Welfare

Debate between Stephen Crabb and Hywel Williams

Monday 21st March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Crabb]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. When he uses the figure of 292,000, we should make it absolutely clear that we are talking about 292,000 disabled people who, with lots of support from the different initiatives of this Government, have made that transition back into work. That is a terrific record, but let us not be complacent. There is so much more to do if we are to achieve our manifesto promise of halving the disability employment gap.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

I congratulate the Secretary of State on his appointment and wish him well. He faces a huge challenge, but he also leaves behind a huge challenge for his colleagues in the Wales Office in respect of the Wales Bill. With one bound he was free—or possibly not. I welcome his commitment to resetting the conversation with disabled people. The abandoned changes to PIP were apparently based on review of just 105 cases of the more than 600,000 people who depend on PIP, supplemented apparently by 400 further reviews after the decision was taken. Will he guarantee that before further changes to welfare are proposed, proper, independent research will be publicly available beforehand?

[Stephen Crabb]

The kind of research that the hon. Gentleman talks about is always published by a Department ahead of any major policy change. There is a duty on Departments to publish impact assessments and to conduct their policy making in an open and transparent way. What I hope he has taken away from my statement today is my personal commitment to ensuring that as we look again at these really challenging long-term issues around disabled people moving into employment, I will be doing so in a way that is transparent, open and based on sound evidence.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Stephen Crabb and Hywel Williams

Wednesday 24th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Crabb]

I thank the right hon. Lady for her question. We are discussing something incredibly serious and sensitive. Let me put on record my thanks to her for the tireless work that she has put in over the years to fight for justice for those who have suffered horrendous abuse. We are talking about some of the most shameful episodes in the history of the nation of Wales.

We have the report, and it is being looked at by the Crown Prosecution Service, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the police. Lady Justice Macur recommended to the Government that certain redactions might need to be made. The commitment that I give to the right hon. Lady and the House today is that we will make redactions only where they are absolutely necessary, and we will provide a full explanation of why we are making those redactions. We owe that to the victims.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

12. Does the Secretary of State agree that there is concern about attention in the report to the language issue? The only attention that was given to the language issue in the Waterhouse report was to say that the children swore a great deal, as well they might have.

[Stephen Crabb]

The hon. Gentleman is getting into a level of detail about the matter that we can perhaps discuss outside this place on another occasion. Perhaps he and I could meet to talk about that.

[Hywel Williams]

The Wales Council for Voluntary Action criminal records unit, which provides free disclosure and barring checks for the third sector, will close on 31 May. The last paper application will be accepted this Friday. The WCVA has provided a bilingual service, which will cease on Friday. Does the Secretary of State share my concern about that cut?

[Stephen Crabb]

The hon. Gentleman knows that I want the Welsh language to flourish and be used on a day-to-day basis. I am not familiar with the case that he has raised, but if he wants to drop me a note, I will make sure that it is looked into fully.

Draft Wales Bill

Debate between Stephen Crabb and Hywel Williams

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 General Committees

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hanson. I apologise to you and the Committee for my slightly late arrival; I was detained by the Prime Minister’s statement.

I thank the Secretary of State for allowing us this pre-legislative stage for discussion. The Bill has sparked some vigorous debates about what Wales’s constitutional position should look like, not just among politicians but in civil society, although possibly not for the people on the streets of Aberavon. I hope that we will have sufficient time to think about and discuss the draft and the responses to it, not least by bodies such as the Wales Governance Centre. I would like to thank the centre for its excellent and useful report that was launched in Parliament last night. I also look forward to the report by the Welsh Affairs Committee. The discussions will take place not only today and tomorrow, but through the next weeks and months, so that parliamentarians and, more importantly, the people of Wales can come to a considered view, not subject to the time constraints of a party or parties facing difficult Assembly elections.

While I am glad that legal issues around workability and drafting are under the spotlight before the Bill is published in full, we have not had adequate time to scrutinise in debate the policy areas in the list of reservations. Members have mentioned the lack of a guiding principle in the list, and that absence is fairly clear. As far as I know, little effort has been made to justify the reservations as a group and the principle behind them. However, they do need to be justified.

