‘A meteor shower of devolution moments is on the way...’
Last week my wife, Alison, and I drove into the grounds of Cardiff’s Heath Hospital to visit an amazing woman who filled our lives with kindness during the years we both lived in the city.
As we entered the multi-storey car park, Alison exclaimed: “Oh, wow! It’s free!”
That’s a devolution moment. Until June, it had cost up to £10 to park at the hospital for a day. In England, car-parking charges raised £174m in 2016-17 in what is a de facto tax on using the NHS and visiting the sick.
But in Wales the days of fumbling for cash or wearily inserting a debit card are gone.
A barrier between patients and the wider community has been removed, and as we wandered the concrete maze in search of the right ward it felt as if, absolutely, the right decision had been made.
Scrapping the charges is an example of what happens when a nation gets the chance to make its own decisions. The policy could be worth every penny in lost revenue if it combats isolation and removes a burden of stress and financial pressure from families at a fraught time.
Wales has some of the lowest wage levels in the UK. If free parking makes it more likely people will visit hospitalised friends, relatives and neighbours, this could boost the morale of patients and accelerate recovery.
The results of the Welsh innovation will be scrutinised by champions and critics of free parking in England.
The UK Government has resisted scrapping charges on the other side of Offa’s Dyke, last year arguing that it would “result in some £200m per year being taken from clinical care budgets to make up the shortfall”.
But Jeremy Corbyn has said Labour would axe the charges and pay for it by hiking up the insurance tax on private healthcare to 20%.
England is also refusing to bow to pressure to follow Wales’ example and introduce free prescriptions.
In 2017 it claimed that this would open up a “funding gap of more than £520m each year”, which was the equivalent of employing 12,000 nurses.
In a further injection of red water between the two nations, the Welsh Government has also agreed to a more generous pay deal for doctors than in England.
All this comes at a time when the NHS in all parts of the UK is under pressure. Health ministers in each of the nations face the same challenge of trying to save the greatest number of lives in the most efficient way – and patients across the UK will be winners if different approaches lead to a deeper understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
The Welsh experiment with free parking is also a classic example of how when a minister cranks a lever of power there is no guarantee of an instant result.
The policy was first announced back in 2008 when Edwina Hart was Health Minister and Labour was in government with Plaid Cymru. It would take more than a decade for the last commercial parking contracts to end.
Ms Hart has retired as the AM for Gower and young people who were in primary school when she unveiled the policy are now in university, but she put real change in motion on her watch.
Wales has had its own government for less than two decades, with only modest powers for much of this time.
But the changes it has introduced – including the ban on free singleuse carrier bags and the prohibition on smoking in public places – have raised awareness that this nation has the chance to craft its own solutions to pressing problems.
The experience of not being charged for a prescription probably did more to awake people to the reality of devolution than the construction of the Senedd in Cardiff Bay.
If the second decade of devolution had not coincided with the introduction of austerity policies in the wake of the financial crisis, ministers might have been even bolder in their policies. They have had the difficult task of trying to boost standards across public services without running out of cash.
The silver lining to this is that a generation of public servants have had to use all the ingenuity and resourcefulness they can muster to deliver the best solutions at a time when throwing money at a problem should not be an option.
Theresa May used her flagship conference speech in Birmingham last week to announce that austerity is coming to an end. We can hope that a combination of hard-learned lessons in management efficiency and new resources will drive forward a chapter of innovation and improvement in our public services.
The Welsh Government will also have the option of altering income tax rates to boost its spending power or as part of an effort to make Wales a more attractive home for entrepreneurs.
It will be a true “devolution moment” if workers in Wales realise their take-home wages are higher or lower than their counterparts’ in England.
Welsh Conservatives spy a rich political opportunity. If the big question facing voters in previous Assembly elections was who they wanted in charge of spending public money in Wales, now they will have to decide which party they want to be in charge of raising tax.
This is all part of a dramatic and accelerating period of change with profound consequences for Wales and its place in the Union – right at the moment when Brexit is collapsing erstwhile certainties.
In the days when Wales’ health and education systems were largely the same as in England, what it meant to be Welsh could be defined in cultural terms, such as a devotion to the nation’s language, traditions and history.
But, increasingly, there will be unique and inescapable social, legal, economic and financial implications that will come with living in Wales.
A meteor shower of devolution moments is on the way and the debate about the future of this land and its people will grow in breadth, diversity and urgency as different groups are outraged and delighted by the latest innovations, gambles and experiments undertaken by a young democracy.
Governments in all parts of the UK will make blunders and politicians in every legislature will disgrace themselves, but if we can learn from mistakes and embrace the best ideas there is every reason to look to the future with ambition and hope.