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Huw Irranca-Davies: Enhanced consultation is set out clearly in the Bill, and there are key words such as "sustaining" and "promoting" the interests of various sectors, but that is absent when it comes to the business community. The words are indicative of the approach. Clause 75 says:
"Welsh Ministers must carry out consultation with such organisations representative of business . . . as they consider appropriate having regard to the impact of the exercise by the Welsh Ministers of their functions on the interests of business."
Business by its nature is to do not only with business interests and economic regeneration but with transport, education and skills, and so many other aspects, so if we are seriously to empower all sectors to contribute to the Welsh agenda—the team Wales approach—we need to bring business much more into line. There is provision to make that work, but it needs to be more explicit in the Bill.
I turn to the highly controversial question of regional Members and first-past-the-post Members. I note that Lord Richard, the chair of the commission, stated:
"There is something wrong in a situation in which five people can stand in Clwyd, none of them can be elected, and then they all get into the Assembly. On the face of it that does not make sense. I think a lot of people in Wales find that it does not."
Many Members who were supportive of the PR settlement in Wales have become disenchanted with it. The problem is the type of PR that we have imposed on the Assembly. I challenge Conservative Members to say that the system has not been abused. I will happily provide examples, and will do so in Committee if I am chosen to serve on it. There has been abuse and that is the problem, and Lord Richard recognises that.
Under the Bill, regional and constituency Members will have to describe themselves more accurately. That is not political niggling. At the moment, regional Members have the ability to cherry-pick and to promote themselves as local in one area or as supporting a popular or a good campaigning issue but to hide from tricky issues. That is not promoting democracy; it is an abuse of the democratic system. Let them be a regional Member and take the rough with the smooth. Let them put their office not where they think they will win a seat—it could be an Assembly first-past-the-post seat or a Westminster seat—but in the areas of most need. That is where my offices are. There seems to be no interest in doing that. If regional Assembly Members seriously intend to tackle problems where, in their wide constituencies, there is greatest need and the most challenges, let them take their offices there and let us test that. At the moment, that is not happening. We have been accused of gerrymandering, but I throw that straight back. Too often we have seen the use of newspapers and the placing of advertisements and offices.
Hywel Williams : I ask the hon. Gentleman the question that I asked the Secretary of State earlier: how would the Bill remedy what seems to concern the hon. Gentleman and other Members? It seems to me to be part of the rough and tumble of politics—perhaps he does not like that.
Huw Irranca-Davies:
I point out to the hon. Gentleman that I do not suffer any great disadvantage
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under the present system, but there are two equal but slightly different types of Assembly Member. A regional Assembly Member masquerading as local here and local there as he chooses is not the rough and tumble of politics but misrepresentation. Missives and memos, which have now been discarded, have said that that could never happen and that it was a case purely of an Assembly Member putting forward some ideas, but the very putting forward of those ideas is testament to the fact that an Assembly Member thought that the current system could be abused. That is what we are trying to change.
Mr. Grieve: I want to take up the hon. Gentleman on his point, because he clearly takes the view that there should be two categories of Assembly Member. Although there may be two routes into the Assembly, it is dangerous to say that members of a corporate body have a different status in relation to each other. That is why I am troubled by the Government's approach, although I am sympathetic to some of the hon. Gentleman's points. I am a believer in first past the post and always have been, but the tinkering around the edges of the PR system that he and the Secretary of State are proposing is iniquitous. If there is to be a PR system, it should be on a national basis, and not just for Wales.
Huw Irranca-Davies: I return to the point—and I think that the Bill envisages the situation—that Assembly Members should be equal but different. A local constituency first-past-the-post Assembly Member has a specific constituency interest and a right to describe themselves as local and to campaign on issues specific to that constituency. It is regrettable and it was never envisaged that regional Assembly Members would choose to make use of the system to make political capital rather than to work on behalf of the area. Unfortunately, as we saw in the memo that was circulated, one Assembly Member envisaged where that could easily be done. It can, and I am afraid that the evidence is there for everybody to see.
Lord Richard talks of how, the morning after, Assembly Members who had been denied the chance of first past the post were suddenly resurrected. That causes immense confusion. It is a Lazarus-like resurrection, except that he had the decency to wait at least three days. Assembly Members who have been rejected outright by their electorate are suddenly back in place. As the Secretary of State said, the question of choosing one or the other is not simply to the advantage of one party. It will also be the case for Labour Members.