I will give a small and obscure example. Members will recall that this morning I asked the Secretary of State for the justification for retaining alcohol and entertainment licences, and I referred to schedule 1 referring to schedule 7A, and so on. I would like to tell the Committee a very brief story about the debates around the Licensing Act. At that time, a number of local licensees told me that they would like to apply for their licences in Welsh. I asked the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport at the time whether application forms could be made available in Welsh. The Secretary of State, now safely ensconced in the upper echelons of the BBC—I think that is today’s equivalent of running away to sea—was embarrassed because he had no answer. He countered by offering me a meeting. At the meeting, I suggested the names of a number of translation companies, which could turn the forms around in a day. Inevitably, he said it was not as simple as that. It was not a mere matter of translation. Eventually, Welsh forms turned up, some 18 months later, long after the aforementioned licensees had despaired, and had applied for and been granted the licences in English.

I doubt that the Cardiff Government would be remiss in the first place, but if they were, they would get their skates on. Yet now, apparently, alcohol and entertainment licences must be retained here, although licensing is a local authority function and local authorities work through the Welsh, not the UK, Government, in general. I do not why it is in the list unless it is because DCMS insists that it is.

When I asked the Secretary of State all those years ago why he had not ensured that Welsh forms were available, he eventually confessed that a mere 13 years after the advent of the Welsh Language Act 1993, after 13 years of apparently serving the people of Wales well, his Department—the Department for culture, for heaven’s sake—still had no Welsh language plan. Is this the same Department that now insists that it retain the power over Welsh entertainment and alcohol licences, let alone S4C—I, of course, welcomed the announcement made today—or is the decision for our own Secretary of State?

There are many other points to be made. I will not repeat the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd about the true consensus that we achieved with Silk versus the Bill that is now before us, which has been called the lowest common denominator. However, I think it is clear that the erosion of the work of the Silk Commission has hampered the Secretary of State in his stated aim of achieving a long-term settlement.

Reference has been made to policing, and I note the concerns of the right hon. Member for Clwyd West. Policing was also referred to by the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire, who is no longer in his place. Policing is devolved in Scotland and in Northern Ireland, but it is reserved in Wales—I am not quite sure why. What makes it necessary to reserve policing in Wales when it is not necessary to do so elsewhere in the UK?

The hon. Member for Gower referred to the complexities of cross-border considerations. I just want to say that it would be for the Secretary of State to argue the case for reserving, and it is not for me to argue why that should not be. I would point out that the police forces themselves support the devolution of policing. The former chief constable of Gwent Police highlighted in her evidence to the Silk Commission the fact that the Home Office develops initiatives based on the English Partnerships landscape without considering the different landscapes in Wales. That intra-Wales issue could be addressed by the devolution of policing.

The crime priorities in Wales are different. England has a knife crime problem that has not affected Wales in the same way, but that dictates the priorities of the Welsh police forces regardless. Those police forces are unique within the UK because they are non-devolved bodies operating within a largely devolved public service landscape. In the usual way, it is a case of follow the money, and where does the money for the police come from? It tends to come, as we all know, from the Assembly itself.

The police are required to follow the agendas of two Governments—currently of a different political hue. To reserve policing prevents us from achieving greater clarity and efficiency by uniting devolved responsibilities such as community services, drugs prevention and safety partnerships with those currently held by UK Government. In my view, that is linked to the question of legal jurisdiction. I will not rehearse the argument made by my hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd this morning, but the unified jurisdiction has been a block on progress.

I should like to consider briefly the reservations that we have about energy. Plaid Cymru compromised during the Silk Commission. We believe that full responsibility should be transferred to the Welsh Government, just as it is in Scotland, but in the interests of compromise, we agreed to support an arbitrary limit of 350 MW. We compromised on that in return for compromises elsewhere, but given that the report has been cherry-picked our compromise is now meaningless. We gave in, but we do not seem to be getting back. Under the current proposal, the Swansea bay tidal lagoon would fall within the remit of the National Assembly, but the proposed Cardiff and Colwyn bay lagoons would be a matter for this place.

