Wales Bill

Lord Richard Excerpts

Monday 13th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I can readily identify with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Ely. I agree that these matters should ideally be in the hands of the National Assembly to decide. None the less, we have guidelines that have been laid down from here. By virtue of speaking to Amendment 5, I want to draw attention to the fact that there are real dangers when a Westminster election overshadows an election to the National Assembly.

Amendment 5 provides that the poll for a National Assembly ordinary general election should not be held within 355 days of the date of a UK general election, although I accept entirely that it should be a matter for the Assembly finally to decide on these matters if we can give it the power to do so. The amendment mentions 355 days rather than 12 months to allow situations to arise whereby one vote could be held on 7 May one year, followed by a poll on 1 May the following year, or similar circumstances.

The truth, which may not be immediately apparent to colleagues from other parts of the United Kingdom, is that the UK media are heavily biased in favour of England-only issues. That is understandable because most of the media are based in south-east England and look through a prism from that perspective. In the leaders’ debates in the run-up to the previous general election, for example, party leaders answered questions relating to healthcare and education, without mentioning that those policies were applicable only in England and not in Wales or Scotland. These considerations spill over to arguments in relation to the settlement that will be made to Scotland as well.

Circumstances such as these are highly confusing for viewers, listeners or readers in Wales and can lead to voters making choices based on policies that would not in fact affect them. Wales has a number of daily newspapers such as the Western Mail and Daily Post, as well as very good local newspapers, but the majority of people still get their news and election coverage from London-based outlets. Were an election to the Welsh Assembly to occur in quick succession following a UK general election, or in inverse circumstances, it is certain that any debates surrounding Welsh policies would be totally drowned by UK election coverage. The Electoral Reform Society Wales has said that combining polls would always have a detrimental impact by causing confusion for voters, and that Welsh elections would be “subsumed” into media coverage of the UK general election.

To ensure that voters’ decisions are well informed, we believe that provisions similar to those contained in Amendment 5 would be necessary to mitigate such media distortion, although I repeat that I would prefer that initiatives along those lines should come from the Assembly itself.

[Lord Richard (Lab)]

My Lords, I agree with the thrust of the amendment but I am bound to say that I am not sure that I fully understand the wording of the first part of it. If one actually looks at the text, it would seem that the amendment proposes that the Welsh Assembly should revert to a system in which the First Minister of the Welsh Assembly, with the consent of the Assembly, would be able to determine to hold an election at any moment that he thinks fit. In other words, we would be back to the situation that we were in before we passed the Act a few years ago that set up the five-year Parliament gap.

If the intention of the amendment is that the Assembly should be able to fix in advance a particular term at the end of which an election should be held—in other words, that the Assembly should decide whether it should be a five-year, four-year or even perhaps a three-year term—that I understand and fully appreciate. If the intention is, however, to give the Welsh Assembly the additional powers that the Prime Minister had in the old House of Commons, to call an election at the time of his own choosing, I am bound to say that I am not sure I agree. I accept the thrust of the amendment, which is that decisions on the timing of an election should be a matter for the Assembly, but I am not sure whether the wording of proposed new subsection (1) in the proposed amendment goes anywhere near achieving that.

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[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.

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[Baroness Randerson]

The noble Lord is seeking to guarantee that gender balance. I am normally very supportive of any initiative that increases the number of female elected Members but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, indicated, there would be an element of controversy. For example, if a female was elected as one of the Members and a male as the other Member, but the second male, shall we say, on the list had more votes than the winning female, or vice versa, there would be local controversy.

However, the main concern with this proposal is that it would reduce the element of proportionality. The offer of proportionality was intrinsic when Welsh people accepted the Assembly in the referendum. It was an integral part of what was offered.

The interlinked issues of the right number of Assembly Members, the optimum balance between constituency and regional Members and the system used to elect them need to be considered as part of the further step forward in devolution in Wales. If there are to be profound changes, there needs to be wider consultation. I know I will disappoint many Members when I say that I do not believe that the thinking behind these amendments is sufficiently mature for me to accept any of them. There needs to be further debate.

[Lord Richard]

Can the Minister go this far and say that the Government would accept in principle that the Assembly needs more Members?

[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.