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Hywel Williams: I think that many of us share the hon. Gentleman's views on the Assembly's work load, but has he considered the difficulty of staffing Committees when many of the 60 Members will be part of the Government or deputies? Is it a practical proposition to run Committees in such circumstances?
Mark Tami: I accept that it is a problem and that it will take imaginative work to come up with a clear solution. However, one solution would be for the Assembly to sit for longer than it does at the moment, and there is scope for that. Two Members sit here as well as in the Assembly, and they can obviously do that.
Much attention has centred on the proposals in the Bill to end the ridiculous situation of dual candidacy in Assembly elections. It is important to build on the Assembly settlement, but we must address its failings, and dual candidacy is one of the biggest failings. Following the last Assembly election, many people asked me how candidates who stood at the election and were defeated—and, in many cases, defeated by a
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country mile—could find themselves sitting in the Assembly, claiming not only to represent constituents but having equal status with the people who defeated them. How would we feel if a third of this Chamber were made up candidates that had stood against us and lost?
As has already been pointed out, all four of the list Members in north Wales were defeated at the ballot box. Three of them stood in the same seat—the infamous Clwyd, West—that has been referred to many times today. All of them were defeated by Alun Pugh, who was the only candidate from a major party who stood a chance of not retaining his seat. All the other candidates were No. 1 on their list. That is farcical. I do not know about north Wales, but they would not have come up with such a system even in North Korea. Even Lord Richard made it clear that something was wrong and did not make sense.
That is bad enough, but the problem does not end there. Once getting into the assembly via the back door, these characters spend much of their time cherry-picking issues and targeting seats that they or their party are looking at for future elections. Unlike in Scotland, there is no protocol under which they have to inform properly elected Assembly Members that they are visiting their constituencies.
Mr. David Jones : What does the hon. Gentleman consider to be the legitimate role of a regional Member of the Assembly?
Mark Tami: We need to examine that matter. I accept that the hon. Gentleman has experience of the situation because although he was not elected on the list first time around, his predecessor decided to spend more time somewhere else. I am not sure whether he was the next one on the list, but that shows that we have a fairly crazy situation. I make no criticism of the hon. Gentleman or the job that he did, but the system is fundamentally flawed.
For some unknown reason, we provide additional list Members with the same amount for staffing and office costs as properly elected Members. Let us be honest—I think that the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies) went some way towards saying this—who actually gets up in the morning and says, "I know, I'm going to write to my additional list Member today about this matter."? I would hazard a guess that the number of such people is pretty small.
Mrs. Gillan: May I establish that the hon. Gentleman said that Members elected on the list system are not proper Members and that he is putting forward a serious proposition to reduce the salaries and allowances of Members elected on the list system? If that is not a proposition to give the Labour party an electoral advantage, I am not sure what would be.
Mark Tami: I certainly did not say that such Members should have a lower salary. I said that they do a different job, and I shall explain what I mean.
If list members are in any doubt about what their role should be, they have only to consult Leanne Wood's magic memo, or the additional list Members' bible, as it is known. She set out with great clarity her golden rules on how list Members should abuse the system: avoid
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casework at all costs; misuse the staffing allowance to benefit the party; locate the office not for the needs of the people, but in the interests of the party; and, of course, attend events only if it is in the interests of the party—if in doubt, send a pro forma letter of rejection. There is a problem with the system. List Members of any party—even Labour list Members, if there were any—would be drawn to that approach because the system allows and even encourages them to behave in such a manner. The system is wrong and should be changed.
I would like the Bill and the Assembly to go further and define the role of list Members. They should have exactly the same status as other Members within the Assembly, but without an unchecked roaming remit outside. We will have to return to the matter if that abuse continues to such an extent.
Mrs. Gillan: Does the hon. Gentleman think that the problem that he is outlining regarding Miss Wood and her operations would be solved if people standing in constituencies were allowed to stand on lists for other regions?
