Wales Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-10
Topic: Government Operations
Dafydd Elystan-Morgan (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 78. However, before so doing, I want to say first how delighted we are that the Minister is safe and sound with us. I must say that a doleful bell rang in my memory. In 1968, I was a Minister in the Home Office and on that particular day had Question 77 to answer. I was assured by somebody who might have known better that there was no prospect whatever of it being reached. However, in my nonconformist ignorance, I had not realised that it was Epsom week and that a large swathe of a particular party was disporting itself at Epsom. I still regard other persons as having some responsibility for that. On the other hand, there was a high degree of contributory negligence on my own part. However, we are very delighted that the Minister is with us. I doubt whether any Minister has ever attended a Bill with greater integrity, enthusiasm and candour as has the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, in this matter I wholeheartedly support everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Ely, put forward as a background to the matter my proposed amendment deals with, which is demarcation. It is an attempt to try to draw a clear and understandable line between the authority of this Parliament and the authority of the Cardiff Assembly. As one brought up in the countryside, I have always espoused the adage: good fences make good neighbours. I have no doubt that there is massive truth and realism in that in relation to constitutional matters Devolution is both an end in itself and a means to an end. Essentially, what it means to me is that it is possible for a number of communities within the same kingdom and the same sovereign state to be able to share responsibilities of an administrative and, more particularly, legislative nature. That can be done only if there is a clear understanding of where the equitable point of balance—the watershed—exists in relation to the division of the two bodies. How do you find that? You do not find it in any criteria set down by a court of law or in an Act of Parliament; nor, if I may say so, do you find it in the learned writings of eminent jurists. You find it in each case by using instinctive common sense and an understanding of the justice of the situation If we look at European sub-Parliaments, there is no clear, consistent rule as to exactly where the boundary is drawn, but they have all espoused a common approach to the problem. It has been an approach that they accept, historically and socially: that there is what might be called a watershed and that certain matters flow inevitably to the general sovereign Parliament, while others inevitably and physically flow to local decision. That is the way that we should approach this matter in relation to Wales Of course, that has simply not happened. It is not as if the Government had set out their criteria for deciding what was local and what was general. As far as the outside world is concerned, it is a wholly haphazard ragbag of reservations—197 of them. I have looked carefully at the situation in Scotland and Northern Ireland and there is nothing approaching that concentration of reservation in either of those countries. Indeed, it is not just a question of the number of reservations, but the sheer triviality. One could spend many doleful hours going through those lists I shall not repeat what I have said on more than one occasion in the House on that, but I will say that the Minister, as an able and distinguished professor of law, will know full well that under certain local public health Acts and local government Acts over the last century and a half, it was possible for local authorities of a modest nature to adopt certain modest rules. They effectively became local law. That happened on scores and scores of occasions. The Minister is probably in a better position to advise the House than anybody else, but interestingly, many of the 197 exceptions that we have would have been included in those very provisions. Is that not a massive irony? My case therefore is this. The Government, intentionally or unintentionally, have managed to make a thorough and chaotic mess of this situation. There is no rationale as to why certain matters are reserved and others are not. No criteria are suggested at all. In so doing, a very great disservice has been done both to the principle of devolution and to the principle of subsidiarity, if there is a difference between the two. One may very well argue that one is talking about the same central principle. But as the matter now stands Her Majesty’s Government have devalued the whole principle of devolution and trespassed on the noble principle of subsidiarity, cynically reducing it to something wholly ineffective The purpose of the amendment is to seek not so much to cure the situation in which we now find ourselves, because that would take something much more fundamental, but to start a process of examining it in detail. The amendment would impose on the Secretary of State for Wales the obligation to set up a working party to report within three years on the operation of each and every one of the reserved matters, and to report to Parliament regularly on such progress. That would not answer the question altogether, but it would be a helpful way of approaching the problem. That working party should represent as broad a social and political spectrum as is humanly possible Perhaps I may make a suggestion to the Minister. If the Secretary of State wants to use something off the shelf to address this matter, he could do far worse than ask the Silk commission to sit again and consider this point. The Minister knows more than anyone else in the House about the commission, having for many years been one of its most distinguished members. The commission has reported on two occasions in a mature, diplomatic and thorough manner on Welsh constitutional matters, and it could do so again. On that basis, I urge the House to consider that this amendment is of real constitutional importance. It does not completely cure the problem but it is a hopeful way of setting about resolving it.