Wales Bill

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 10th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, we welcome the arrival of the Bill, which is in much better shape than the original draft Bill presented last year.

To those of us closely associated with the devolution process the journey towards an effective settlement—towards my party’s aim of home rule for Wales—is achingly slow. I disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan; there has not been enough rush over devolution. We are certainly not yet in a situation where we can say that we have a firm, decisive devolution settlement, but we are shuffling steadily down the road towards it. Therefore noble Lords will forgive me for becoming somewhat impatient with what I regard as a slow process. However, I acknowledge that in the big scheme of history, the 17 years since the establishment of the Assembly are just the blink of an eye, and therefore as ever I am pragmatic. Any step forward must be welcomed and built upon.

However, I am disappointed that the Bill still does not provide the clarity, coherence, stability, workability and sustainability set out by the previous Secretary of State for Wales, the right honourable Stephen Crabb. Looking back over the last 17 years, the Assembly that I was elected to in 1999, along with my noble friends Lady Humphreys and Lord German, is almost unrecognisable in comparison with today’s institution. The Minister is well aware of this because of his history in that place and his part in the Silk commission.

I am proud that my party, the Liberal Democrats, has played a fundamental role in the transformation of those powers. In the first Assembly, I was a Minister in the partnership Government formed between my party and the Labour Party. As part of our agreement, the Liberal Democrats insisted on the establishment of the commission led by the noble Lord, Lord Richard. It put forward some bold and imaginative proposals, but several of those remain to be implemented to this day. Sadly, it took far longer than it should have done to implement the recommendation for full legislative powers, which now exist, due to the indignity and bureaucratic nightmare of the legislative competence order system imposed on Parliament and the Assembly. I welcome the indication from the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, that the Labour Party as a whole is now much more convinced about the importance of devolution than appeared to be when it was in government.

When the Liberal Democrats came to form a coalition here with the Conservatives in 2010, we again made constitutional progress in Wales a priority. The Silk commission was born and many aspects of this Bill owe their origin to the Silk reports. By that time, I was seeing the story from the other side of the fence. As a Minister in the Wales Office it was obvious to me how easy it was to kick reports, such as the Silk reports, around Whitehall and to make frustratingly little progress. No Whitehall department and few Ministers are willing and happy to surrender power, however small and inconsequential that power may be.

However, the ship of devolution in Wales was then blown along in the slipstream of the Scottish independence referendum, and I was confident that we were poised for a big stride forward by St David’s Day 2015. The St David’s Day declaration, on which I worked with the then Secretary of State, was bold, clear and ambitious, and I pay tribute to his sterling efforts to create a cross-party consensus on many aspects of devolution. Of course, there was not 100% agreement—indeed, my own party wanted to go further on some aspects such as devolving powers over policing—but there was a firm basis for agreement.

This Bill fulfils some of the criteria needed to establish the sustainable settlement envisaged in that agreement. The move to a reserved powers model is obviously fundamental but it has not proved to be the easy step that so many imagined. The complex and vague Welsh devolution settlement of 1999, based on conferred powers, has been translated into a less vague but still complex set of reserved powers. I believe that they are still unnecessarily complex and many of them are illogical as well. So, as the Bill goes through the House, I will examine the list of reserved powers and test out why some of those powers are there.

On the issue of the distinct and separate jurisdiction, I do not believe we have come to the point where a separate jurisdiction is desirable or needed. However, we need it to be distinct, and so I am interested in the progress made in the joint working group and what commitments there are on taking forward the outcomes of its deliberations. I am anxious that it will not be used to simply distract us from the main issue. It has to have concrete outcomes that are implemented.

The elephant in the room whenever we discuss Welsh devolution is the issue of fair funding and the Barnett formula. This has been the case ever since the Assembly was established in 1999. I look forward to hearing details of progress on this issue because significant progress is key to the effectiveness of the Bill.

I welcome the additional powers set out in the Bill, but there are more powers that we would like to see. I have already mentioned policing because, after all, the cost of policing is more or less shared equally between the Home Office, the Welsh Government and local government in Wales. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to expect the powers over policing to be devolved. There is no constitutional reason why air passenger duty should not be devolved. If Scotland and Northern Ireland can handle it, it is unjust to say that Wales cannot have that power simply because Bristol airport has run an effective lobbying campaign. We cannot see, for example, why Milford Haven is excluded from the list of devolved ports. I know it is a trust port—that is the technical aspect of it—but I cannot see why it is the exception among all Welsh ports.

We believe that the Assembly’s powers over energy will still be too limited. The 350 megawatts limit is an artificial one. It is based on a Silk commission recommendation, but nevertheless it has possibly been overtaken by events. The figure was picked because it was based on the size of the Swansea tidal lagoon, which I regret to say this Government seem to have abandoned anyway.

There is much to support in the Bill such as the permanence of the Assembly, giving it powers over its own affairs and elections, its size, its name and so on, thus treating it as a grown-up body. I welcome strongly the powers to vary income tax without the need for a referendum, behind which it was clear that the Welsh Government were going to hide. Having worked within the UK Government, I understand some of the caveats. However, I also understand that some of those caveats can be misused and need to be tested in this House.

This Bill is the product of a previous, pro-devolution Government. I do not believe the same can be said of the current Government, with the exception of the noble Lord the Minister sitting opposite. As a pragmatist, I am keen to support the Bill and to push devolution as far as possible, because, after all, this is all we are going to get for a while at least. It brings via the reserved powers model greater clarity. However, it does not bring greater simplicity to the Assembly and Welsh Government’s powers, and it does not widen their powers to the extent that we as Liberal Democrats would wish.