Implications of Devolution for England

Debate between Lord Richard and Lord Elis-Thomas

Tuesday 16th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elis-Thomas (PC)]

My Lords—

[Lord Richard (Lab)]

My Lords—

Wales Bill

Debate between Lord Richard and Lord Elis-Thomas

Tuesday 11th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Richard (Lab)]

My Lords, I did not intend to speak in this debate until I heard the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Deben. I shall make two points. First, he is absolutely right that the constitution of the United Kingdom as a whole needs a good looking at. There is no question about that. It needs looking at rationally, sensibly and at a very high level. Therefore, I have for a long time been in favour of some kind of convention or royal commission which would do precisely that task. That is one issue.

The other issue is what you do about Wales now. You cannot mix the two up and pretend that the Welsh issue is not an issue that has to be dealt with before the royal commission begins to sit. The position with the Welsh Assembly at the moment is that it has—to use the noble Lord’s phrase—an irrational system whereby it is entitled to legislate. I would have thought that the noble Lord would agree that perhaps some rationality should be brought into the Welsh system. You would then at least have conformity between Wales and Scotland.

The relationship between the devolved Administrations and the centre is precisely the issue that then has to be looked at by a royal commission when it comes to consider the constitution as a whole. I do not think you can just pretend that the situation in Wales does not really exist and wait for the deliberations of a royal commission, which may take some time, as they usually do, and when it reports, the report usually takes a long time to be properly considered. I think there is a distinction there.

[Lord Elis-Thomas (PC)]

My Lords, I am a little reticent to enter the debate on the basis of rationality because I once had to resit an examination in logic, happily in the university of which I am now the chancellor, so some things work out. This has been an extremely illuminating debate for all of us, not least because we have had further highlights from the memoirs of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, which I am sure many noble Lords have already read. I remember those days in the 1970s very vividly. I pay tribute to him for his consistency in this matter and for his consistency at that time. He has pointed out how he was so keen to ensure that there was not a flanker movement on the part of the Scots, as there always is in politics and occasionally is in sport. He ensured that the issue of Wales stood alongside the issue of Scotland at that time. We had a few cups of tea, and other things, at that time to discuss these matters, and we are where we are today because of the way that he stood firm.

If this is the day of the eulogy of the conferred powers model, I want to say some positive things about it. I was elected Presiding Officer in the Assembly, and I had to work with the three constitutions we have had so far: the executive period; the transitional period of the late lamented—perhaps not—requests for permission to legislate; and now the period post the 2011 referendum on the conferred model conferring full legislative powers with exceptions.

As I mentioned in Committee it is important to say that in constitutional theory, as far as I am concerned, conferred powers with reduced or no exception, bring us to the same place as reserved matters. It means that the subject set out in Schedule 7—the latest and most relevant model—and Clause 108 of the Government of Wales Act 2006 gives us those powers as defined. There is no ambiguity there.

Wales Bill

Debate between Lord Richard and Lord Elis-Thomas

Monday 13th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Richard]

My Lords, I strongly support this amendment. If one goes back 10 years to the report of the commission that I had the honour of chairing, we then identified this as one of the problems the Assembly had then and would face increasingly in the future. I will spend just two minutes on analysing where the Assembly is in this regard. We have 60 Members in the National Assembly in Wales; the Scottish Parliament has 129 and the Northern Ireland Assembly has 108.

At first sight, those numbers are a bit odd. I do not see why they should be quite as different as they are. If one then goes on to look at what the present 60 in the National Assembly of Wales do, only 42 of them are actually available to hold the Welsh Government to account and scrutinise legislation. Indeed, at one stage it was even worse than that. At the time of the Labour-Plaid Cymru coalition, there were 41 Members either from Labour or Plaid Cymru, leaving only 19 from a non-governing party to scrutinise the whole body of Assembly legislation. The noble Lord, Lord Bourne, who is sitting on the Front Bench opposite me will no doubt remember those days pretty well since he was one of the 19.

