Government of Wales Bill

I hope that my participation in the previous Government of Wales Bill and, indeed, the Bill that became the Scotland Act 1998, has made me pragmatic about the constitution of our country. Our constitution is, of course, unwritten, and it has great flexibility. The right hon. Member for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy) made the point that constitutions evolve, which I acknowledge. I accept the Minister’s argument that the separation of primary and secondary legislation has a certain flexibility. In recent years, we have seen ample signs that the Executive have taken to addressing matters through secondary legislation that the House would have thought of as requiring primary legislation in the past. I also acknowledge that, as the right hon. Member for Torfaen said on Second Reading, the important aspect of scrutiny is its effect on the delivery of good governance and legislation to recipients. I thus hope that it is not the case that sacred notions of parliamentary propriety or historical ways of conducting business are simply embedded in my mind. I learned that when we considered both Bills in 1998, which I enjoyed participating in very much. The Minister’s answers to the questions of my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) about amendment No. 162 were telling. The reason why the protection that we have under the Bill of Rights was not given to the Welsh Assembly in 1998 was because it was considered that it was being set up not as a parliamentary body, but as a local government body. At the time at which we debated the matter, I highlighted my worry that, whereas the solution that we had adopted for Scotland was quite neat—one might have disagreed with it, but shedding a whole raft of areas of parliamentary responsibility to the Scottish Parliament had a neatness about it—the solution for Wales was fraught with problems because of the difficulty of separating primary and secondary legislative functions. That is embedded in my mind from all those years ago. Today’s debate has highlighted the problem. Despite all the explanations that the Minister offered, we cannot escape the fact that the reason why the Government thought it necessary to give immunity to the Welsh Assembly was precisely because they intended to transfer primary legislative functions to it under part 3. I enjoy debating with the Minister—or any other hon. Member, for that matter—but when we are discussing constitutional measures, it is important that, while arguing our cases, we are honest with the electorate about what we are doing. The Government’s tendency to say that changes do not really matter because they are minor incremental moves, or gentle tweaks to the system about which we should not worry, is quite wrong. Even by the standards of the present blurred distinctions between primary and secondary legislation, the Government are presenting a fundamental, major constitutional change.