Elections (National Assembly for Wales)

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd July 2012 Westminster Hall

[Paul Murphy]

Not to me, although I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith), who will wind up for the Opposition, will touch on that. I am sorry that the Secretary of State is not here. I have a great deal of time and respect for the Minister, but on this occasion the Secretary of State should be present. Secretaries of State sometimes think that they are too grand to come to debates in this Chamber, but when I was Secretary of State I certainly took part in Adjournment debates. I think that she should be in this Chamber, but she is not, and we will hear what the Minister has to say.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend is a distinguished Member of this House and a former Secretary of State for Wales. Does he agree that the fact that the Secretary of State is not here is totally disrespectful to Welsh Members? I venture to suggest that if we had been a group of community campaigners from Buckinghamshire who were opposed to High Speed 2, she would have been present, even if it was 6 o’clock in the morning. Is it not time for her to turn on her alarm clock and show Wales a bit more respect?

[Paul Murphy]

None of this is a surprise to me, because it follows the pattern of what happened when we discussed parliamentary constituencies during the progress of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. There was no adequate debate on the Floor of the House; the guillotine fell, and we did not really have the chance to discuss the issues for Wales. Furthermore, the Secretary of State refused point blank to hold a Welsh Grand Committee on the issue. But enough of that; I am sure that the Minister will be able to explain the Secretary of State’s absence in his concluding remarks.

I wish to come to the essence of the debate, which is the Government’s Green Paper concerning electoral arrangements for our National Assembly in Wales. I will not touch on some of the more peripheral issues, but will rather focus on the central matter of how boundaries are configured and how constituencies are worked out in Cardiff. The Green Paper is flawed for two reasons. First, it is almost exclusively based on partisan grounds, and follows the pattern of the gerrymandering that we saw in the case of parliamentary constituencies. Secondly, that is backed up by the fact that there are only two options in the Green Paper, which is deeply wrong.

If we want a proper debate on how Welsh Assembly Members are elected, to say simply that the status quo is one option and the other is a 30-30 match—30 directly elected Members and 30 top-up Members—is not the end of the story, and other possibilities should have been included in the paper for consideration. I may disagree with most of them, but that is not the point—the option should be there. There is a genuine argument, with which I know the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) and his party—and, I suspect, the Liberal Democrats—agree, regarding the single transferable vote. I do not particularly believe in that, but it should have been an option in the Green Paper.

The option that I favour should also have been considered: retaining the 60 Assembly Members and having two Assembly Members per new parliamentary constituency. I would favour the election of those two Members by first past the post, but they could be elected under the alternative vote system.

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[Paul Murphy]

Absolutely. The Secretary of State should also be trying to ensure that she has reasonably good relations, despite the political differences, with the Government in Cardiff. It seems to me that there is almost a permanent state of civil war between the United Kingdom Government and the Welsh Government on various issues. That has come to a head on this point about the electoral arrangements.

[Susan Elan Jones]

My right hon. Friend has been very generous with his time. Does he, like me, think it is significant that Conservative Members in the National Assembly for Wales have concerns about the matter? Take, for example, the statement of opinion signed by the Minister’s counterpart in Clwyd West, Mr Millar, and by Mr Paul Davies and Mr Russell George. It says:

“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.”

I am sure that, like me, my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Paul Murphy) will be very interested to hear the Minister tell us who he thinks speaks for the people in Ruthin market on this issue—him or Mr Millar.

[Paul Murphy]

Indeed. My hon. Friend has pre-empted me; I intended to give a similar quote from the very same Member of the Assembly. Darren Millar said to the Western Mail some time ago that the Welsh Assembly Conservative group

“has made its position very clear. We have said we want the status quo to continue. We don’t want any change. That’s our position. We think the 40:20 position we have with the existing boundaries is perfectly adequate.”

Not even the Conservatives—the Secretary of State’s friends in the Assembly in Cardiff—agree with the Green Paper, so what is she doing this for? What is the point of it? Unless she gets consensus and agreement, this will be a running sore between the two Governments and the two Parliaments.

