Wales Bill

Lord Elis-Thomas Excerpts

Monday 13th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Richard]

My Lords, I strongly support this amendment. If one goes back 10 years to the report of the commission that I had the honour of chairing, we then identified this as one of the problems the Assembly had then and would face increasingly in the future. I will spend just two minutes on analysing where the Assembly is in this regard. We have 60 Members in the National Assembly in Wales; the Scottish Parliament has 129 and the Northern Ireland Assembly has 108.

At first sight, those numbers are a bit odd. I do not see why they should be quite as different as they are. If one then goes on to look at what the present 60 in the National Assembly of Wales do, only 42 of them are actually available to hold the Welsh Government to account and scrutinise legislation. Indeed, at one stage it was even worse than that. At the time of the Labour-Plaid Cymru coalition, there were 41 Members either from Labour or Plaid Cymru, leaving only 19 from a non-governing party to scrutinise the whole body of Assembly legislation. The noble Lord, Lord Bourne, who is sitting on the Front Bench opposite me will no doubt remember those days pretty well since he was one of the 19.

Can that many Members do that work? The short answer is no. They could not do it 10 years ago and they certainly cannot do it now. I recently came across a quote from Rosemary Butler, the Presiding Officer of the National Assembly. She put it like this:

“There are only 42 Members to scrutinise £15 billion of taxpayers’ money, and to scrutinise the government on the big issues of the day—the future of our health service, our education system and the economy. On top of that they have to make sound, thoroughly scrutinized laws for our nation. A quarter of those 42 members sit on three committees, half sit on two”.

She concludes with the comment:

“One would simply not find the same level of workload on Members in Westminster, Holyrood or Stormont”.

That is clearly true.

Over the years, we have given the Assembly greater powers. We have not increased the number of people available to deal with those powers and scrutinise the way they are used. In this Bill, we propose to give them more powers. We will no doubt, in the not too distant future, have proposals to give the Assembly further powers again. To keep the limit at 60 is frankly ludicrous. It hobbles the way in which the Assembly works and means that laws are not sufficiently scrutinised. It means, too, that the way money is spent is not sufficiently looked at. Quite honestly, it breeds inefficiency. The argument for increasing it from 60 to 80 is, frankly, irrefutable.

The only argument now is whether it should be 80 or go up to 100. I have an open mind on that. As a first step, going up to 80 would satisfy me for the moment. If you are to give the Assembly more powers, and if it is to become a Parliament in the sense that the Scottish Parliament is one, 80 may not be enough. Assuredly, if you are to do that, 60 will not be. I support this amendment.

[Lord Elis-Thomas (PC)]

My Lords, it is always a delight to follow a debate proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Rowe-Beddoe, and spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Richard—to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude for having defined an ideal model in 2004 of what the National Assembly could have been.

My Amendment 9 has a whiff of relative autonomy about it, which will not surprise noble Lords. Although I deny being a separatist and I am not an upper-case Nationalist, I am certainly an avid, totally committed, complete devolutionist. My amendment—which my noble friend supports—proposes that the Assembly should decide its own size. No doubt many constitutional objections will be put forward to this notion. However, the amendment proposes that the decision should be subject to the very important principle of a majority of not less than two-thirds of voting Assembly Members on a vote of the whole Assembly. That is a feature we have already in our constitution—and use regularly. It applies to dissolution Motions and other Motions within our procedures.

My amendment has the support—and I had the assistance in drafting it—of the Electoral Reform Society Cymru. I will not detain the Committee by quoting from Size Matters—I know the Government have read it. However, it provides a comparative analysis of the size of national Assemblies—that is Parliaments; we will come to this at a later stage this evening, perhaps with the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan. The key issue is the ratio of Members to the size of the electorate in a given constituency, and the relationship between the two. It also looks at the legislative Assemblies of other comparable European regions or nations— whatever you wish to call them. Again, it looks at their size in relation to function. What is relevant in this analysis is the functional level. In other words, with the amount of devolutionary power that the National Assembly for Wales already has, we are reaching the norm of the European Union—and the Canadian provinces, another comparator. However, we are nowhere near the norm in terms of the number of Members.

