Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Wilson of Dinton Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 2nd March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My noble friend interjects that I was right. Well, I may have been right, but I lost. We all lost. The fact is that we have devolved Administrations. Two of them are active and I devoutly hope and pray that the third will be active again very soon. It is very important that we make this system work. All we are asking for is for my noble friend Lord Callanan to adopt as his motto “festina lente”—make haste slowly—and make real progress as one does so.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, made a very wise speech. He laid out just the sort of complexities that we face. I just hope that this Bill, which I believe to be unnecessary in its present form, and premature, can be paused. I hope it can go into the same compartment that the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill has now gone into. That is what I hope for. I believe passionately—the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, underlines this—that this is going to do harm to our United Kingdom and to our relations with our European friends and former partners. Neither of those things is in the interest of our country or is going to contribute to a stable future for it.

[Lord Wilson of Dinton (CB)]

My Lords, I am not sure I am wise to rise and speak, but I feel as a matter of honesty I must, in response to my noble and learned friend Lord Thomas, who spoke brilliantly.

Let me confess that I was Cabinet Secretary during devolution legislation and its implementation. I oversaw the implementation of devolution. I can confirm everything that my noble and learned friend said. It was messy behind the scenes. Noble Lords may not remember that the legislation went through Parliament amazingly easily and very fast. A lot of points that are being raised now should have been raised in different ways on that legislation. I was under instructions from the then Prime Minister Mr Blair that my misgivings about whether it would weaken the union—I shared them—should be set aside and we should use devolution as a way of strengthening the union, and implement it with harmony.

I had in place a structure with my colleagues in Wales and Scotland to oversee the effective implementation. There were endless points of the kind that my noble and learned friend raised from before 1999 and on the legislation, which we had to sort out. I had monthly meetings—these went on for years—with my Permanent Secretary colleagues from Wales and Scotland in particular to discuss and go through detailed issues which arose on the legislation on assets, personalities, quangos and everything, some of which were legal and some of which were not. I am pleased to tell noble Lords that I cannot remember them now. It is a blessing. I have tried to shed them, because they were difficult. But what I can say is that we dealt with them in the end with good will, good lawyers and great ingenuity. And we dealt with them—if I can confess it in the privacy of this Chamber—with a certain amount of fudge, because some of them were impossible to deal with without good will and pragmatism.

But I am certain that this Bill has overlooked a great deal. I am afraid that there will be more horrible loose ends for my successors to try to sort out. The amendments that the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, my noble and learned friend Lord Hope and others have put down are wise. The Government should allow themselves every scope for sorting things out for years to come, whatever the sunsetting clause says, because there will be awful problems to sort out.