go out and find 
the vulnerable at risk categories and you bring them in for treatment and 
you need more consultants to do that and you cannot just pull consultants 
out of the...you know, from the unemployment register, they're just not 
there.

HUMPHRYS:                    So, you don't want the 
extra cash or so it would seem.  Let's suggest to you that maybe you might 
want...possibly want some other powers though it seems to be saying ...you 
seem to be saying that you don't want tax raising powers, we've got the 
Richard Commission looking at this whole area and I know that you're going 
to say that well we're going to have wait and see what they say, but you're 
already apparently saying that we don't want tax raising powers, are you 
saying you don't want more powers?

MORGAN:                    No, we are asking for more 
powers - individually we have said we want the transfer of animal health 
powers from Westminster to Wales, that was one of the lessons from the 
foot-and-mouth disease inquiry. We are looking at a wide range of areas 
where there are individual things where we think we could deal with it 
better because there's a clear lesson from some incidents that have occurred 
like the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic.  But we don't get obsessed with 
this, it's a...we are delivering public services to the people of Wales 
in the way that they want them. We are bringing down unemployment to forty-six 
and a half thousand now in Wales compared to its peak during the Tory years 
of hundred and sixty-eight and a half thousand during the year 1986.  It's 
back now to 1975 levels.  There was an increase in the total number of 
jobs in the Welsh economy last year of thirty-three thousand from September 
'01 to September '02.  These are huge achievements which we have done in 
partnership with Westminster.  We are doing a good job for the people of 
Wales.

HUMPHRYS:                    If the Richard Commission 
were to recommend fairly drastic things, such as the ability for you to 
raise tax, whether you wanted to raise it or not and I accept you might 
not want to raise it but, nonetheless, if you were to do that, you would 
say what? - we'd have to have a referendum before that could be agreed, 
or what?

MORGAN:                    The whole purpose of setting 
up the Richard Commission is for them to be able to report back to the 
Assembly with the ability to look back at the whole of the Assembly's first 
term, so they will be reporting in about October of next year, ten months', 
eleven months' time, and then the Assembly will debate the consequences...well 
the conclusions rather, of the Richard Commission.  And then it's a matter 
really for each party to pick that up in any way that they want. They will 
either reject or accept part or all of the Richard Commission recommendations 
and then it's a natural consequence of that, that each party will look 
at it and will say: right, well what we do we want to put in the manifesto 
for the next general election - full acceptance of any recommendations 
from the Richard Commission, what are the consequences of that, for the 
need for another referendum, if it was that kind of change that they were 
proposing.  If that's what the Assembly accepted, that's a matter for parties 
to take forward, as parties always do, there's no magic about it and no 
rocket science.

HUMPHRYS:                    Rhodri Morgan, many thanks.

MORGAN:                    Thank you.