Therefore, this amendment would give the National Assembly the ability to decide its own membership subject to the agreement of a two-thirds majority of Members. This is a proper devolutionary measure for the nature of the constitution itself. I know that that is a difficult concept for the Committee to understand. I am sorry to say that the United Kingdom is still an extremely centralist state. It is not a unitary state and never has been. It is a state of unions and those unions are different, for historical reasons. But the nation of Wales, despite the great time we had during the Tudor ascendancy, is not well placed in the pecking order of UK devolution. This amendment seeks to redress that. I know the Government will not be able to accept the amendment because it is too autonomous—but it is a constitutional principle that it is important to present in this discussion.

[Baroness Humphreys (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to return to a theme I referred to briefly at Second Reading: the issue of the size of the Assembly. I am also pleased that our debate today may inform opinion in Wales on the number of AMs needed to run our Assembly effectively. My amendment recognises that the Assembly has too few Members to carry out its present functions. It also recognises that there is a simple way to increase its size to 80 Members for the next Assembly elections to be held in 2016, and further recognises that an Assembly of 100 Members at the 2021 elections is possible but dependent on a reduction in the number of MPs that Wales sends to Westminster.

In its publication, Size Matters, the Electoral Reform Society, drawing on the work of the Wales Governance Centre at Cardiff University, the Institute of Welsh Affairs and Cymru Yfory/Tomorrow’s Wales, argues that the size of the Assembly is a matter that is,

“too important to be left to politicians”.

However, politicians, whether here or in Cardiff Bay, will ultimately have to make a decision: a decision that will give the National Assembly the tools that it needs to make it the accountable and efficient institution we desire it to be, or leave it overburdened and struggling to cope with its powers.

We are urged, in all our deliberations, to come to evidence-based decisions, and Size Matters provides us with the unbiased evidence we need to guide those deliberations. Of course, it is and would be difficult for Assembly Members themselves to make the case for an increase in their numbers. Fear of criticism from the media and the electorate results in their remaining silent in public. However, privately many will confess that there are too few of them to hold the Welsh Government to account or to scrutinise the volume of legislation for which they are responsible.

The noble Lord, Lord Richard, has already referred to the fact that with only 60 Members—and only 70% of them, 42 Members, available for scrutiny work at present—their ability to undertake this work is seriously compromised. In the UK Parliament, 85% of Members are available to undertake scrutiny and legislative functions; in the Scottish Parliament, 88%; and in the Northern Ireland Assembly, 85%. There are too few Assembly Members to populate the committees where scrutiny takes place, and because of time constraints arising from other duties they are less able to develop the specialist expertise needed to optimise their effectiveness. Because of this, and the increase in the number of plenary sessions, the Assembly’s own remuneration board has increased the staffing allowance for AMs to allow them three staff members to support their research, policy and constituency work, and is even now giving further consideration to increases that will allow each Assembly Member to appoint a senior adviser.

However, appointing more support or research staff misses the main point. It does not address the issue of AMs being unable to find the time to read papers, however well prepared by their staff, and to prepare for committees. That has led to a strengthening of the Executive, with well briefed Ministers apparently able to run rings around AMs who do not have time to read their briefings.

In these times of austerity, proposing an increase in Members to the National Assembly for Wales is hardly likely to be popular. Arguments we make about workload, efficiency, effective scrutiny, accountability and holding the Executive to account will all seem insignificant to an electorate more concerned about costs. However, the truth is that we get our Assembly on the cheap compared to other legislatures. The average annual cost of an Assembly Member, including pay, travel and other expenses, support staff and equipment is £225,000. The annual cost of an MP is £590,000 and that of an MEP is £1.8 million. Based on those figures an 80-Member Assembly would cost an extra £4.5 million per annum and a 100-Member Assembly an extra £9 million. The Electoral Reform Society’s publication argues that this,

“would be a small price to pay”,

given the benefits that would flow from increased accountability and better scrutiny.