[Stephen Crabb]

I find the point that the hon. Gentleman has made fascinating, because this is the first time that I have heard anyone who was involved with the Silk Commission describe a process of fudge and political compromise. I thought from previous contributions to the debate that the commission was characterised by high-minded principle, but the hon. Gentleman is saying that it was all a bunch of trade-offs to achieve consensus, which did not have the buy-in of Her Majesty’s Government or of the official Opposition, so there was no great Silk consensus based on principle.

[Hywel Williams]

The principles of the Silk Commission and its recommendations are quite clear—further devolution —however, as the Secretary of State knows better than I, in the process of discussion people take positions on the basis of what is before them. We decided to compromise on our long-held belief that there should be no limits. There is an interesting case that illustrates why this might be so. In the village near the town where I live, near Caernarfon, there is a hydro-electric scheme. It was initially going to generate 49 MW, because at 50 MW it would have to come to the attention of the Department of Energy and Climate Change in Whitehall. When the limit was mooted to be 350 MW, the proposed capacity was immediately raised. What we have here is an example of legislation preventing economic development that we would all want to see—the production of green electricity —because of an arbitrary limit. That is one of the reasons why we did not want such an arbitrary limit, but it is now 350 MW, which we have agreed to.

I will not refer in any detail to the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd, excellent as it was. It was a model for first speeches in a Welsh Grand Committee and I am sure that it will repay close reading. She said that there was little shift in mentality. There has been a change, but not a change in the world view. We heard contributions from the hon. Members for Monmouth and for Wrexham, who discussed English votes for English laws. That is a problem. I raised a point of order in the Chamber when we were debating the student issue, asking how I would represent the thousands of English students who live in Bangor, many of whom voted for me, and who will be affected by that decision. They would be unrepresented, especially if the vote went a different way. That issue needs to be addressed.

I am suspicious about the suggestion from the hon. Member for Wrexham that we have a joint committee of Assembly Members and Members of Parliament, along with local councils in both Wales and in England. That would be a camel by design, but perhaps we could meet in Ludlow, as the Council of Wales and the Marches used to do. There are some excellent restaurants there, I am told, but even that could not attract me to the proposal.

The right hon. Member for Clwyd West said, quite rightly, that the powers model is not a panacea and needs to be discussed. I certainly agree about that. He did not believe, as I have said, that the Welsh Government should handle policing, and there is a debate to be had about that. The hon. Member for Torfaen made an interesting reference to horses—not camels—and he made a good point that there would be legal challenges daily, which is something that animates everyone on the Committee. We want a proper solution that would not be subject to the attention of the courts.

The hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd suggested that decisions made during the St David’s day process were directed by what was in the press on that day. As a long-term politician, God forbid that we take any notice of the press at all. The hon. Member for Ceredigion said that clarity was at the heart of democracy, and I agree with him entirely, as I do on many matters. He also addressed the issue of a distinct jurisdiction. The hon. Member for Montgomeryshire decried the negative tone of the discussion. In last night’s meeting to launch the report by the Welsh Governance Centre direct reference was made to the negative tone of the coverage of that report. Given that the press are not here, I might say that there was a direct reference to the Western Mail’s completely negative coverage.

Draft Wales Bill (Morning sitting)

Debate between Stephen Crabb and Hywel Williams

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 General Committees

[The Secretary of State for Wales (Stephen Crabb)]

I beg to move,

That the Committee has considered the matter of the draft Wales Bill.

May I start by welcoming you to the Chair, Mr Owen? It is a particular pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. In the past 18 months, while I have been Secretary of State, I have tried not to burden colleagues with too many of these meetings, after taking soundings from Members from Welsh constituencies. We had organised a meeting of the Welsh Grand Committee for 1 July, with the aim of discussing the Queen’s Speech and the Budget statement together, but at the request of the then shadow Secretary of State for Wales, the hon. Member for Pontypridd, that meeting was cancelled.

I am glad we now finally have a chance to meet and to discuss the Bill. Today is an opportunity to update Members on the progress of the draft Wales Bill and for right hon. and hon. Members to make their views known; I look forward to hearing them. The draft Wales Bill is, of course, still undergoing pre-legislative scrutiny by the Select Committee on Welsh Affairs, ably chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth, and we await the Committee’s report with interest.