Mark Tami: No. That would make the situation even more complicated and people would not understand what on earth was going on—they fail to understand the situation at the moment.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy) said, list Members should be elected on a properly proportional second vote. In the same way in which people do not understand how losers become winners, they do not understand how a party can top a poll yet not get any of its candidates elected. In the 2003 election, for example, Plaid topped the poll in mid and west Wales. It received 51,000 votes on the second vote and received one additional list Member. Labour came second with 46,000 votes, but got no additional list Members. The Tories were back on 35,000 votes—19 per cent. of the vote—and got three additional list Members. The Lib Dems were not far behind the Tories, but got no additional list Members. A party that got less than a fifth of the second vote got three quarters of the seats. That is obviously a very democratic system—[Interruption.] The system is fundamentally flawed. I used to support proportional representation but, like an ex-smoker, I have seen the light and discovered the problems that it throws up.
Mark Tami: I am sorry, but I will not give way because I have gone over my time.
The Bill is a step in the right direction, but we need to go further. I am sure that it will get its Second Reading tonight.
8.25 pm
Mr. David Jones (Clwyd, West) (Con):
The most charitable criticism that one might make of the Bill is that it is premature. Perhaps a less charitable criticism would be that it is a devious measure designed significantly to extend the powers of the Welsh Assembly to give it a primarily law-making competence
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without first obtaining the consent of the people of Wales in a referendum. Furthermore, one could say that the Bill's aim is to bolster the Labour party's position in the Assembly.
It is worth looking back briefly at the history of devolution in Wales to date. As other hon. Members have said, it must not be forgotten that devolution was voted for in the 1997 referendum by the narrowest possible margin. On a poll of just over 50 per cent. of the Welsh electorate, just over 25,000 people voted in favour of devolution. The majority throughout Wales was just over 6,000. In other words, almost 75 per cent. of the Welsh electorate was either opposed to devolution, or insufficiently persuaded of its merits to vote in favour of it.
Hywel Williams: Will the hon. Gentleman tell the House the proportion of the electorate of Clwyd, West that voted for him and other parties? Did he receive a majority vote?
Mr. Jones: I am making the point that at the time of the 1997 referendum, a significant majority of the Welsh electorate was not in favour of the Assembly, or was insufficiently persuaded of its merits to vote for it.
The Assembly is a fact of life, but one must also acknowledge that as far as many electors in Wales are concerned, the jury is still out on whether it has been beneficial to the people of Wales overall. Many people in Wales—and, perhaps, on both sides of the House—are extremely disappointed by the Assembly's performance to date. On health, especially, it has been a less-than-conspicuous success. Waiting lists and times in Wales are significantly longer than those in England. In my constituency, to cite just one, it is virtually impossible to find an NHS dentist. There is not a huge amount to crow about regarding the Assembly's success.
The Secretary of State has acknowledged that there is no consensus in Wales on full primary legislative powers for the Assembly. On 15 June, he said:
"we will call a referendum only if there is a consensus for one. There is no consensus for one now, and it would be lost."—[Official Report, 15 June 2005; Vol. 435, c. 267.]
More recently, he said that neither he nor the First Minister were
I agree entirely with the Secretary of State that there is no consensus in Wales for further devolution. Clearly, there is no such consensus. It might therefore be expected that the Government would wait to allow the current devolution settlement to bed in and to start proving its worth before granting further legislative competence to the Assembly.
The Secretary of State contends that what is proposed in the Bill under stage 2—the Order in Council measures—does not amount to such a significant extension of the Assembly's powers to merit a referendum. He said today that a modest transfer of powers was involved. The validity of that view depends to a great extent on the way that the Order-in-Council procedure would be operated. We await much more detail in that respect.
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The more widely drafted the Orders in Council, the less modest the transfer. It is abundantly clear that Assembly measures made as a result of powers granted via Orders in Council might be used to amend, extend or even repeal Acts of Parliament. The power is significant and goes a considerable distance beyond what was initially envisaged at the time of the referendum in 1997.
The White Paper, "A Voice for Wales", made it clear that the Assembly's role would be to take over the administrative functions of the Secretary of State for Wales, its legislative functions being confined to the passing of secondary legislation. The Bill makes it clear that an Assembly measure may make any provision that could be made by an Act of Parliament. We therefore have what the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) described as a kind of salami slicing. There is an extension of primary legislative competence to the Welsh Assembly.
Furthermore, once an Order in Council has conferred enhanced legislative powers in relation to a matter, the competence conferred will be of a continuing nature. The Assembly will be able to revisit those powers conferred by the original Orders in Council. That will amount essentially to a permanent transfer of legislative competence in a large number of areas. As the years pass, so that competence will grow.
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