Wales: Governance

My Lords, I will just say one or two words, since in a sense it is my corpse that people have been cutting up; or at least the corpse of the commission. On the whole, I give this White Paper a qualified welcome; it gets a B verging on B+. Some things are clearly right, such as dealing with the corporate structure. Some of the provisions in the White Paper about the electoral system are to be welcomed. I take the point about Clwyd; it is difficult to see how five people can be rejected by the electorate and nevertheless end up as Members of the Assembly. Something must be done about that. I also say to my noble friend that I am not convinced that there is no majority in Wales for these proposals. The latest polls show 64 per cent, a two-thirds majority, in favour of giving primary legislative powers to Cardiff. Having said all that—and I accept that there are different views—I inform my noble friend that my personal aim is to see established in Cardiff an Assembly for Wales with pretty well the same legislative powers as the Scots have. I do not understand why—in one United Kingdom—one nation, Scotland, has certain powers and another nation, Wales, does not. There is a fundamental illogicality there that must be dealt with. That is my aim; so the test in relation to this White Paper becomes pretty simple and pretty clear. Does it advance that aim or does it retard it? I have always regarded devolution as a progression. It is not a once and for all act. Someone once famously said that devolution is a process; and it is. I ask myself now whether this White Paper and these proposals help that process. Clearly, it does. The White Paper contains the important acceptance of the principle that the National Assembly needs greater legislative competence than it has at present. Therefore, the acid test for me is whether these proposals give it greater legislative competence. The answer is that they do, though perhaps not in a way that I would have liked at this stage. That brings me on to the point that I wanted to make. For me, the crucial point here is that the commitment to primary legislative powers should be in the Bill. It is not enough for a Minister to get up and say that he thinks it is a good idea after 2011. There must be a commitment in the Bill that if a referendum takes place in Wales, and if it has a positive result, then it will happen. We have here something along the lines that the commission reported; namely, that there will be an interim period during which the White Paper proposals can be implemented. The object of the exercise is to have   primary legislative powers in Cardiff that can be exercised in exactly the same way as they are in Edinburgh.