Before we get into the real meat of the Bill, I will take a step back to remind Members of what we are doing with the Bill and how we got to this point. It is fair to say that a number of Members—particularly Government Members, myself included—were not initially natural devolutionists, but once it became clear that that was what the people of Wales wanted, we were determined to make Welsh devolution work. In 2011, the coalition Government held the referendum whereby full law- making powers were devolved to the Assembly for the first time.

Following that, the then Wales Office Ministers, my right hon. Friends the Members for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) and for Clwyd West, established the Silk Commission to undertake a broad consultation and to make recommendations on the future direction of devolution in Wales. As Members will be aware, the commission’s first report made recommendations about fiscal devolution that we then took forward in the Wales Act 2014. The Silk Commission’s second report looked more widely at the balance of powers between Westminster and Cardiff and made recommendations on a broad range of areas, from the model of the devolution settlement itself all the way through to specific recommendations about new powers that should be devolved from Westminster to Cardiff.

It is important to note that although the Silk Commission included representatives of the four main political parties in Wales, those representatives had no mandate to bind their parties to the recommendations the commission made. That is why, following the Scottish referendum, I decided to take forward what we called the St David’s day process, to identify the recommendations that could command political consensus. The resulting St David’s day document set a clear path for the future of devolution in Wales, and in the Conservative party’s manifesto last year, we committed to implement the St David’s day agreement in full.

All the main political parties in Wales, at Westminster level and Cardiff level, were involved in the St David’s day discussions, and it would be wrong of any of the parties represented on this Committee to seek to distance themselves from that process. The fact that we decided not to implement the Silk Commission’s recommendations to devolve policing and justice was as much to do with the views of the official Opposition as with ours—the Labour party at the time took a very clear view, as did my party, that we would not take forward those recommendations—and the recommendation in the St David’s day package to devolve fracking licensing had much to do with how hard Plaid Cymru pressed for it to be included. The fingerprints of all the main parties in Wales are on the St David’s day document.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

I agree fully with the Secretary of State’s point on policing. Can he explain the status of the St David’s day process? Did he see it as determining—defining—what the Bill would be, or was that, as I and my right hon. Friend Elfyn Llwyd recall, a matter of consultation with the Opposition parties and fully owned by the Government who wrote it?

[Stephen Crabb]

Of course we own the Bill that we write. The purpose of being a Government is to write legislation. The hon. Gentleman will recall that what was enumerated in the St David’s day document was a recommendation about a set of powers that all parties agreed on. We were absolutely clear throughout the process and on the day that the Prime Minister and the then Deputy Prime Minister made the announcement in Cardiff that it was entirely up to other parties to go further than the St David’s day recommendations. In fairness to Plaid Cymru, they did that. In fairness to the Liberal Democrats, their manifesto at last year’s general election went further than St David’s day. St David’s day represented a baseline around which the process showed consensus among all parties.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Crabb]

The hon. Lady, for whom I have huge respect, is very knowledgeable about legal and constitutional matters. If, through the Select Committee of which she is a member or independently, she would like to provide me with details of what she regards as a distinct jurisdiction, we can measure it against what other people are saying they regard as a distinct jurisdiction.

Part of the problem is that no one knows what “distinct jurisdiction” means. We understand what “separate jurisdiction” means, but people are bandying about this term “distinct jurisdiction” as if it is now the answer, in the same way as people used to say, “We need a reserved powers model; that will sort out Welsh devolution” without thinking of the complexity underneath it. People are now saying “separate jurisdiction” or “distinct jurisdiction” without really having thought through what it means.

[Hywel Williams]

The Secretary of State is being generous with his time. He has conceded that there is a growing body of Welsh law that will need to be responded to and he says he has had discussions with the Lord Chief Justice and the Lord Chancellor. Can he give the Committee an indication of when these considerations will come to fruition, so that we have clarity on the nature of our Welsh law and Welsh jurisdiction, whether distinct, separate or whatever? Does he see this as part of the full Bill when it comes before the House or over the horizon?

