Government of Wales Bill

Before you rule the Secretary of State out of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I suggest that his real problem is that there are three Welsh Conservative Members of Parliament, as well as Conservative Members in the Assembly. If Labour Assembly Members had the same reputation for hard work as our Conservative MPs and AMs, they would do extremely well. The Bill suffers from two fatal flaws. First, there is a lack of any proper consultation with the people of Wales through a referendum on the implications of the changes in part 3. Our argument is not that the Assembly should not gain additional powers but that, consistent with our approach to devolution, we need to give the people of Wales their say. We need to give them the opportunity to understand the proposals in the Bill and to express their views on what they want. However, although the Government are prepared to concede a referendum, at some point in the future, on the primary law-making powers set out in part 4, they do not provide for one on the new legislative procedures in part 3. That is inconsistent and wrong, and we will seek to persuade the Secretary of State to provide for an earlier referendum on the proposals for the two-stage process. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) says that I should not waste too much time doing that. In the spirit of consensus, however, I am going to try to make the Secretary of State see sense. He has himself described the procedures in part 3 as a mechanism to ““streamline”” or ““fast-track”” Welsh legislation. In fact, they represent a fundamental change to the 1998 settlement, not least evidenced by the extent of the repeals in the last schedule to the Bill. The Government are proposing, without asking the people of Wales, to substitute the detailed scrutiny that Parliament gives to Welsh primary legislation with a procedure by which legislative competence is transferred to the Assembly through unamendable Orders in Council following a debate for one and a half hours. That procedure risks disfranchising Welsh Members of Parliament, who will no longer be able to carry out the job of work for which their constituents send them here, and at the same time it will disfranchise the Welsh electors who returned Members to this House in the expectation that they would represent their interests by properly scrutinising legislation—a function that will be diminished if the Bill is passed in its present form. It also risks placing the Assembly and Parliament on a clear constitutional collision course. No convincing answers have so far been given to legitimate concerns over what would happen if Westminster rejects an application by the Assembly to legislate in a certain area or what would happen if the Secretary of State uses his pro-consular powers to block an application. If the Government envisage that the role of Parliament is simply to rubber-stamp applications, why involve us at all? Why should we go through that interim process and not go straight for full legislative powers? It is little wonder that Lord Richard concluded that"““There is very considerable lack of clarity in the way in which this interim stage would be managed and effected.””" The Secretary of State has said that the interim stage would be a test of the robustness of the devolution settlement. The people of Wales and this Parliament deserve better than that. We are entitled to ask where the demand for the proposed procedure has come from. The Secretary of State says that it will mean that Wales will no longer have to jostle each year to get legislation into the Queen’s Speech. If that is so, it would be useful for the House to know precisely how many requests for pressing pieces of legislation have been made by the Assembly that the Government have turned down.