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[Albert Owen]

I do not believe that the hon. Gentleman is really apportioning blame to the Boundary Commission. He and his party voted on strict criteria, which were then imposed on the Boundary Commission. First, they allowed exemptions in some areas, which means that the argument that the hon. Member for Aberconwy made about equalisation across the entire United Kingdom is a false one. Secondly, the Boundary Commission was given no room for manoeuvre, which is why we will end up with this Government doing away with a quarter of the seats in Wales.

[Susan Elan Jones]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is a degree of nonsense in what certain Conservative Members are saying? It seems that they want fewer Conservative Members of Parliament in Wales as long as it does not affect their own seats. In his role as Parliamentary Private Secretary, the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies) has to sit silently, but he has described the changes as the death of parliamentary democracy in mid-Wales. Although he is not allowed to speak, he can nod—he is not even nodding this morning. Does my hon. Friend not agree that there is real inconsistency in what the Conservatives are arguing on this point?

[Albert Owen]

I have highlighted the inconsistencies of the Conservative party on these issues, but I now want to move to some of the important points that my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen made in his opening remarks. I have dealt with the first point: there was no mandate for the change. There is no respect for the National Assembly as a body and for the First Minister as a leader of that body. That is absolutely clear from what has come out of this debate and from the way in which the matter is moving forward. As for the idea that there is dialogue among people through a Green Paper—the hon. Member for Aberconwy gave me the ammunition to go after this one—I have to say that not many people concentrate on a Green Paper. Many people concentrate on manifestos. That is the difference.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Wales (Mr David Jones)]

Mr Hollobone, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. In the brief time available to me—some 11 minutes—I will do my best to answer many of the questions posed in this debate. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Torfaen (Paul Murphy) on initiating this debate. He was kind enough to say during his remarks that he had considerable respect for me. I must tell him that as a lawyer, I am always suspicious when told that people have respect for me, because the expression “with great respect” is the greatest insult in the legal profession. I believe that the right hon. Gentleman’s compliment was, in fact, meant as a back-handed insult to the Secretary of State for Wales, and that insult was echoed by many Opposition Members. Frankly, the personal nature of their criticism does them little credit.

It is important that the facts are set out clearly on the record. As the right hon. Gentleman will know, although we have had the benefit of a one-and-a-half-hour debate today, the Secretary of State had offered to hold a Grand Committee on the issue. The right hon. Gentleman is an important supporter of the Grand Committee system and, had that offer been accepted, we would have had a three-and-a-half-hour debate yesterday morning. For the life of me, I cannot understand why his party’s Front-Bench representatives refused that offer. The right hon. Gentleman said that it was made on short notice, but as he will know there is little time left in this parliamentary term to hold such a debate. I hope that I am not being unfair to the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith), but I think that, had the right hon. Member for Torfaen been in his position, that offer would have been accepted and we would have had a Grand Committee debate yesterday, led by the Secretary of State, and not the attenuated process that we have gone through today.

[Susan Elan Jones]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Jones]

I will, but I will not take many interventions, because I have been left with so little time.

[Susan Elan Jones]

Why is the Minister waffling so much? Where is the Secretary of State for Wales?

[Mr Jones]

That was a very helpful intervention. The fact is that, had Opposition Members been willing to turn up on a Monday morning, there would have been a debate yesterday.

[Susan Elan Jones]

Where is she?

[Mr Jones]

The hon. Lady’s personal animosity towards the Secretary of State is well known, so I will not grace her comments with any further response.

This debate is about the Government’s Green Paper on the future electoral arrangements for the National Assembly for Wales, but the Labour party appears to spend most of its time agonising about process. Having hacked through that undergrowth of process, its principal complaint seems to be that it is the Assembly, not Parliament, that should be responsible for determining those electoral arrangements. The position, however, is absolutely clear: this Government can only work within the devolution settlement that was put in place by the Government of Wales Act 2006. That Act was implemented by the Labour party, so it is rather rich that its Members are now complaining about the arrangements that they thought perfectly adequate back in 2006. I witnessed the passage of the Bill through Parliament, and I cannot recall any of those Members suggesting at the time that the arrangements should be anything other than those that we are pursuing.