[Stephen Crabb]

The hon. Gentleman asks an important question. We are in the early stages of that work and we are having discussions about it with a view to being clear about what distinctive arrangements Wales needs to make sure there is effective delivery of justice in Wales that takes account of the growing body of Welsh law. We will make some announcements about that in due course, but that work does not need to happen within the context of the Bill. It does not need to be put into legislation to give effect to it. A lot of practical work can just be got on with fairly quickly.

Ministerial consent is another controversial area in the Bill that we are looking at again. Let me put on the record some thoughts about it. Much has been said about the consent requirements in the draft Wales Bill. They are intended to provide flexibility for the Assembly to legislate but with a demarcation of responsibility between the Assembly and the UK Government. It is only right that the Minister’s consent is required to amend the functions of reserved bodies that are accountable to UK Ministers, just as it is right that the UK Government seek the Assembly’s consent to make changes to the law in devolved areas.

I am told that when making legislation that changes the responsibilities of UK Ministers or the functions or duties of a reserved body—a public body that is the responsibility of a UK Minister—the Welsh Government should have the ability to do that without the relevant UK Minister in Whitehall being able to have any say on that. To any fair-minded Welsh man or woman, that is not a reasonable proposition, because the United Kingdom Government are responsible for those areas of policy. However, this seems to be emerging as the new consensus in Cardiff Bay. We are told that we need to take away the draft Bill and remove the consenting requirements. The threat is that the Bill will be blocked if there is any attempt to make the Welsh Government more responsible in making changes to things that are the responsibility of UK Ministers. We do not believe that is a credible position.

I know from my discussions with business leaders and others in Wales that there is a large body of pragmatic and reasonable opinion on devolution, which does not endorse the rhetoric and criticism of the Bill that is coming out of Cardiff Bay which says the Welsh Government should be able to change the functions of a UK Minister, and change the duties and functions of a UK public body that is the responsibility of a UK Minister, without any consenting requirement. This is about basic respect for the devolution settlement. It is a key principle of ours that we respect the Welsh Government in recognising the areas for which they are responsible. When we make legislation in this place that touches on devolved areas, there is rightly a process of seeking the consent of the Welsh Government. We believe that the principle should work in reverse. I do not think that is an unreasonable proposition.

We have hit a number of major stumbling blocks with the Bill on the differences of viewpoint between how we see the devolution settlement working and how the Cardiff Bay Welsh Government want it to work. They believe that the draft Bill should give legislative effect to the new consensus that they believe in with the expanded devolution boundary that they believe the Supreme Court has given them with the ability to make law unfettered that affects reserved matters or England without any hurdle or boundary or safeguard around that, or any requirement for consent. That is not something that we can go along with.

I appeal to Members of this place and Assembly Members to try to understand the devolution settlement from the viewpoint of the interests of the UK Government, in the same way as I have spent a lot of time trying to understand the devolution settlement from the perspective of Cardiff Bay and the Assembly,

I am going to wrap up there to allow other Members to speak. We have heard language such as “English veto”. There is nothing in the Bill which provides for an English veto. When the First Minister uses that phrase, he is talking about the UK Government—the UK Parliament. He is saying that all of us sitting here are English—the hon. Member for Newport West is English, and the hon. Member for Llanelli is English, because they are part of the UK Government. Let us be absolutely clear—this goes to the core of my approach to the Wales Bill—Wales has two legitimate Governments: the UK Government, who exist for the benefit of all parts of the United Kingdom, including Wales; and the devolved Welsh Government, who exist to create law in devolved areas. The purpose of the legislation is to create clarity and respect about the roles of those Governments. It is not to delegitimise and push back the role of the UK Government and say that Wales has an elected Government in Cardiff Bay who are the primary legitimate Government for Wales.

Draft Wales Bill

Debate between Stephen Crabb and Hywel Williams

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 General Committees

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hanson. I apologise to you and the Committee for my slightly late arrival; I was detained by the Prime Minister’s statement.

