Wales Bill

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 18th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elis-Thomas]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the Minister, who is an old colleague of mine—sorry, not an old colleague but a former colleague—in the National Assembly. His great achievement then, which I have alluded to before, even in this place perhaps, was converting the Welsh Conservative Party into a Welsh Conservative Party and a pro-devolution Conservative Party, as we saw most firmly yesterday in the National Assembly vote. He has excelled that contribution in the way that he has taken this legislation through this House. If I may, I want to link him to what is a very important memory for many of us. He ranks up there with the late, great Gareth Williams QC, who took us through the very early stages of devolution in this House. I cannot pay him a higher compliment than that.

The Minister kindly referred to our debate yesterday. I am not going to rise to the bait and have a spat with my noble friend about the way that the parties voted. However, it did strike me as interesting that the United Kingdom Independence Party and the party of Wales ended up in electronic harmony—we do not have Lobbies in the National Assembly—voting against a measure of Welsh devolution, even if it was for different reasons. The debate we had there was reasonable and reasoned. It was necessary to have that debate and that vote because, as the Minister has told this House before, we could not have proceeded to complete our stages without that legislative consent Motion.

That leads me to another conclusion that we can, I hope, take from our proceedings on this legislation, both in the National Assembly and in this House. Last week, I ventured to mention that we had perhaps finished a chapter of doing things in a certain way in relation to Welsh devolution. I believe we have now, potentially, reached a level of consensus, certainly between the main parties of devolution, as we saw in yesterday’s debate in the Assembly.

Perhaps we can now move, in the spirit of the agreement for legislative consent and the agreement that this House has achieved through reasoned discussion with the Welsh Government and the Constitutional Affairs Committee of the National Assembly, towards a form of co-legislating. Certainly we should look for early drafts of any proposed future developments in devolution, rather than this hand-me-down form of Westminster legislating on behalf of Wales. I put that suggestion forward not in a spirit of controversy but because I believe it is the way to achieve the consolidation championed by one of the most distinguished former Secretaries of State for Wales.

On that point, the noble Lord neglected to include himself in the list of the promoters of devolution. Although he tries now to present himself as an anti-devolutionist, during his period as Secretary of State he achieved more Executive devolution than did any other Secretary of State. It is important that we remember those days because, without the Executive devolution led by the Conservative Party in Wales, we would never have had the basis for the powers now devolved further in this Bill. I am afraid I include him as well in the pantheon of devolutionists, where he likes it or not.

I add my own thanks to Geth Williams. I remember working with him and my right honourable friend the Secretary of State in a previous Government. I recognise the quality that he and the officers and lawyers of the Wales Office bring. I also thank the lawyers of the Welsh Government who participated in these discussions and the lawyers of the National Assembly Commission, particularly those advising the Constitutional Affairs Committee of the Assembly, of which I am proud to have served as a member in two Assemblies—although not for the whole time, for reasons which I will not go into tonight.

I pay tribute to the present Constitutional Affairs Committee in the Assembly for its rapid turnaround in producing those “critical friend” reports on the Bill; to its current chair, a former Member of the House of Commons, Huw Irranca-Davies; and to its previous chair, David Melding, who has been such a distinguished Member of the Assembly, and among the deep, caring, great Conservative constitutionalists of Wales. I thank the First Minister for his constant support on these matters and the Counsel General. In addition, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Morgan. It is not an easy job to work both sides of the railway line but we had the happy experience of sharing the same train this morning, so were able to congratulate each other, and the Minister in his absence, on the progress we have made together on this Bill. I link with that my friend the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, and the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, whose contributions have always been philosophical and sometimes prophetic—a great Welsh tradition.

We thank all noble Lords for their contributions. We know that through the progress of this Bill we have achieved a further significant milestone in the progress of devolution. I am not here to speculate as to what will happen next but, whatever does happen, will be on the firm basis of the reserved powers model, which is constitutionally congruent even if not as extensive as what happens in the rest of the United Kingdom, and for that I thank the Minister and this Government deeply.

[Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)]

My Lords, some 3,000 years ago, Homer wrote in the Iliad that after the battle men like to reminisce about their prowess in the fight. Some 10 or 15 years ago the tributes and thanks were getting so extensive that the decision was taken that such tributes would no longer be heard at Third Reading. However, just as referring to people at the Bar is now commonplace—any Member of Parliament or Minister who comes to the Bar tends to get a mention these days—so that tradition, in which I firmly stand, has been eroded. Therefore, I confine myself to thanking the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, who has done a brilliant job in listening to all the complaints, some of which were completely without foundation. He has reacted very well. Lastly, I thank my noble friend Lady Randerson, who was part of the team in the coalition Government when the Bill was in its infancy. She played an important part in framing the way it progressed.

[Lord Elystan-Morgan (CB)]

My Lords, I strike a concordant note in joining with all others who have expressed so genuinely their appreciation of the Minister’s efforts in this matter. He has been a model of courtesy and accommodation in so far as it has been humanly possible for him to be so. Had he been invited to draft the Bill we would have had a very different piece of legislation before us, but that was not to be.

Although the Welsh Assembly yesterday gave its seal of approval to the Bill, although a reserved constitution has placed Wales technically in the same field as Scotland and Northern Ireland—a matter of constitutional significance—and although this is the third occasion when there has been a very thorough examination of the Welsh constitutional position in the short space of 19 years, nevertheless the Bill cannot be regarded as a great leap forward in the field of devolution at all. I say that because it seems to me that, compared with the situation Wales found itself in two and a half years ago after the agricultural workers’ wages case was decided by the Supreme Court, we are far behind where we were on that occasion in so far as the sum total of legislative and devolutionary authority is concerned.

When the Scottish referendum concluded and the Prime Minister, in the grey dawn of that morning, walked to a microphone in Downing Street, he uttered the words that Wales will be at the very heart of devolution. I was stirred and cheered by those words, but had they been followed with the prophecy, “But bear in mind that 27 months from now the range of devolution will have been very severely cabined, cribbed and confined by a Bill called the Wales Bill”, I am not sure my attitude would have been exactly the same.

There is no doubt that there has been a faint tinge of old colonialism relating to this situation—something I have referred to ad nauseam. I make no apology for that. It is the attitude somewhere or another that small, insignificant powers that are wholly classically local in their character must somewhere or another be withheld from Wales. I hope that will change. I hope future Governments will accept that we are no longer in a colonial era—that:

“The old order changeth, yielding place to new”.

It may well be that the Government think they have thrown away many of the difficulties relating to devolution in Wales, but not all things thrown away stay thrown away. There is a tale that David Lloyd George used to tell of one of his erstwhile colleagues, a person who had changed his attitude very considerably to former policies. Somewhere or another they came back to him again and again. Lloyd George likened it to the position of an old Aboriginal chief who was utterly fed up with his boomerang and threw it away. It did not matter whether he threw it in a sharp curve or in wide curve; back it came again and again. I end with the admonition to government: never forget the boomerang.