Antoinette Sandbach
Main Page: Antoinette Sandbach (Liberal Democrat - Eddisbury)Department Debates - View all Antoinette Sandbach's debates with the Wales Office
(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Nia Griffith
Today’s subject is the Bill before us, and we want a Bill that actually works, so that is what we need to scrutinise now; that is what we need to be looking at.
Just last year, the Secretary of State said:
“I want to establish a clear devolution settlement for Wales which stands the test of time.”—[Official Report, 27 February 2015; Vol. 593, c. 35WS.]
Elsewhere, he referred to
“a clear, robust and lasting devolution settlement”.
We have only to take one look at this Bill and it is plain that he has completely failed to do that. The Bill as drafted is not clear. It does not meet the Secretary of State’s stated aims. Those are not just my words; they are also those of the Assembly’s Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee, chaired, incidentally, by a Conservative Assembly Member. Its inquiry heard
“grave concerns about the complexity of the draft Bill”
from the
“overwhelming majority of…consultees and witnesses”.
It heard
“a clear, unanimous voice from legal experts and practitioners that the complexities of this Bill will lead to references to the Supreme Court.”
This Government have been particularly trigger happy in taking the Assembly to court ever since it has had primary law-making powers. Those cases cost the taxpayer tens of thousands of pounds and lead to long delays before the Assembly’s laws come into force.
Antoinette Sandbach
Does the hon. Lady agree that the Agricultural Sector (Wales) Bill decision drove a coach and horses through the Government of Wales Act and in effect conferred a reserved powers model on the Assembly, which requires legislation to address the issues that arose out of that case?
Nia Griffith
An awful lot more cases will go to the Supreme Court if we do not get this Bill correct. That is the problem. The Assembly has passed 14 Bills, parts of which various commentators are suggesting could not have been passed if this legislation had been in place. The fact that they are arguing over that is the reason why we would end up with people—not just the UK Government or the Welsh Government, but any individual—taking things to the Supreme Court, and thousands of pounds would be spent trying to sort that out. That is simply not the way we want to proceed.
Nia Griffith
The “distinct” model does not have to have a separate high court: that is the whole point.
Nia Griffith
No; I think I have said enough on this. What we need from the Secretary of State is a solution, a way forward. We need a way to make it possible for the Assembly to legislate in the areas in which it has competence, which people voted for in 2011, not to make it more difficult. If we remember, the Secretary of State said he was going to deliver,
“the most robust and ambitious package of further devolution to Wales in a generation”.
However, it is pretty clear that the consents, the necessity test and the Bill in general would roll back the powers of the Welsh Assembly. The Bill is not robust, ambitious, lasting or clear. In fact, the Secretary of State has failed every one of his own tests. What he has proposed is a second-class settlement, a system that is unduly complex, regressive and unworkable, and we will not support the Bill unless it is radically amended. It is clear that the Secretary of State has badly mismanaged this entire process, including failing miserably to ensure the cross-party consensus that characterised both the Silk and Smith Commissions. In fact, he has not even got consensus within his own party.
Liz Saville Roberts
It does appear in the Scottish devolution settlement but it appears three times in the draft Bill. In Scotland, it refers to reserved matters but here, it also refers to criminal and private law. That is the significant question.
I challenge anyone to justify making a Government accountable to a judge rather than to a legislature, as the draft Bill effectively promotes. The report released this week by the Wales governance centre at Cardiff University and the constitution unit at UCL states:
“To restrict the choice of National Assembly members in matters likely to form parts of a great many Assembly Acts may be said to undercut their role as primary legislators, and to deny the institution…proper esteem in ‘the union of the nations of Wales and England’.”
The reasons that these mechanisms are listed as reserved is, according to the Secretary of State,
“to protect the unified legal system of England and Wales”.
All the criticisms that the Secretary of State has faced since the publication of the draft Bill—the cries of “unworkable,” “badly drafted,” “overly complex,” and so on—are a consequence of his blind loyalty to preserving the unified legal system, which has almost unanimously been described to the Welsh Affairs Committee by the legal profession as unnecessary, damaging and paradoxical.
Plaid Cymru, along with many legal experts, believes that it would be a sensible and—crucially—sustainable solution to create a separate legal system for Wales and the Welsh legislature. As the Wales governance centre’s report says,
“it would bring Wales more into the mainstream of sub-state constitutional arrangements in the common law world”.
