Welsh Assembly Legislation (Attorney-General)

Stephen Doughty Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making a strong case about the first law, which was very historic, as he mentioned. Did he share my surprise, along with other members of the Welsh Affairs Committee, that the Secretary of State, and apparently the Attorney-General’s office, did not even seem aware of the cost to the taxpayer of referring that very modest measure to the Supreme Court?

[Paul Flynn]

I am glad that my hon. Friend has intervened, because I can remind him of the costs that the Government seemed indifferent to. The legal cost of the Treasury Solicitor’s Department for representing the Attorney-General in relation to the Bill was £59,000.

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[Paul Murphy (Torfaen) (Lab)]

Unexpectedly, I rise to support my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) on this issue. I do not actually think the Attorney-General’s Office is to blame for the situation. The system is to blame, because it means that issues are resolved through the courts when they should be resolved through the political process.

The whole purpose of the Wales Office and its counterparts in Northern Ireland and Scotland is to resolve disputes such as those that have been described in a proper political way, so that they never have to enter a court of law, let alone end up going to the Supreme Court and costing so much money. When I was first appointed Secretary of State for Wales, virtually all the responsibilities of my predecessors had gone to the National Assembly for Wales. Although my hon. Friend and I—we have been friends for far too many years to remember—were not always on the same path on the issue, we have ended up in the same place on it, not least because the people of Wales recently voted to extend the Assembly’s powers. For the first time, it will have the right to produce its own primary legislation.

The Solicitor-General will know that disputes in government are resolved either through correspondence or, if that cannot work, through Ministers meeting. In the case of matters involving devolved Administrations, Ministers of the Crown meet other Ministers of the Crown who happen to be in the devolved Administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Beyond that, there is machinery, for which I was once responsible, for joint ministerial committees. If necessary, there is the British-Irish Council. All that means that matters can be resolved in a way that avoids the need to go to the courts. Of course, the situation is not the same when different parties are in government in London and Cardiff, but the principle is the same—to try to resolve the problem.

I rather fancy that the Solicitor-General will talk about whether the National Assembly has the powers to do certain things and whether it acts ultra vires or intra vires. Even those points can be resolved by diplomatic means, however, if they are talked through. By going to the Supreme Court, we press the nuclear button. Although that might satisfy the lawyers, civil servants and Ministers who think it should be done, they are unwittingly doing immense damage to the devolutionary settlement, whether in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. The whole purpose of devolving legislation and administration to those three countries and regions of the United Kingdom is that they are allowed, by Act of Parliament and by referendum, to take their own decisions. If the Government do not like something, a crafty way to stop it is not through negotiation among Ministers but by going to the courts. That is the wrong way to do it.

A lot of the problem is the general inexperience in government of how devolution works. For many years, I was frustrated with Whitehall Departments because they did not understand what devolution meant. The purpose of the territorial Departments of State for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland is to undertake liaison between the Governments of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and that of the United Kingdom.

[Stephen Doughty]

My right hon. Friend is making a strong case. Does he agree that at play here was something much more sinister because, in the case of the Agricultural Wages Board, the Welsh Government were going to show up the UK Government in what they were doing and what we were trying to protect? Let us not forget that the measure was to protect more than 13,000 low-paid agricultural workers in Wales. The use of this constitutional process shows not only disrespect for devolution, but a way of trying to get away from something the Government did not want to be shown up in public.

[Paul Murphy]

There are two ways of looking at it. There are party political differences because of the different parties in the different countries, but I also experienced that when Labour was in government and other state Departments were not necessarily sympathetic to what the Welsh Government were doing. It was my job to say, “You might not like it, but you’ve got to do it because that is what devolution is all about.” Otherwise, what is the point of having it in the first place?

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[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I could not agree with the hon. and learned Gentleman more. Perhaps I should clarify what I was saying: LCOs were clearly imperfect, but the new system is meant to be better. Even with the LCO paraphernalia—it was difficult and cumbersome—attempts were made within the constitutional arrangement, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen has made clear, to work through those difficulties. If necessary, and as a last resort, they would be escalated up the constitutional food chain for resolution at a higher level, but there was certainly not the seemingly macho political posturing of taking it outside of this place without recourse to internal mechanisms and straight to the Supreme Court. I can see only one possible justification for that: to prove some sort of point and say to the people of Wales and the democratically elected representatives in Wales, “Know your place.”

[Stephen Doughty]

Does my hon. Friend accept that there is also an opportunity cost here? What is the Secretary of State for Wales doing with his and his officials’ time, attempting to stymie and frustrate the will of the Welsh people and the National Assembly instead of focusing on standing up for Wales around the Cabinet table? He was evasive when we questioned him on this point in the Welsh Affairs Committee. He would not give us an estimate of the amount of time that he and his office had spent on this. I suspect it was far more than it should have been.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. There is a clear case for a cost-benefit analysis of the tasks the Secretary of State is spending his time on, and for asking why he is not finding more useful things to do. There is also the question of the cost of challenging this through the Supreme Court. In an era of what we are told is great austerity, cutbacks and stringent demands on Departments, I am amazed that the Wales Office thinks it fit to throw on to Government—albeit another Department—the cost associated with a Supreme Court challenge.

I turn to the Agricultural Wages Board, about which I know some small amount, given that I was the shadow Minister who stood here frequently in opposition to its abolition. Just as frequently, I put the case that the Westminster Government merely needed to allow Wales to continue as it was by putting a clause in the Bill, as requested by the Welsh Government, saying, “Ignore Wales for these purposes.” We only asked that they let us carry on and find a way to do it ourselves, rather than abolishing the whole mechanism and saying, “Now do what you want.”

I pay tribute to the work of Unite, in Wales and throughout the UK, which stood up for the lowest of the low-paid agricultural workers, for skills and training and for the development of earnings and capacity among agricultural workers. I also pay tribute to colleagues in the Welsh Assembly, including Mick Antoniw and others, who fought the good fight in Wales and to the Farmers Union of Wales—for goodness’ sake!—which said, “The reason we want to keep it in Wales is that we are slightly different from England. We have a higher proportion of small and medium-sized farms, which do not only employ individuals. That is why we want the clarity provided by the Agricultural Wages Board. We also rent ourselves out.” They would say to me, “I as a small farmer, rent out, and I know the terms of the contract.” I am talking of the young farmers of Wales too. These are not organisations that would automatically side with Labour on every issue in defence of something such as the Agricultural Wages Board, but my goodness they did on this occasion.

All that the Welsh Government and Alun Davies, the Welsh Minister, were asking was, “Give us time and space to define our own future”, but that did not happen. We debated it long and hard, we fought the good fight, speaking up for the Agricultural Wages Board not only in England, but in Wales, all the while conscious that the voice of representatives in the Welsh Government and the National Assembly was not being heard anywhere except in the media. We had to speak for them.

Wales lost without having had a direct say, and all that was required was for a Westminster Minister to say, “We concede that agriculture is a devolved responsibility. We won’t challenge you. We will put a clause in the Bill that will allow you to proceed.” That, I say to the Solicitor-General, would have shown respect for Wales and the devolution settlement. Rather than that, and symptomatic of the case put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West, we had a firm no. The door was shut in our faces. In effect, it wiped Wales off the democratic map. That is a regret.

The Solicitor-General is a reasonable and fair-minded fellow. The cacophony of pleas from the Opposition might remind him of the old poem about Welsh people worrying the carcase of a dead song and being a bit too melancholy, but we are not melancholy; we want to be joyous and we want to celebrate devolution and respect the fact that the people of Wales supported greater devolution. We just ask the UK Government, whatever political perspectives make it up, also to show that respect.