Wales: Governance

My Lords, it was my privilege to serve on the Richard commission under my noble friend’s chairmanship. I will give the White Paper an ““A-””—a rather more generous examination mark than my noble friend—primarily because it takes the devolution settlement forward significantly in a meaningful way, without opening up a new agenda. Initially, through the structures of the framework legislation and, secondly, through Orders in Council, we will grant greater and greater legislative competence to the National Assembly and build on the legislative partnership that has already grown between Westminster and the Assembly. We will have the considerable scrutiny skills of this House and the Commons alongside the developing scrutiny skills of the Assembly—a kind of legislative trinity of Commons, Lords and Assembly. I see extreme value in allowing that process to build up and develop and seeing how it works. I remind my noble friend that one of the central conclusions of the Richard commission report was that, if we transferred a portion of primary powers to the National Assembly, to exercise those powers we would have to increase the Assembly’s membership by 20? Consequently, we would open up the issue of how those extra 20 Members would be elected—probably under a different electoral system altogether. I hope that my noble friend will confirm that such radical changes should be put to the Welsh people in a referendum, because they would be a radical departure from what was agreed in 1997.