Can that many Members do that work? The short answer is no. They could not do it 10 years ago and they certainly cannot do it now. I recently came across a quote from Rosemary Butler, the Presiding Officer of the National Assembly. She put it like this:

“There are only 42 Members to scrutinise £15 billion of taxpayers’ money, and to scrutinise the government on the big issues of the day—the future of our health service, our education system and the economy. On top of that they have to make sound, thoroughly scrutinized laws for our nation. A quarter of those 42 members sit on three committees, half sit on two”.

She concludes with the comment:

“One would simply not find the same level of workload on Members in Westminster, Holyrood or Stormont”.

That is clearly true.

Over the years, we have given the Assembly greater powers. We have not increased the number of people available to deal with those powers and scrutinise the way they are used. In this Bill, we propose to give them more powers. We will no doubt, in the not too distant future, have proposals to give the Assembly further powers again. To keep the limit at 60 is frankly ludicrous. It hobbles the way in which the Assembly works and means that laws are not sufficiently scrutinised. It means, too, that the way money is spent is not sufficiently looked at. Quite honestly, it breeds inefficiency. The argument for increasing it from 60 to 80 is, frankly, irrefutable.

The only argument now is whether it should be 80 or go up to 100. I have an open mind on that. As a first step, going up to 80 would satisfy me for the moment. If you are to give the Assembly more powers, and if it is to become a Parliament in the sense that the Scottish Parliament is one, 80 may not be enough. Assuredly, if you are to do that, 60 will not be. I support this amendment.

[Lord Elis-Thomas (PC)]

My Lords, it is always a delight to follow a debate proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Rowe-Beddoe, and spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Richard—to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude for having defined an ideal model in 2004 of what the National Assembly could have been.

My Amendment 9 has a whiff of relative autonomy about it, which will not surprise noble Lords. Although I deny being a separatist and I am not an upper-case Nationalist, I am certainly an avid, totally committed, complete devolutionist. My amendment—which my noble friend supports—proposes that the Assembly should decide its own size. No doubt many constitutional objections will be put forward to this notion. However, the amendment proposes that the decision should be subject to the very important principle of a majority of not less than two-thirds of voting Assembly Members on a vote of the whole Assembly. That is a feature we have already in our constitution—and use regularly. It applies to dissolution Motions and other Motions within our procedures.

My amendment has the support—and I had the assistance in drafting it—of the Electoral Reform Society Cymru. I will not detain the Committee by quoting from Size Matters—I know the Government have read it. However, it provides a comparative analysis of the size of national Assemblies—that is Parliaments; we will come to this at a later stage this evening, perhaps with the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan. The key issue is the ratio of Members to the size of the electorate in a given constituency, and the relationship between the two. It also looks at the legislative Assemblies of other comparable European regions or nations— whatever you wish to call them. Again, it looks at their size in relation to function. What is relevant in this analysis is the functional level. In other words, with the amount of devolutionary power that the National Assembly for Wales already has, we are reaching the norm of the European Union—and the Canadian provinces, another comparator. However, we are nowhere near the norm in terms of the number of Members.

Therefore, this amendment would give the National Assembly the ability to decide its own membership subject to the agreement of a two-thirds majority of Members. This is a proper devolutionary measure for the nature of the constitution itself. I know that that is a difficult concept for the Committee to understand. I am sorry to say that the United Kingdom is still an extremely centralist state. It is not a unitary state and never has been. It is a state of unions and those unions are different, for historical reasons. But the nation of Wales, despite the great time we had during the Tudor ascendancy, is not well placed in the pecking order of UK devolution. This amendment seeks to redress that. I know the Government will not be able to accept the amendment because it is too autonomous—but it is a constitutional principle that it is important to present in this discussion.

Scotland: Independence

Debate between Lord Richard and Lord Elis-Thomas

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elis-Thomas (PC)]

My Lords, when I sent my name in for this debate, I suspected that I might end up in a minority but I did not expect to be in a minority of one. However, there is on the wall of this House a very important reminder of the failure of the House of Lords to understand issues of home rule, as it was then called. Of course, I am referring to the two famous portraits of the 1890s which show their Lordships—in those days bedecked in fine top hats, of course—doing down the aspirations of the Irish people. I wish to speak about the idea of the exercise of sovereignty within an existing state and the way in which that can and should happen in a context that respects everyone’s rights to self-determination as peoples.

