Welsh Ministers (Transfer of Functions) Order 2018 — House of Lords, 2018-05-17
Topic: Government Operations
Leslie John Griffiths (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I am more than grateful to the Minister for giving that introduction to these varied and multitudinous proposals before us. We can easily recognise what he says about the amount of hard work that has been done to achieve the scrutiny of previous legislation and bringing forward these 47 matters. It is a little disarming for me, having engaged just yesterday with the Minister on the future of theatres in the United Kingdom, to be engaging now with him on matters of detail pertaining to these legislative proposals. But that, as they say, is life It is interesting to me that the word "clarity" was used about the Wales Act 2017. Yes, there is a degree of clarity, but the adjective "clear" in its comparative form, "clearer", may apply—but there is a lot of work to do to take it to an even better stage of comprehensibility lying ahead of us. It was very contentious at the time and many of its provisions need improving even now. For all that, it is a step along the way and, with all these discussions of devolution, a step along the way is as much as we can hope for sometimes, although these may be two steps along the way—and we must welcome them It has been good bedtime reading for me to know more about seeds and seals and salmon and sewerage and slaughterhouses and deputy lieutenants, put deliberately into that little mixture of things. I draw some opinion from reading about all that in welcoming the transfer of powers and the closer alignment of legislative competence exercised by the Assembly and executive competence exercised by Welsh Ministers. Once again, we are moving into a more coherent governance arrangement for the principality As for devolution, we cannot just look at what is proposed in these instruments without remembering the debates that we had up until yesterday on the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, which, of course, beckon the consideration of a whole number of things that will take the discussion of competence, framework agreements, the internal market and so on further more comprehensively as we go along. What assessment has been made already in anticipation of the further steps that will need to be looked at as time goes by Then there is the question of teachers’ pay and conditions. Uncoupling the pay arrangements that are national and United Kingdom-wide to make this separate provision in Wales has not been without its difficulties, especially with the trade unions. We certainly do not want by this uncoupling to envisage a situation in which Welsh teachers, for example, might be paid less, with conditions more onerous than already obtain. But assurances have been given us, and a taskforce is being run in parallel with these arrangements to ensure that we can hope even for a betterment of conditions for teachers in Wales. We can note therefore that this has been contentious, so that we may keep an eye on developments in this area On ports, Milford Haven springs out from the detail as having particular details dependent on it, making it one of those areas that has a national, UK interest. Of course, it must do; after all, a huge percentage of our energy needs are met by imports of liquefied natural gas to that port. Perhaps I should just confess a particular local interest, as I come from south-west Wales, which I believe is in need of considerable economic regeneration, in the hope that we can balance the UK-wide pertinence of the way we look at the reserve powers alongside Milford Haven and its capacity to generate the economy of that part of south-west Wales. This will be a test case, indeed, for some of the things we have been talking about elsewhere in our recent considerations Civil contingencies again come to mind, with the response to emergencies and so on, and the role of co-ordinating such responses within the Principality, even when perhaps some of the emergency services will be drawn from across the border. It is an interesting thing to envisage and we shall, again, need to look at that very carefully as these things transpire.