It is noteworthy that that is also the long-term aim of the Labour Welsh Government.
We acknowledge that it would have financial and practical implications that would need careful consideration but, if the UK Government are serious about delivering a devolution settlement that stands the test of time, they need to adopt a long-term approach. Although that would be Plaid Cymru’s preferred solution, we recognise that not all parties have caught up with our position. The same cannot be said, however, of the creation of a so-called distinct but not separate jurisdiction. The evidence that the Welsh Affairs Committee has heard has been overwhelmingly in favour of this solution, as has that heard by the Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee in the National Assembly. I suspect that those who remain sceptical of this solution mistakenly fear the practical and financial implications that a separate jurisdiction might have, and do not fully understand—or perhaps do not want to fully understand—the simplicity of what is actually being proposed.
Creating a distinct jurisdiction need not be any more complicated—perhaps this is the definition that we have been looking for—than simply acknowledging in statute the existence of the law of Wales and the law of England that extend to the territory of Wales and the territory of England respectively.
Antoinette Sandbach
Can the hon. Lady explain why Welsh law does not have that current status and why she feels it needs to be put into statute? Surely it has that status already.
Liz Saville Roberts
Because we are arguing about the leeway and lock model, and the necessity clauses in criminal and private law, and that is creating so much complication. With this acknowledgment, we could move ahead.
David T. C. Davies
I begin by offering a word of support for the point of order that was raised earlier. The Conservative party, as a party that has always prided itself on providing support for the Welsh language, would be quite happy about and would look positively at the possibility of allowing Welsh to be used during Welsh Grand Committees. Why would we not be? After all, I gather that in the last few minutes alone there has been an announcement of extra funding for S4C, the Welsh language television channel, which, of course, was set up by a previous Conservative Government. The Conservative party will always be a huge supporter of the Welsh language.
I find myself in a slightly difficult position in talking about this Bill, because even as we speak, of course, members of the Welsh Affairs Committee are considering their own positions on the draft report, which I hope will be a unanimous report full of recommendations about this Bill. Obviously, as has become clear already, different Members from different parties, and even different Members from the same party, have taken somewhat different positions on this Bill, so talking about it is challenging. In fact, when it comes to trying to get a unanimous Bill through, I think I know how the Prime Minister feels in Europe.
Consequently, I will skirt around some of the issues. I understand the wish of the Government and the Minister to bring some clarity to the devolution settlement— I certainly support that principle. However, I have to put on record my disappointment over the issue of taxation. I have been around long enough to know which way the wind is blowing and I can see what is going to happen. I have to say, with all due respect to the Minister, I personally think it would have been better to have a referendum.
One thing I want to talk about is scrutiny, because regardless of what people have been saying, it is clear to me that this Bill will lead to the Welsh Assembly having significant further powers when it finally goes through, and one issue that has been raised all the way through our Select Committee evidence has been the Welsh Assembly’s ability to conduct good scrutiny. It has become even more important that it can do so because of the extra powers that it can have.
There are two areas where the scrutiny process could be improved. The first, of course, is the Assembly Committees. They are the equivalent of our Select Committees. The Select Committee process, ever since the late 1970s, has been one of the great success stories of Parliament, but the reform that happened in 2010, when Select Committee Chairs started to be elected by all Members of the House, was very important. I cannot understand how those of us who were here before that could have tolerated a situation in which party leaders were simply sticking in people who they thought would be compliant and handing out those positions almost as a kind of prize.
That system was totally unacceptable, and nobody would ever go back to it, yet we still have it in the Welsh Assembly, and there have been controversies where leaders of various political parties have allegedly removed people or put people in place as Select Committee Chairs because they held a view that was more likely to be supportive of the political party that they represented. Even the suggestion that that could have happened undermines confidence in the process, so I think that the situation is unacceptable and that somehow we ought to persuade the Welsh Assembly Members of the success of the reforms that have been made in Parliament.
Antoinette Sandbach
That was proposed by Assembly Members, including Lord Elis-Thomas, myself and Nick Ramsay in the current Assembly. Very regrettably, those proposals were not taken up, largely because the party leaders want to hand out the baubles of chairmanships of Committees, and it allows them to control the casting votes in those Committees. It is—
The Chair
Order. Before the democratically elected Chair of the Welsh Affairs Committee continues, I point out that we are talking about this draft Bill in this House, not procedures in the National Assembly.