David T.C. Davies: Is it not the case that under our system members of the public have a chance to reject people? Under the system that the hon. Gentleman proposes, they will not have that chance but the Assembly Member may still pop up the next day. Should he not have the intellectual honesty to admit that the proposals set out in "Llais Dros Gymru" in the first place were incorrect? If he wants to do away with proportional representation altogether, he might be surprised at where the support for that comes from.
Huw Irranca-Davies:
There is a perfectly coherent proposal in the Bill, which is to choose one or the other. It is the same for all political parties and every Member will have that choice.
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This Bill should be supported on Second Reading. Conservative Front Benchers know that they can raise their objections during subsequent stages. If they choose to push their amendment to a Division and to reject the Bill out of hand, they will be objecting to the principle of devolution. If there is one thing on which the other parties are united, it is that the Welsh public should be given the opportunity if they wish to take forward devolution. It should not be rejected out of hand as the Conservative amendment seeks to do.
7.9 pm
Mr. Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con): Whatever questions people in Wales are currently asking about devolution, I do not believe that the Bill provides the answers. It contains useful measures to enhance the effectiveness of the Assembly's workings, which I welcome, but at its heart lies a very unwelcome political fix. I refer to part 3, which sets out the Order-in-Council procedure for granting further law-making powers to the Assembly.
By constructing a hugely complex procedure whereby the Assembly can essentially legislate for itself in the fields devolved to it by part 1 of schedule 5, and which requires Parliament to give its consent, the Secretary of State has pulled off the ultimate devolution trick. He can tell his impatient pro-devolution colleagues in the Assembly that he has given them full law-making powers in all but name. He can also tell colleagues who are more cautious about devolution—some may be present now—that Parliament is retaining its sovereignty and that part 3 does not constitute a significant extension of current practice. It is a political fix and I do not believe that the British constitution should be bent and shaped by such a fix.
Apart from the constitutional issues, I am very concerned about the way in which the Order-in-Council procedure would work in practice. It seems to rely heavily on a large measure of good will and shared objectives on the part of the Secretary of State and the Welsh Assembly Government. It is not difficult to envisage circumstances in which the relationship might not be so cordial and the scope for disappointment, confusion and, perhaps, legislative breakdown could be considerable.
If we are to extend and deepen the devolution settlement, the Order-in-Council mechanism, which emasculates Parliament and bypasses a referendum, is certainly not the way to do it. Without doubt, the Bill develops the settlement in a way to which the people of Wales never assented when they voted by a 1 per cent. majority to establish the Assembly in 1997. It is simply not true that, as the Secretary of State would have us believe, the Government of Wales Act 1998 provided for exactly this kind of arrangement.
As has already been said today, Lord Richard himself argued that the proposals for Orders in Council had the potential to be a
Professor Rawlings of the London School of Economics has argued that the approach could be described as a
The claim that the Order-in-Council procedure is nothing more than what was agreed to by the Welsh people in 1997 is a bizarre and misleading interpretation of the Bill. The truth is that it goes significantly beyond what was agreed to following the referendum eight years ago—which is why, if part 3 is to be implemented, it should be implemented only after a new referendum decision.
The one fundamental driving force for devolution should be the people of Wales, and what they want for their country. If they want to take the devolution settlement further to give the Assembly full law-making powers, let us get on with it by using part 4. If they do not want that, let us not try to bring it about by using a byzantine alternative route that would risk further alienating Welsh people from the body that is supposed to bring decision making closer to them. It is essential for those making policy to move in step with Welsh opinion. Otherwise, they will risk creating an even more remote devolved body that will lack real meaning for the Welsh people.
It is worth reminding ourselves just how divided the Welsh nation was over the original devolution question in 1997. Wales was split down the middle on whether to create the National Assembly. Eleven of the 22 Welsh local authority areas returned no verdicts, while just 559,000 people—a mere 25 per cent. of the Welsh electorate—voted in favour. At the time, many of us believed strongly that that was a flimsy basis for the creation of an Assembly that could command popular legitimacy and interest, but we in the Conservative party accepted the fact of devolution and, as many neutral commentators have said, the Conservative group in the Assembly has perhaps worked harder than anyone else to make the institution work. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the fact that large chunks of the Welsh electorate are disengaged from devolution.
At the first Assembly election in 1999, there was a 46 per cent. turnout and just over 1 million people voted. In 2003, only 850,000 votes were cast. There was a 38 per cent. turnout, about the same as the United Kingdom turnout for the 2004 elections to the European Parliament, an institution that is supposed to represent the very paragon of remoteness to the people of this country. That is a dreadful record for such a young institution, which was set up to satisfy some unmet desire for devolution on the part of the Welsh people.
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