I am very grateful to the Constitution Committee for the way in which it has exercised its judgment on this issue but I am concerned about the constitutional framework that is being pursued. My suspicion is that the notions of a continuator state and a successor state are not precisely analogous in the present position. I know that there are no other precedents but it is important for us to consider how the devolution transformation has changed the United Kingdom already and how it might change it again.

What has really dismayed me about this debate is that your Lordships seem to believe that the United Kingdom was created by almighty God. The United Kingdom is a constitutional chapter of accidents, just like most other constitutions are. As someone who has studied the history of these islands, I am aware that the United Kingdom did not remain a kingdom as originally conceived, with the union of the kingdom of Scotland and the kingdom of England, which had already taken on the Principality of Wales, with Ireland, but that existed in history only for some 150 years. So why is that state form the only thing that we can envisage in the 21st century?

I confess publicly that if I had a vote in Scotland I would vote yes. That does not make me a nationalist with a capital N and it certainly does not make me a separatist. The badge that I habitually wear indicates which Union I think is the most important to belong to—the European Union—alongside the nation of Wales, but that does not mean that I do not consider it to have been a great privilege in my political life to have served in this building for 40 years. That is my approach to this issue.

What I have tried to do here for that period, especially the 15 years I have spent trying to establish the constitution of Wales, with a lot of help from my noble friend Lord Richard—I was glad to hear him say earlier that his work is yet unfinished; I look forward to the time when we will have more equality in the numbers of Members who serve across the United Kingdom in our assemblies—is to have a positive approach to trying to make devolution work. To that end, I have always emphasised the important principle of the sovereignty of the people and of the self-determination of peoples. This is what I find very attractive about both the original Scottish Government White Paper—much attacked and savaged in this Chamber—and, more recently, the draft independence Bill.

I am a big fan of what is usually known as the continental way of making constitutions—in other words, putting down basic principles and indicating fundamental rights—and here we have a fine example in how a series of policies is set out. The noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, has already referred to this matter. As a former Defence Minister—and someone with whom I have had disagreements in the past on matters of nuclear disarmament—he is quite seriously concerned about a Scottish Government who are attempting to make nuclear disarmament a principle of the constitution. Well, for heaven’s sake. We have a situation where 190 countries have already signed the non-proliferation treaty, so is it not rather good—for some of us, anyway—that one of the nations of the United Kingdom might decide to do that by its constitution?

Apart from the international issue of disarmament, there are issues relating to social policy, which is set in the constitution, and in particular there are issues involving the environment. Again, I would be very attracted to a yes vote on these grounds—the commitment to legislate on biodiversity and to address the mitigation of climate change, following on from what the Scottish Government have already done in this area in the Climate Change (Scotland) Act and so on. The notion of placing in one’s constitution, as about 90 other countries have done, the right to a healthy environment is also attractive. However, perhaps most attractive is the provision for a permanent constitution to be prepared as a written constitution by a further constitution convention. It is not something that the Scottish Government themselves are seeking to do; it is something that they are seeking to establish by the same principle by which devolution was established—that is, through a convention made up of civic society.

In contrast to everyone else who has spoken, I do not see these huge fears about the future of the United Kingdom and I do not share the pessimism. I will co-operate of course with whatever refreshed union—to use the term of the noble Lord, Lord Purvis—will emerge from these discussions. I still believe, however, that the best way forward is a yes vote in Scotland. This would have a catalytic effect on constitutional development not only north of the border but across the Marches of Wales.

[Lord Richard]

Since the noble Lord was kind enough to refer to me, I wonder whether he could answer a question. I heard what he said—I listened with great interest—but is he saying that at the end of the day he wants to see a United Kingdom in which Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the regions still participate, or is he saying that he wants to see a United Kingdom which Scotland, and possibly also Wales, is no longer part of?

[Lord Elis-Thomas]

What I certainly see is the constitutional position, especially since there will be one common head of state, where what we are talking about is not the end of the United Kingdom but the creation of united kingdoms or the recreation of united kingdoms, which of course includes the Principality of Wales and indeed a significant portion of the island of Ireland. Especially when we look at the new relationships within the island of Ireland, there are myriad possibilities. I look forward with excitement to the further changes in the history of our kingdom.