Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Debate between Lord Wigley and Baroness Randerson

Consideration of Commons amendments
Thursday 8th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I will intervene very briefly, as I did at earlier stages of the Bill, having taken good note of the comments made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd.

I press on the Government the question of the definition of reserved powers. This goes broader than this amendment and may be something that needs to be looked at in another context, in its own right. Under those circumstances, I accept the lead that has been given by the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, and I hope the Government keep the issue alive in their mind.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, for moving this amendment. I too will be brief. It is important to restate the principles involved here. The Bill is one of a series from this Government that trespass boldly—I would say foolishly—on devolution. The United Kingdom Internal Market Act, the Procurement Bill and the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill do so distinctly, but this Bill takes it to another level. The overwhelming majority of the list of services for which it seeks to set minimum standards and take control are devolved services, and the noble and learned Lord spoke about this. Add to this the Government’s habit of ignoring the need for legislative consent Motions and we are well on the way to a constitutional crisis, which this Government seem openly to invite.

Even now, the Government do not seem to have decided how to develop and impose minimum service levels. Back in March, the Constitution Committee expressed surprise at this in its report, and it is significant that we are still at this point in June. It is nonsense to imagine that the Government can impose minimum service levels, in effect from a distance, on a service for which they have no responsibility at any level, and, in the case of Welsh-medium education, for which they do not even understand the language in which the rules and standards are written.

As it stands, the Bill is unworkable and damaging. The noble and learned Lord’s original amendment, which was agreed by the House, sought to limit the scope of the Bill. The elegance of the new amendment is that it would allow the devolved Administrations to give agreement in the normal way.

In the different political climate of the past, in devolution as it used to be practised and operate, there would be discussions, co-operation, compromises and ultimately agreement between the UK Government and the devolved Administrations. There would be legislative consent Motions agreed before we agreed legislation here. The norms have gone and that is a serious problem for our future democracy.

Subsidy Control Bill

Debate between Lord Wigley and Baroness Randerson

Committee stage
Monday 31st January 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak specifically to Amendment 6, to which I have added my name. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, explicitly outlined its importance.

This very important group of amendments seeks to get to the core of what this is all about: why are subsidies required? As it stands, the Bill sets out seven subsidy control principles, which you could actually call rules and which on their own can easily be interpreted in a mutually contradictory way. They are further complicated by additional “energy and environmental principles”, by “subsidy schemes” versus “streamlined subsidy schemes”, and by “schemes of interest” versus schemes of “particular interest”.

This web of rules is combined with a complete lack of context. I take to heart the points just made by the noble Lord, Lord Lamont. As a councillor in south Wales, I was on the receiving end of changing maps. There is great significance in maps as an instrument to encourage investment in certain areas. If you are not going to have a deprived areas map for places to be assisted, you can have a carefully written industrial strategy that sets out terms on which assistance would be given to help the less prosperous areas. There is also a clear potential for overlap with other government schemes. It seems that levelling-up funding could well be seen to be in direct contravention of several of the principles set out in the Bill.

All this is further complicated by the unbalanced power structure at the top. I will not go through it again, but we will undoubtedly do so at different points on our amendments over the next few meetings. Briefly, the crux of the problem is that the Secretary of State is the Minister for England at one moment and the UK’s referee at another. In addition, there is a weak regulator with ill-defined powers and a lack of transparency, with high financial limits at which subsidies have to be registered. All this together strikes me as a chaotic system that is cooking up a bureaucratic nightmare because it does not have the clarity of the map or of the industrial strategy. It is a lawyer’s dream come true and invites litigation.

My noble friend Lord Fox gave us some excellent examples, and we could add to them the overt conflict between the principles of this Bill and those of the ARIA Bill. I was one of the Peers sitting here prior to Christmas discussing the Government’s desire to have the freedom to invest without particular principles that they would have to obey. I cannot see how that does not conflict with this Bill.

