Elections (National Assembly for Wales)

Owen Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd July 2012 Westminster Hall

[Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Paul Murphy) on securing this useful and important debate. It is a profound matter of regret to me, and to my right hon. Friend, that the Secretary of State is not here to listen to the arguments on both sides, not least because the Minister’s comments, and their further underlining of the clear disagreement between the Prime Minister and the First Minister, are a matter of the utmost seriousness. The word of either the Prime Minister or the First Minister is being called into question, and as the Secretary of State is at the heart of that unfortunate disagreement, it ill behoves her not to engage in the debate today.

It is no surprise, however, that the Secretary of State is not here, because that is in keeping with the ham-fisted, high-handed manner in which she has dealt with the matter over recent weeks. She has accused me of playing games. I put it to her that we are not playing games but merely articulating the views of Opposition Members and, I suggest, the National Assembly, which are already on record. This is a matter of profound significance to the National Assembly and the people of Wales. I ask whether there is any other Welsh issue of this significance being debated in the House this morning. I did not see anything on the Order Paper that should be detaining the Secretary of State. I certainly felt that my attendance here was important enough to warrant my sending my apologies to the shadow Cabinet, which meets as we speak.

I want to make something clear about the debate that we did not have this week. I wrote to the Secretary of State several weeks ago, telling her that I thought this such an important issue that it ought to be debated on the Floor of the House. She did not have the courtesy to write back with her opinion but merely tabled, through the usual channels, a debate in the Welsh Grand Committee. That was why we objected to the debate; it was nothing to do with the timing, but because we felt it ill-considered and ill-judged to debate something of this significance in Committee, and not to expose a constitutional matter to wider discussion.

This is a high-handed and ham-fisted way of going about things. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen made clear in his eloquent remarks, the Green Paper is highly partisan. It represents a barely veiled political agenda of increasing representation for minority parties in Wales. As my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) said, that agenda is, incredibly enough, there in black and white in the Green Paper. I include among those minority parties the Welsh Tory party and Plaid Cymru, a party that, extraordinarily, is not represented in this debate about the National Assembly for Wales.

[Jonathan Evans]

Does the fact that the Labour party got 43% of the vote in the Assembly elections not make it a minority party?

[Owen Smith]

No, it very clearly does not. The Labour party is here today speaking for Wales, and it is a shame that the hon. Gentleman sought earlier to misrepresent the options in the Green Paper. He suggested that on the table was one option of keeping the status quo, and he knows that that is not straightforwardly true. The option is to keep 40-20, but to shift to a more equalised block of constituencies by changing all the constituencies across Wales, with none of the benefits of retaining coterminosity with the parliamentary boundaries. Even that minor change is so significant that the consent of the National Assembly for Wales, as proxy for the people of Wales, ought to be sought.

The Green Paper is partisan, and also arrogant, in that it completely eschews the tradition of seeking consensus on issues such as constitutional change. When in office, the Labour party sought change through cross-party consensus, including when we proposed changes to the National Assembly for Wales in election manifestos. Amusingly enough, even the Tory party is split on this issue, with the party in Westminster taking one position in documents, and the party in Wales, which is perhaps more in touch with the people of Wales, taking an alternative one.

This is essentially an anti-devolution Green Paper, at odds with the spirit, if not the law, of devolution, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen said. How else can we describe a proposal from a Westminster-based, Tory-led Government for changes to both constituencies and elections to the National Assembly for Wales—a proposal that does not require the consent of the Assembly or the people of Wales? The proposal lacks even a modicum of a mandate, and thus lacks legitimacy, and it should be called out for what it is.

The two options are clear. One is to keep the 40-20 split but change the nature of the boundaries. That has all the disbenefits of reorganisation and none of the benefits of retaining coterminosity. That is why, of course, the Secretary of State is not minded to take the option forward. It is a red herring, designed to deceive. The second option is to shift to 30 on a list and 30 first past the post, increasing the number of Members elected via proportional representation, and decreasing the number directly elected by 10.

No one is suggesting that the nature of the National Assembly should be set in stone or fixed in aspic. Nobody is suggesting that no changes should be proposed and no reforms undertaken. Many people in Wales have lots of ideas—we have heard some suggestions today—about how the National Assembly could be reformed, but few of those people would have the temerity to propose imposing those changes on the National Assembly and the people of Wales without seeking their consent in any meaningful fashion. Fewer still would have the nerve to propose changes without any real evidence or impact assessment of how they will affect voting patterns or election turnout in Wales.

However, our absent Secretary of State proposes to do just that, giving effectively one option, the justification for which is cut and pasted from the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011, with nothing to back up either that or the alternative except the threat that if the option she favours is not adopted, the other even more destructive and disruptive option will be adopted. So much for the respect agenda.

That is happening despite the fact that in the Select Committee on Welsh Affairs last year, when I suggested that the Secretary of State had precisely such a plan in the back of her mind and warned her not to try to gerrymander the map in Wales, she told me that

“before anything goes forward to do with boundaries there would be a loud, long and large period of consultation”.

