Wales Bill

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 10th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I have Amendment 82 in this group. It is a question, as my noble friend Lord Elystan-Morgan said, of flow. The problem for Wales is the flow of alcohol: Wales does not have the ability to control how that flow starts and how that supply chain moves. We in Wales are lumbered with the costs of alcohol abuse, both direct and indirect. There are direct costs in health and social care and indirect ones in damage to other people, either directly to another person or secondarily, through bereavement and so on. There is a real problem of culture around alcohol consumption in Wales. We should remember that while Scotland has the same culture of drinking, it has been given a degree of control. I fear that it is not always a pretty sight. Things have improved greatly but the Welsh Government does have to have the powers to do something about it.

There is another aspect of this that needs to be considered. We understand very little, really, about the way that alcohol interacts on the brain and on the reward centre, on people developing cravings. It is quite possible that the epigenetics mean that when you have a background culture of a family where there has been drinking, an individual’s reward centre responds differently. It may just be that people in Wales, having been born into a culture of drinking are more predisposed, more likely to develop an addictive tendency towards alcohol. It seems bizarre, when this is such a social problem and when the costs are really all borne at a local level, that the ability to control it is not given to the very Government that have responsibility for dealing with those problems.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to say a few words about Amendment 90. I will not stray into the internal affairs of Wales but this matter came up in debating the Trade Union Bill last year. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, mentioned the need for sound constitutional principles. I think that supporting sound constitutional principles should lead us to resist Amendment 90—which, to use a term of the noble Lord, Lord West, represents mission creep.

The amendment looks fairly innocuous and can be split into two parts. On “Terms and conditions of employment”, we keep hearing how Wales has managed to escape difficulties with doctors and has an excellent education system—although I am not sure whether the recent OECD figures bear that out—thanks to its ability to deal with terms and conditions. But, when you move on to the next bit of the amendment, “and industrial relations”, you open up a Pandora’s box. Given the Explanatory Notes accompanying the Bill, once you admit that industrial relations in Welsh public authorities are a devolved matter, you open up a huge area of debate as to what constitutes a public authority or industrial relations. For instance, could you have a different minimum wage for public servants in Wales or would you then get disputes between the private and public sectors?

[Lord Hain]

I acknowledge that the noble Lord represents Conservative trade unionists, which must be a noble and valiant role to play, but the definition of public services is in the legislation passed by this House. It is set in statute; there is no question of redefining it or inventing new public bodies. It is all defined and the amendment repeats that.

[Lord Balfe]

I thank the noble Lord for his intervention, but I am sure that there would be plenty of room for disputes; this would not end the dispute. Perhaps the Supreme Court is needed to rule on this, but the proposed clause would not help us to go forward in any way. It is a slippery slope. We have a difficulty and clearly it needs to be defined. If this clause were passed and added to the Bill, it would not be the end of the matter; it would actually complicate matters and make them more confused. I make a practice of reading absolutely every scrap of paper that comes to me from the TUC—not a week goes by without something arriving—and, if this were such an important matter, I wonder why no one has asked me to support or even consider supporting this clause. It is sheer opportunism.

[Baroness Morgan of Ely]

My Lords, the point is that, under the conferred powers model of governance at the moment, we already have this power. It is in the move to the reserved powers model that we are losing this power. That is why we are so outraged by this move.

[Lord Balfe]

Well, some see it as that. I see it as a clarification that was needed—something that became quite clear last year. I suggest that we resist this amendment. It will not take us anywhere further forward and I am not sure that it is useful. It will open up many further legal cases and I hope that the House will reject it.

[Lord Elis-Thomas (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will make clear my strong support for Amendment 90, for the reasons that have been made clear on both sides of this debate, and from my own experience as a trade union member and a manager in the public sector in Wales at different periods of my life. I will confine myself, as I have during the course of the Bill, to the constitutional principles—if I may use the term again—rather than discussing specific subjects.

This is where I have to disappoint three of my noble friends. The noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, is a very old friend—I mean old in terms of our association, since I believe I first met him in a Crown Court in Ruthin in the very early 1960s. I hasten to add that I was not the defendant; my father was a witness there. With the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, I had the pleasure of discussing issues as soon as I arrived in the other place as a very young Member of Parliament. The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, of course came in with me at that time. I shall disappoint all three by expressing my considered view that we no longer need working groups chaired by Secretaries of State—although I recognise that a Secretary of State is present at the Bar of the House today, along with one of his ministerial colleagues.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Kinnock]

My Lords, there are many issues on which I find myself in agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Balfe. There used to be more, it must be said, in a different political lifetime, but I greet with some dismay the fact that I have to diverge from him on this issue, simply because he is wrong. I particularly pursue the point made in her intervention by my noble friend Lady Morgan. The noble Lord, Lord Balfe, used the term “mission creep” to describe Amendment 90. Of course, that can be employed as a derogatory description of any development. If we put it in the context of devolution, however, we could categorise devolution entirely as “mission creep” because the whole proposition on which it has been based in this country—and perhaps, indeed, in biology, from which it derives—is that there will be an accretion of competences as time passes and the sophistication of devolved Administrations and legislatures takes place.

[Lord Balfe]

I wonder if the noble Lord recalls our jointly campaigning on the Welsh referendum in the 1970s. We were on the same side, of course, but presumably where he is now is the definition of mission creep.

[Lord Kinnock]

No, it is the definition of the fact that when confronted with reality, I try to make it work. Consequently, while I retain some reservations about the whole way in which devolution is taking place in the United Kingdom, I am utterly in favour of decentralisation of administration and decision-making, which any democrat must be, but would quarrel with the sectional and selective form of devolution that is taking place. I would argue on another occasion that, had we undertaken in 1979, let alone in the 1990s, the form of devolution that I and some of my colleagues, including my noble friend from Pontypool, were then advocating, there would have been devolution throughout the whole of the United Kingdom. Perhaps we would not be confronted with the constitutional mismatches and disequilibria that confront us now, especially when we are faced with the prospect of the disaster of Brexit. I will return to that on a different occasion.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, that the accretion of competencies that has taken place is in the nature of devolution. Indeed, the Minister could take justifiable credit for producing a Bill that assists in the clarification and strengthening of the whole devolution process. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, will welcome the redemption of the Conservative Party, which, back in 1979, took a view that was almost as enlightened as mine on the issue. The most important point—and it is fundamental to this amendment and this Bill—is that the argument in favour of Amendment 90 is that those powers currently exist and they manifestly work. I am therefore employing, in a sense, a conservative argument in saying, “If it works, don’t fix it”.

What happens in Wales—and has happened for several years past—is that the powers advocated for retention in this current set of arrangements for devolution should remain: not that there should be mission creep, but restoration of the status quo. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, that surely, in his changed political prism, he would recognise and wrap his arms around the principle of the maintenance of the status quo that works. It is on that basis that I hope the Minister will give further consideration to these arguments and retain a set of arrangements that work, that are warmly endorsed by everybody involved in Wales, and that do not constitute the difficulty of definition suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, in discriminating between public and private employers. The terms on which this measure, if accepted, would be retained, properly describe where the responsibilities and obligations would lie and be exercised. It works now; do not fix it.