Draft Wales Bill (Morning sitting)

Huw Irranca-Davies Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 General Committees

[Antoinette Sandbach (Eddisbury) (Con)]

rose—

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

rose—

[Stephen Crabb]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman who is shortly to be a Member of the Assembly.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

Indeed, I have a vested interest in this in more ways than one. The Secretary of State is trying valiantly to play a very difficult hand, but I suspect he is running out of cards. How does he respond to this week’s report that highlighted in depth, with detailed analysis, both fundamental and detailed points of principle that were wrong? The conclusion was that that suggests an unwillingness to take Wales seriously. I ask him, in all seriousness, how he responds to that.

[Stephen Crabb]

I respond to the hon. Gentleman by saying, in all seriousness, that this Government take Wales very seriously. We take Wales so seriously that we did not do what his Administration did, when he was a Minister in the previous Labour Government, and bury our heads in the sand over the inequities of the Barnett formula. They have admitted that they were unwilling to address that issue. We are bringing forward the funding floor. This Government took the decision to have a referendum for the people of Wales on having full law-making powers.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

This Bill does not do it.

[Stephen Crabb]

In the details of the report that came out today, and in other academic reports, there are some good and important points. We have taken the report away and are looking at it very closely. The whole point of having pre-legislative scrutiny is to use it as an opportunity to think again and take views from a very broad range of stakeholders.

I have to say, having read some of the evidence presented to the Welsh Affairs Committee and to the Welsh Assembly’s Committee, sometimes the people giving that evidence are asking a different question from the question we are asking. The question they are asking is, “How do we craft a piece of legislation that expands the remit of Welsh government and Welsh law-making?” If that is your only question, of course you will find failings and limitations in the Bill. If you are trying to balance that question with the question of how to regulate the interface between the two legitimate Governments for Wales: the UK Government and the Welsh Government—how to ensure clarity about who is responsible for what, how to build in respect for the devolution settlement so that we do not get Governments crossing over one another’s boundaries, changing each other’s functions without a clear consenting process in place—then you cannot avoid coming up with some of the procedures and mechanisms in the Bill.