That cost could, however, be offset by the better use of existing resources if Wales had fewer MPs and Peers at Westminster, fewer paid councillors and more AMs instead. The case has long been made for a reduction in Welsh MPs. Each Welsh MP has an average electorate of 76,000 while the figure for the UK is one Member per 97,000. While Scotland cut its number of MPs from 72 to 59 in 1999, Wales did not.

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[Baroness Randerson]

I think that it was not a case of the Silk commission not being allowed to consider the matter; the issue was that this was not within the specific remit of the commission. It was certainly something that it considered and discussed, and on which it made a recommendation.

While all of us here today seem to have an agreement that there is an issue to be considered, the First Minister confirmed in his evidence to the Welsh Affairs Committee in the pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Bill that the Assembly could undoubtedly cope with all its new powers with the 60 Members. Reference has been made to the Presiding Officer’s views. I think that it would be useful if the Assembly itself considered this issue.

[Lord Elis-Thomas]

I would counsel the Minister not to quote the First Minister or any first minister in any legislature as the authority on scrutiny.

[Baroness Randerson]

The noble Lord makes a very good point.

The size of the Assembly is a vital issue that goes to the heart of democracy in Wales and the inter-relationship between the legislature and the Executive. The key issue—the noble Lord has just drawn our attention to it—is that with a small Opposition, particularly in the case of a coalition, scrutiny is very difficult. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, said that everyone has a job. The problem is that everyone has two or three jobs in the Assembly, so the difficulty is with Assembly Members being busy. MPs and your Lordships are busy too, but Assembly Members are spreading themselves across several subjects and committees, which makes it difficult to establish expertise. This is a live issue. It needs to be considered as part of the Silk 2 recommendations and after the appropriate level of public debate.

A recent Electoral Reform Society report found that nearly 80% of Assembly Members believed that changes should be made to the way in which plenary time is used within the Assembly, with a view to making the time that they have available more effective. I am sure that that will have been considered within the Assembly at various times. As our debate today has demonstrated, this is a complex issue with a number of strands of opinion.

I wish now to turn to Amendments 11 and 14. Amendment 11, in the name of my noble friend Lady Humphreys, specifies that from 2021 the Assembly should be elected via the single transferable vote system. That would bring greater proportionality than the current system. We have discussed proportionality this evening. It would replace the current mix of first past the post and the proportional system that we have in the Assembly at the moment. Although we have an element of proportionality in the Assembly, it is not complete proportionality. A change in the electoral system is once again properly the domain of manifestos. I would also like to note a recommendation by the Richard commission report that was accepted at the time by several of the parties in the Assembly but has not been implemented.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Randerson]

I can certainly undertake to relay the points of view put forward this evening within government discussions on the future of devolution in Wales. I understand that there are very clear and strong views. Although I cannot promise action on this issue in this Bill, I can guarantee that I will ensure that the views are widely known within government. I fully understand the issues that have been raised.

[Lord Elis-Thomas]

That means that we go into the 2016 election without an increase in Members.

[Baroness Randerson]

The noble Lord is possibly being a little on the cautious side in his estimate of how fast a future Government could produce a further devolution settlement. I cannot give any guarantees about anything that a future Government might do, but if this debate is taken forward and undertaken rigorously within Wales within the next few months, and if parties put something in their manifesto on the increase in the size of the Assembly that they believe is required, we can have a debate on the future shape of devolution during the general election that would enable a future Government to take this forward with considerable speed. I regret that there are a number of “ifs” in that answer, but there is no need for the noble Lord to despair of the outcome.

This debate must continue. It must include civil society and seek to engage the general public if the Assembly is to change as a result of the further devolution of powers so that there can be more Assembly Members. I hope the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment.