Governance of the Union (Constitution Committee Report)

Lord Murphy of Torfaen Excerpts

Monday 28th April 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)]

Who knows what will happen in the future? They used to sell tickets for the Devolution Committee, which my noble and learned friend Lord Irvine chaired in 1998. They were wonderful affairs, setting up devolution right across the country—including, later, in Northern Ireland. The committee did a great job, but one thing it did not do very well was work out exactly how these devolved Administrations were going to work with each other or with the United Kingdom Government.

After nearly 26 years—I served as Welsh Secretary and as Northern Ireland Secretary in that period—I can say that it did not go very well. In fact, it went very badly at times. Relations were okay when it was the same political party, of course. For example, I could go to Cardiff on a Monday morning and talk to Rhodri Morgan to sort out the problems of the world—and I continued doing that—but it was not quite so easy in Scotland. When I later had to deal, in another capacity, with Alex Salmond, it was a very different picture altogether. As the noble Lord, Lord Norton, said, when there are different parties in Cardiff, Edinburgh and London—as well as in Belfast, of course—it presents a totally different picture.

Over the years, the attempts to bring people together were pretty awful. Prime Ministers did not want to go to the meetings and rarely did. Although we were trying to deal with best practice, it was often too bureaucratic. The meetings were too infrequent. Civil servants wanted to devolve and forget, and let the devolved Administrations get on with things, yet we could learn a great deal from each other—and, eventually, we did. However, there was no real structure for doing that; what there was was wholly inadequate. Any communiqué that came from an intergovernmental meeting was utterly and completely useless—waffle of the worst possible sort that meant absolutely nothing—so, over the years, things got worse and worse. I pay credit to the last Conservative Government because they successfully started to change the way in which the devolved Administrations and the United Kingdom Government worked. That was good, but there are a couple of things that we could look at; they have been partly highlighted by this excellent report from the noble Baroness, Lady Drake.

The first is the use of the territorial departments. There are a couple of paragraphs saying that it is a good thing to have them, but we need to look much more carefully at how they operate. It is a good idea that the Cabinet Office now takes responsibility for intergovernmental relations, but you can bet your bottom dollar that Pat McFadden and Nick Thomas-Symonds have a million other things to deal with. There must come a time when we have Ministers wholly dedicated to the question of devolution and relations between the Governments, and that has to work within the structure of the Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. How that operates I do not know, but those departments are entirely devoted to relations between those countries and the United Kingdom Government. Why do we not use them more? Why is that not seen as the way forward? There is not enough on that in the report and certainly not enough in the Government’s response, bearing in mind that those are three Cabinet Ministers dealing with the devolved areas and Administrations.

Next, as far as I can see, there is nothing in the structure we are dealing with today that addresses interparliamentary relations rather than Government-to-Government and Executive-to-Executive relations. But there is an organisation that does precisely that, which resulted from strand 3 of the Good Friday agreement, which I and my Irish counterpart chaired all those years ago. We set up a sophisticated mechanism by which the devolved Parliaments—the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Senedd and the Northern Ireland Assembly—and the Irish Parliament and both Houses of this Parliament get together regularly, twice a year, with sub-committees. It is the only way that Parliaments compare notes and best practice. Why can we not look at that as a way to build on the best practice of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly?

Those are just a couple of suggestions. There is a lot of work to be done. This is extremely important. It has improved in the last couple of years, but there is a long way to go yet.