Wales Bill — House of Lords, 2016-12-14
Topic: Government Operations
Edward Rowlands (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I support the amendments, which are similar to those that I had the pleasure of moving in Committee. Since then, we have had a most interesting and informative letter— yet another Bourne letter, I may say; the collected correspondence of the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, is becoming voluminous—that is extraordinarily revealing. It appears that if we have bad habits, other Assemblies, including the Welsh Assembly, are now catching them. The letter tells us: "In 2015 and 2016, eight out of the twelve Acts passed by the Assembly included a power for Welsh Ministers to make consequential amendments to Acts of Parliament"— that is, our Parliament— "without any role for Parliament to scrutinise such secondary legislation" It turns out that the Assembly is doing exactly what we are threatening to do. It is bringing in legislation, including Henry VIII powers, that will then be used to amend legislation, primary and secondary, that this House has passed. That is a constitutional absurdity and we have to put a stop to it at both ends In fact, not only has the Welsh Assembly taken these Henry VIII powers in eight of its 12 Acts, it has exercised them already. In three cases it has amended our primary legislation without our knowing or being consulted. I do not know who was asked. I ask the Minister to elaborate on this, because it is all in his letter. Another four pieces of secondary legislation have been made by the Assembly that amend SIs made by the UK Parliament. So there are three pieces of primary legislation and four secondary that have been amended by the Welsh Assembly, using their Henry VIII powers, without either this House or the other House knowing I have the privilege of serving on two committees of this House that spend a lot of time on secondary legislation, as well as the Joint Committee with the Commons. They are most impressive committees. An enormous amount of effort is taken and thorough, diligent work is done by the legal advisers and the members of the Committees. We pore over our draft statutory instruments and report if there is any special reason—if we need to draw attention to defective drafting, in the case of the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, or to vires issues or broader issues in the case of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee I am astonished that we spend all this time making sure that we bring to this House statutory instruments that are fit for purpose, yet I now find that another Assembly—the Welsh Assembly—has amended the statutory instruments that we have so carefully prepared. I do not know how it has amended them; I do not know the nature of the amendment—I will press the Minister to explain in a minute—but this is the sort of situation that we get into. It is a sort of inter-ministerial legislative stitch-up: "You can amend it in your legislation —it is sufficient, it saves time and it is convenient". Neither House should be interested in ministerial convenience. It is our job to be inconvenient at times, and I believe we should be in this case. Will the Minister now tell us, based on the letter he has sent us, which sections of which Acts of Parliament—primary legislation—the Assembly has amended? I do not have a clue; none of our committees seems to have found out about it. Secondly, which statutory instruments have been amended by the National Assembly and which paragraphs of our statutory instruments have been changed? We have to put a stop to this; we have to put our foot down. I will read the last paragraph of the letter: "There was no requirement for Parliament to scrutinise any of this legislation" It appears that Parliament was not party to any of this legislation, only Ministers. That is not true. Acts of Parliament and statutory instruments belong to this Parliament as much as they belong to Ministers; they are as much our constitutional property as they are that of Ministers. We need to put our foot down and find ways and means to ensure that this will not happen again. It is now happening to us, as we threatened to do it to National Assembly legislation. Let us put a stop to it, please.