The amendment from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, tries to start to sort this out. So far the Government clearly do not know what they want, or they would have set it out in much greater detail and with much more clarity. Another way of looking at this is that the Government have been given all the cards in terms of power and can brush aside competition. They can hide significant subsidies that fall below the very generous thresholds that they have set out. It leaves the Government free to pick winners on the flimsiest of evidence—almost as was done over PPE at the start of the Covid pandemic, and we know what grief that has caused to both the Government and taxpayers.

Crucially, Amendment 6 sets out a process of agreement between the four Governments on what constitutes “disadvantaged areas” that are hence in need of levelling-up subsidies. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, said, this must be a decision taken at a political level. It is not suitable for the CMA or the Competition Appeal Tribunal; their job is to judge individual cases against the rules established as a result of political decision-making.

Amendment 6 would once again establish in legislation the existing concept of common frameworks in relation to this topic. There are of course dozens of common frameworks on everything, from nutritional labelling to rail technical standards, from blood safety to motor insurance. Each has a set of rules on how the four Governments of the UK will co-operate to ensure that individual internal markets work properly. If any mechanism is likely to disrupt relationships within the internal market then subsidies are the one, so a formal common framework with evenly balanced dispute mechanisms is required. That way, the Governments of the four nations can establish their own priorities for subsidies and ultimately subject them to a formal dispute procedure if needed.

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I had not intended to intervene in this debate, and I am going to do so not from a particularly Welsh angle but from a general one. I identify with Amendment 6 and the comments of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, with regard to the practicality of any Act like this being interpreted by the courts. We are going to create a monster if we are not careful, and it may well fall down because of its own inertia.

Three areas of experience spring to mind for me in addressing this question. The first is the old—am I allowed to say it?—Chinese saying that if you give a man or woman a fish then you feed them for a day, but if you teach them to fish then you feed them for a lifetime. Therefore, any long-term economic strategy must be geared towards enabling that to fulfil itself, so that we are not just providing subsidies for the day but providing a basis on which to build.

The second experience that comes to mind is writing an economic plan back in 1970 with the late, great Phil Williams, whom some colleagues here will remember from the National Assembly. We did an analysis to find winners in terms of industry and in terms of geographic location. Most of them worked out. In fact, they were fairly common-sense things—electronics, chemistry and so on—and I suspect that they would have fulfilled themselves had there been no grant mechanism, because they were doing what there was a momentum towards.

My third and final point concerns our experience in Wales with regard to European funding; I have no doubt that similar experience will have been obtained in Cornwall, South Yorkshire, Merseyside, parts of Scotland and wherever such funding was available. The funding went not just to narrow projects but to areas of investment with a long-term payback, such as work, even blue-sky projects, in our universities. These would not create immediate jobs but provided a basis on which industry and commerce, and those who were going to invest in them, could look to the future. The scheme of grants that was available then through the European Union was very broad; we should not ignore that dimension. We need mechanisms that enable that to happen. If we can get this right, it could be very valuable. It may well be that this Bill has that potential in it, but there is a lot that needs to be clarified at the moment. Some of these amendments may help tease that out.

European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Debate between Lord Wigley and Baroness Randerson

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 15th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, my name is also attached to Amendments 18, 23 and 45. I am very pleased to support the points made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay.

The issues at question are issues of trust between the devolved Governments and the Government of the United Kingdom. Nobody is arguing that the devolved Governments have power over international treaties—of course they do not; they are reserved powers. None the less, what will be undertaken in those treaties will almost certainly have a very direct effect on matters that are devolved, some of them fully, to the National Assembly for Wales, and likewise to Scotland and Northern Ireland in slightly different ways.

To that extent, there have been occasions when the UK Government has been well represented in negotiations in Brussels by Ministers from the Government of Wales. It is perfectly right that they should be there on matters such as the sheepmeat regime or when questions of smaller languages are debated. When such matters arise, as is likely, in the context of any ongoing treaties or new treaties that will emerge, it is vital that the confidence of the Welsh Government and the National Assembly, and likewise that of Scotland and Northern Ireland, is taken fully into account.