I thank the Secretary of State for allowing us this pre-legislative stage for discussion. The Bill has sparked some vigorous debates about what Wales’s constitutional position should look like, not just among politicians but in civil society, although possibly not for the people on the streets of Aberavon. I hope that we will have sufficient time to think about and discuss the draft Bill and the responses to it, not least by bodies such as the Wales Governance Centre. I would like to thank the centre for its excellent and useful report that was launched in Parliament last night. I also look forward to the report by the Welsh Affairs Committee. The discussions will take place not only today and tomorrow, but through the next weeks and months, so that parliamentarians and, more importantly, the people of Wales can come to a considered view, not subject to the time constraints of a party or parties facing difficult Assembly elections.

While I am glad that legal issues around workability and drafting are under the spotlight before the Bill is published in full, we have not had adequate time to scrutinise in debate the policy areas in the list of reservations. Members have mentioned the lack of a guiding principle in the list, and that absence is fairly clear. As far as I know, little effort has been made to justify the reservations as a group and the principle behind them. However, they do need to be justified.

I will give a small and obscure example. Members will recall that this morning I asked the Secretary of State for the justification for retaining alcohol and entertainment licences, and I referred to schedule 1 referring to schedule 7A, and so on. I would like to tell the Committee a very brief story about the debates around the Licensing Act. At that time, a number of local licensees told me that they would like to apply for their licences in Welsh. I asked the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport at the time whether application forms could be made available in Welsh. The Secretary of State, now safely ensconced in the upper echelons of the BBC—I think that is today’s equivalent of running away to sea—was embarrassed because he had no answer. He countered by offering me a meeting. At the meeting, I suggested the names of a number of translation companies, which could turn the forms around in a day. Inevitably, he said it was not as simple as that. It was not a mere matter of translation. Eventually, Welsh forms turned up, some 18 months later, long after the aforementioned licensees had despaired, and had applied for and been granted the licences in English.

I doubt that the Cardiff Government would be remiss in the first place, but if they were, they would get their skates on. Yet now, apparently, alcohol and entertainment licences must be retained here, although licensing is a local authority function and local authorities work through the Welsh, not the UK, Government, in general. I do not why it is in the list unless it is because DCMS insists that it is.

When I asked the Secretary of State all those years ago why he had not ensured that Welsh forms were available, he eventually confessed that a mere 13 years after the advent of the Welsh Language Act 1993, after 13 years of apparently serving the people of Wales well, his Department—the Department for culture, for heaven’s sake—still had no Welsh language plan. Is this the same Department that now insists that it retain the power over Welsh entertainment and alcohol licences, let alone S4C—I, of course, welcomed the announcement made today—or is the decision for our own Secretary of State?

There are many other points to be made. I will not repeat the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd about the true consensus that we achieved with Silk versus the Bill that is now before us, which has been called the lowest common denominator. However, I think it is clear that the erosion of the work of the Silk Commission has hampered the Secretary of State in his stated aim of achieving a long-term settlement.

Reference has been made to policing, and I note the concerns of the right hon. Member for Clwyd West. Policing was also referred to by the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire, who is no longer in his place. Policing is devolved in Scotland and in Northern Ireland, but it is reserved in Wales—I am not quite sure why. What makes it necessary to reserve policing in Wales when it is not necessary to do so elsewhere in the UK?

The hon. Member for Gower referred to the complexities of cross-border considerations. I just want to say that it would be for the Secretary of State to argue the case for reserving, and it is not for me to argue why that should not be. I would point out that the police forces themselves support the devolution of policing. The former chief constable of Gwent Police highlighted in her evidence to the Silk Commission the fact that the Home Office develops initiatives based on the English Partnerships landscape without considering the different landscapes in Wales. That intra-Wales issue could be addressed by the devolution of policing.

The crime priorities in Wales are different. England has a knife crime problem that has not affected Wales in the same way, but that dictates the priorities of the Welsh police forces regardless. Those police forces are unique within the UK because they are non-devolved bodies operating within a largely devolved public service landscape. In the usual way, it is a case of follow the money, and where does the money for the police come from? It tends to come, as we all know, from the Assembly itself.

The police are required to follow the agendas of two Governments—currently of a different political hue. To reserve policing prevents us from achieving greater clarity and efficiency by uniting devolved responsibilities such as community services, drugs prevention and safety partnerships with those currently held by UK Government. In my view, that is linked to the question of legal jurisdiction. I will not rehearse the argument made by my hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd this morning, but the unified jurisdiction has been a block on progress.

I should like to consider briefly the reservations that we have about energy. Plaid Cymru compromised during the Silk Commission. We believe that full responsibility should be transferred to the Welsh Government, just as it is in Scotland, but in the interests of compromise, we agreed to support an arbitrary limit of 350 MW. We compromised on that in return for compromises elsewhere, but given that the report has been cherry-picked our compromise is now meaningless. We gave in, but we do not seem to be getting anything back. Under the current proposal, the Swansea bay tidal lagoon would fall within the remit of the National Assembly, but the proposed Cardiff and Colwyn bay lagoons would be a matter for this place.

[Stephen Crabb]

I find the point that the hon. Gentleman has made fascinating, because this is the first time that I have heard anyone who was involved with the Silk Commission describe a process of fudge and political compromise. I thought from previous contributions to the debate that the commission was characterised by high-minded principle, but the hon. Gentleman is saying that it was all a bunch of trade-offs to achieve consensus, which did not have the buy-in of Her Majesty’s Government or of the official Opposition, so there was no great Silk consensus based on principle.

[Hywel Williams]

The principles of the Silk Commission and its recommendations are quite clear—further devolution —however, as the Secretary of State knows better than I, in the process of discussion people take positions on the basis of what is before them. We decided to compromise on our long-held belief that there should be no limits. There is an interesting case that illustrates why this might be so. In the village near the town where I live, near Caernarfon, there is a hydro-electric scheme. It was initially going to generate 49 MW, because at 50 MW it would have to come to the attention of the Department of Energy and Climate Change in Whitehall. When the limit was mooted to be 350 MW, the proposed capacity was immediately raised. What we have here is an example of legislation preventing economic development that we would all want to see—the production of green electricity —because of an arbitrary limit. That is one of the reasons why we did not want such an arbitrary limit, but it is now 350 MW, which we have agreed to.

I will not refer in any detail to the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd, excellent as it was. It was a model for first speeches in a Welsh Grand Committee and I am sure that it will repay close reading. She said that there was little shift in mentality. There has been a change, but not a change in the world view. We heard contributions from the hon. Members for Monmouth and for Wrexham, who discussed English votes for English laws. That is a problem. I raised a point of order in the Chamber when we were debating the student issue, asking how I would represent the thousands of English students who live in Bangor, many of whom voted for me, and who will be affected by that decision. They would be unrepresented, especially if the vote went a different way. That issue needs to be addressed.

I am suspicious about the suggestion from the hon. Member for Wrexham that we have a joint committee of Assembly Members and Members of Parliament, along with local councils in both Wales and in England. That would be a camel by design, but perhaps we could meet in Ludlow, as the Council of Wales and the Marches used to do. There are some excellent restaurants there, I am told, but even that could not attract me to the proposal.

The right hon. Member for Clwyd West said, quite rightly, that the reserved powers model is not a panacea and needs to be discussed. I certainly agree about that. He did not believe, as I have said, that the Welsh Government should handle policing, and there is a debate to be had about that. The hon. Member for Torfaen made an interesting reference to horses—not camels—and he made a good point that there would be legal challenges daily, which is something that animates everyone on the Committee. We want a proper solution that would not be subject to the attention of the courts.

The hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd suggested that decisions made during the St David’s day process were directed by what was in the press on that day. As a long-term politician, God forbid that we take any notice of the press at all. The hon. Member for Ceredigion said that clarity was at the heart of democracy, and I agree with him entirely, as I do on many matters. He also addressed the issue of a distinct jurisdiction. The hon. Member for Montgomeryshire decried the negative tone of the discussion. In last night’s meeting to launch the report by the Welsh Governance Centre direct reference was made to the negative tone of the coverage of that report. Given that the press are not here, I might say that there was a direct reference to the Western Mail’s completely negative coverage.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Stephen Crabb and Hywel Williams

Wednesday 18th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Crabb]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the Welsh Government need more fiscal tools. They need the responsibility of income tax devolution to encourage them to be a more financially responsible Administration. The point that he makes about earnings is also important. That is why he should be giving full-throated support to the steps that we are taking to drive up wage levels and end the curse of low pay in Wales.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

7. What progress he has made on consulting civic society in Wales on the likely effects of the provisions of the draft Wales Bill; and if he will make a statement.