Consulting on a flimsy Green Paper for a few months over the summer, and treating the National Assembly as a consultee like any other individual or institutional consultee in Wales, while the Secretary of State for Wales refuses to submit to any meaningful scrutiny, does not constitute a loud, long or large consultation to my mind. It is certainly not appropriate to the changes proposed.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen said, consider the contrast between that and the attitude taken by this Tory Government when they sought to introduce changes to the nature of the voting arrangements for Parliament in Westminster. We had a three-month, significantly contested and well-resourced campaign, followed by a national referendum. I am not necessarily suggesting that that is comparable to the changes proposed in the Green Paper, nor am I necessarily suggesting, as some have done, that the changes necessitate a referendum. However, I put it to Members that at the very least, the consent of the National Assembly must be obtained as a proxy for that of the people of Wales if there is to be no referendum on the changes.

Consider, too, the changes mentioned in this debate in respect of the passage of the Scotland Act 2012. This Government explicitly accepted that the Scottish Parliament should have to consent to the views included in the Bill before it could become law in Scotland. Why does this Welsh Secretary, parachuted into Wales, not feel that a similar job should be done for Wales? Why does she treat the National Assembly for Wales with such disdain when her counterpart in Scotland treated the Scottish Parliament with such respect?

All that prompts the question: why these changes, and why now? Like others here, I cannot but conclude that it is about narrow party self-interest for smaller parties that will benefit from an increased proportion of Members in the National Assembly being elected by proportional representation. To proffer a piece of evidence in support of that contention, think back to 1999, when the Labour party was well supported by the people of Wales and did well at the elections, with the Tories winning just one seat by first past the post. What was the impact for them on the list? Eight seats were delivered. I suggest that a similar position might well come about, with similarly happy benefit for Conservative Members, if the proposals are adopted.

One cannot help thinking that the reason why Plaid Cymru is so quiet on the issue is that the party has cooked up a deal with the Conservative Secretary of State to accept the proposals, because it knows that they will benefit Plaid Cymru, too. The people of Wales will note Plaid Cymru Members’ absence from this debate and understand precisely what they are about.

[Ian Lucas]

On that point, does my hon. Friend not find it extraordinary that Plaid Cymru’s position appears to be that it will consent to the UK Government’s imposition of an electoral system on the Assembly without the Assembly’s consent?

[Owen Smith]

I find it absolutely amazing that Members from the so-called party of Wales should be absent from a debate on electoral arrangements for the people of Wales alone. It is an absolute dereliction of duty for them not to be here engaging in this debate.

Suspicions only harden when we consider the fact that No. 10 has now been dragged into the debate about Wales. That too strikes me as extraordinary. No. 10 is now reduced to the kind of weasel words that we read in the newspaper this morning and heard repeated by the Minister earlier today:

“the Assembly should be fully engaged in the process of deciding its future electoral arrangements”.

What does “fully engaged” mean? Does it mean consulted with, like any Tom, Dick and Harry in Wales, any public body or any MP? I suggest that that is not full engagement. Equally weaselly is the Prime Minister’s letter to the First Minister. He did not say that the changes in Wales should be decided by the people of Wales, but he certainly said, in the words of the First Minister, that the people of Wales should agree with the changes through the National Assembly. That is a bone of contention to which we will need to return later.

In conclusion, I have some questions for the Minister sent here today by his extremely busy Secretary of State to represent the Wales Office. First, what exactly does No. 10 mean by “fully engaging” with the National Assembly? Does it mean anything more than consulting with it, as with others in Wales?

What weight will the consultation accord the views of the National Assembly? To quote the motion passed there by the Tories, Plaid Cymru and Labour, it has already voted to:

“This Assembly recognises that there is absolutely no mandate to change the current electoral system in Wales and that any future change should be put to the people of Wales.”

Given this Government’s complexion, what notice will be paid in particular to the views of the leader of the Welsh Tories, Andrew R.T. Davies? He said:

“I think the Assembly should determine its own boundaries”.

In another interview, he said:

“I am in favour of the status quo”.

Ultimately, what will this Government do if, as seems likely, the National Assembly holds to its course and continues to submit evidence to the consultation saying that it does not believe that there is a mandate for the changes and does not support them? Will the Secretary of State for Wales continue to drive through the changes in the teeth of clear opposition from the National Assembly? If so, something has gone badly awry in the arrangements between Wales and Westminster. The Minister and his Secretary of State would do extremely well to consider the damage that will be done to that relationship if they press ahead. Devolution was intended not to diminish the voice of Wales within the UK, but to amplify it. It was intended to grant greater control over national affairs to the people of Wales via the National Assembly, within the framework of the UK. That framework is delicate, as events in Scotland are displaying only too clearly. All of us who believe that we in the UK are better together should reflect on that, and on the impact on that delicate framework.

Imposing ill-considered and ill-judged changes from Westminster on the National Assembly will only damage it. I am not playing games; I am simply stating the facts. I hope that the Minister has some answers on behalf of his Secretary of State.