The real danger is that things happen by default. The UK Government, with all the good will in the world, might think that issues do not arise without having talked about them. There needs to be some system to avoid unnecessary tension and rows between the various Governments within the United Kingdom.

I did not participate in the debate last night, but I read with considerable interest the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Duncan of Springbank. He said:

“This debate has taken a turn that I had not anticipated—the notion that a power is now being granted to the Government to undo that which has been set before: if you like, the magisterium of the law which sets up the elements of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. That is not the purpose of this rule.”


He goes on to say that he would be happy to make a note available

“to all noble Lords who are interested in this, so they can see where we believe this power will be required”.—[Official Report, 14/1/20; col. 639.]

The point is that if the noble Lord, Lord Duncan, has recognised that there is a need for greater clarification than is provided in the Bill, surely with the Bill still going to Parliament there is an opportunity to table amendments, such as the ones proposed in this group, to safeguard the position. It is not enough to have a sentence in Hansard. That obviously helps to clarify the position, but there needs to be something more cast-iron than that.

This is not a party-political issue, it is a matter of getting means of sensible co-operation into the Bill. If the Government cannot accept the amendments now, I very much hope that between now and Report they will consider these issues and try to bring in some form of wording that gives an assurance in the Bill along the lines that the noble Lord, Lord Duncan, suggested last night.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, these amendments are designed to cement the established position of the devolved Administrations in the new situation in which we will find ourselves.

Amendment 18 to Clause 22 relates to any amendment to the statutes establishing devolution. They can be amended by a Section 109 Order in Council as long as the devolved Administrations agree but, as the clause stands, it leads to a suspicion that the Government could take the power to change devolution settlements without the agreement of, for instance, the National Assembly of Wales. We need the Government to make it clear one way or the other that they do not intend to do this.

Amendment 23 to Clause 26 simply adds devolved Ministers to the list of those to be consulted before the Government bring forward regulations referred to in that clause. Amendment 45 to Clause 38 relates to the Sewel convention. It simply inserts the well-established principle that Parliament will not normally legislate on devolved matters without legislative consent from the National Assembly for Wales.

I want to spend a little longer on Amendment 29, which puts the Joint Ministerial Committee on EU Negotiations on a statutory footing and requires representatives of devolved Administrations to be briefed regularly on future relationship negotiations. The history of the JMC as a whole has been chequered, to say the least. I have been privileged to see it from both sides: from the Welsh perspective as a Minister between 2000 and 2003 in a coalition in the National Assembly, and from 2011 to 2015 when I was a Minister in the Wales Office here.

In the early years, 2000 to 2003, I would describe the JMC as having been part of an old boys’ network. Labour was in power, in government, both here and in Cardiff, where it led the coalition. There was a dangerous lack of formality about the business we did. It was very good humoured but it did not have structure and was slightly erratic. It at least met regularly, if not frequently, but its behaviour was erratic. From 2010, I would characterise relationships as at the other end of the spectrum, with the coalition Government— the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives—here, the SNP in Scotland and Labour in Wales, as well as the complexity of Northern Ireland. I would say it was more of an armed standoff in those years. It provided an opportunity to have a well-scripted, very formal row with each other, with people coming out on to the steps of Downing Street to tell the world what they had said on their side of the argument. As a result, not surprisingly, it did not meet that frequently. Having observed the JMC in recent times, it does not seem to have got much better.

The devolved Administrations have drawn a lot of their strength and confidence from their vital EU links, which affect so much of the devolved work that is taken in those countries. Those links are now to be severed. As a Welsh Minister in the early years of this century, for instance, I represented the combined Governments of the UK at a European Council of Ministers; the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, referred to that kind of situation in his speech. I presented the agreed joint position of those Governments. It has given the devolved Administrations status and strength and is a very important part of their overall situation.