Government of Wales Bill

I accept that it is a problem and that it will take imaginative work to come up with a clear solution. However, one solution would be for the Assembly to sit for longer than it does at the moment, and there is scope for that. Two Members sit here as well as in the Assembly, and they can obviously do that. Much attention has centred on the proposals in the Bill to end the ridiculous situation of dual candidacy in Assembly elections. It is important to build on the Assembly settlement, but we must address its failings, and dual candidacy is one of the biggest failings. Following the last Assembly election, many people asked me how candidates who stood at the election and were defeated—and, in many cases, defeated by a country mile—could find themselves sitting in the Assembly, claiming not only to represent constituents but having equal status with the people who defeated them. How would we feel if a third of this Chamber were made up candidates that had stood against us and lost? As has already been pointed out, all four of the list Members in north Wales were defeated at the ballot box. Three of them stood in the same seat—the infamous Clwyd, West—that has been referred to many times today. All of them were defeated by Alun Pugh, who was the only candidate from a major party who stood a chance of not retaining his seat. All the other candidates were No. 1 on their list. That is farcical. I do not know about north Wales, but they would not have come up with such a system even in North Korea. Even Lord Richard made it clear that something was wrong and did not make sense. That is bad enough, but the problem does not end there. Once getting into the assembly via the back door, these characters spend much of their time cherry-picking issues and targeting seats that they or their party are looking at for future elections. Unlike in Scotland, there is no protocol under which they have to inform properly elected Assembly Members that they are visiting their constituencies.