[The Secretary of State for Wales (Stephen Crabb)]

Last month, I published the draft Wales Bill for pre-legislative scrutiny and I continue to meet members of civil society, the judiciary and leading business organisations across Wales to take soundings and hear their views.

[Hywel Williams]

I thank the Secretary of State for that answer. There was a substantial deliberation on our country’s constitutional future, led by a distinguished former Officer of the House, Sir Paul Silk. However, the Secretary of State has so far chosen to include very few of the recommendations of the Silk commission in the draft Wales Bill. Will the final version of the Wales Bill give his final vision of our country’s constitutional future? Is this it for the foreseeable future?

[Stephen Crabb]

A lot of the Silk recommendations do not require primary legislation and we have already delivered them. We are committed to delivering the Silk recommendations that we have agreed on, which we set out in the St David’s day announcement earlier this year.

[Hywel Williams]

There is general, substantial and growing dissatisfaction with the draft Wales Bill, not least among legal colleagues. Would the Secretary of State not be better advised to withdraw the Bill and start again?

[Stephen Crabb]

I fear that if we were to withdraw the Bill, we would see no progress whatsoever on strengthening and clarifying Welsh devolution, which I understood Plaid Cymru and the Labour party supported.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Stephen Crabb and Hywel Williams

Wednesday 16th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

5. What assessment he has made of the effect of benefit sanctions in areas of Wales which have high numbers of economically inactive people and low numbers of available jobs relative to the rest of the country.

[The Secretary of State for Wales (Stephen Crabb)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his new role as leader of his party. Benefit sanctions are a necessary part of a welfare system that encourages people to take up support, while being sustainable and fair. Our welfare reforms have helped thousands of people from across Wales move from inactivity into work.

[Hywel Williams]

I thank the Secretary of State for his kind words. Some areas of Wales have high unemployment and low economic activity, and getting a job or extra hours is not easy, or even impossible. What has he done personally, as our Secretary of State, to ensure that our people are not subject to arbitrary and unfair benefit sanctions?

[Stephen Crabb]

I repeat that we need benefit sanctions if we are to reform the welfare system in a way that will encourage hard work and responsible decisions, but they are used as a matter of last resort. I take the hon. Gentleman’s point about rurality as I am from a rural area myself, but I remind him that unemployment has fallen significantly in his constituency over the past five years, and we thoroughly expect that to continue.

[Hywel Williams]

Following yesterday’s decision, Welsh families will lose between £1,000 and £2,500 in tax credits every year. Is the Secretary of State confident that his constituents, and mine, are aware of that change, so that they can plan cuts to food, fuel, clothing, footwear and—dare I say it?—even travelling to work?

[Stephen Crabb]

The hon. Gentleman paints a very negative picture. His constituency, like a great many in Wales, has suffered too long from the curse of low pay, so I thought he would welcome the fact that one of the things we are doing to transform the Welsh economy is introduce a national living wage, which will benefit thousands of families in his constituency and mine

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Stephen Crabb and Hywel Williams

Wednesday 17th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

7. What discussions he has had on returning control of health policy from the Welsh Government to Westminster.

[The Secretary of State for Wales (Stephen Crabb)]

None.

[Hywel Williams]

I am grateful for that reply. Will the Secretary of State ignore any siren calls there might be for the repatriation of health policy? Does he agree that this is not a matter of a war with Wales or of Offa’s Dyke being the border between life and death, and will he put the responsibility where it lies—with the Labour Governments who have reorganised health and tolerated the situation in north Wales for far too long?

[Stephen Crabb]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s point. The Welsh Government have full policy responsibility for health services and all the levers available to them. Full responsibility for the challenges and problems in Welsh health services lies with them.