Government of Wales Bill

Amendments Nos. 156 and 157 would remove the absolute veto enjoyed by the other place over the Order in Council setting up the referendum and replace it with a suspensory veto, similar to that which it enjoys over primary legislation under the Parliament Act 1949. There is an important point of principle involved for our party. It would be entirely wrong for an unelected institution to frustrate the will of the Welsh people, as expressed through their directly elected National Assembly, to hold a referendum on the matters contained in the Bill. I hope that some Labour Members agree with that basic principle and will support the idea of democratic sovereignty in that regard. The royal commission on reform of the House of Lords proposed replacing the absolute veto over statutory instruments, which is what we are discussing in this instance, with the suspensory veto. It is important to remember that the other place has used its power to reject statutory instruments on a number of occasions. The Secretary of State will remember the famous case involving sanctions against southern Rhodesia in 1968. The House of Lords struck down that order because it supported the white minority Administration in southern Rhodesia. That caused something of a constitutional crisis at the time. However, it has used the power more recently too, during the passage of the Greater London Authority (Election Expenses) Order 2000, on the issue of Freepost. The other place has shown that it is willing to use its power to strike down statutory instruments in the case of elections. Our fear is that, unless the amendment is accepted, the other place, which is not representative of anything in particular—it is certainly not representative of Wales—will use its power in the Bill to frustrate the aspirations of the Welsh people and their representatives to move on to the next phase of democratic devolution. That cannot be right. The Under-Secretary said in the Second Reading debate that the Parliament Act would not apply to the legislation, so that cannot be used to protect us against the House of Lords striking down an Order in Council in this context. The Salisbury convention will not apply. All we are left with is the First Minister saying in his evidence that new conventions will develop over time, as is the practice in the British constitution. That provides us with no crumb of comfort as we face the possibility that, having achieved the two thirds bar in the National Assembly that has been set down in the Bill, having achieved the political consensus that the Secretary of State refers to constantly, and having achieved an affirmative vote in this House of directly elected Members, we will be frustrated by the unelected Chamber down the corridor. That would be entirely unacceptable and against every honourable radical tradition in Welsh politics. We appeal to the Government and to hon. Members to think again about giving the House of Lords an absolute veto in this regard. If a suspensory veto is good enough as regards every other piece of primary legislation, surely it is good enough when we are talking about the historic decision and proposal emanating from elected representatives of the people of Wales to move on to the next phase of democratic devolution. The First Minister in his speech in the National Assembly for Wales said that he did not believe that there would be any circumstances where the Order in Council procedure, whether it were in relation to the referendum or to other aspects of the Bill, would be used to frustrate the will of the Assembly, because to do that would be to"““expose yourself to ridicule, and you would pay the penalty at the next election.””" That argument may apply to the Secretary of State and to the Commons, but it expressly does not apply to the unelected, unaccountable and often unpredictable House of Lords. We cannot expect the House of Lords simply to accede to the demands of this place and the National Assembly in that regard. As Lord Morgan pointed out in his evidence to the National Assembly Committee on Better Governance for Wales White Paper, the House of Lords came very close to throwing out, purely adventitiously, the Health (Wales) Bill. Heeding the clarion call—the bugle call—all the Tory peers appeared just before the vote on the hunting ban was taken. They were there and they came very close to striking down the Wales legislation. Surely everything in our political traditions in Wales should tell us that we cannot trust the other place to have the final say on whether we can move on to the next phase in democratic devolution. In closing, I shall quote the Secretary of State. This is what he called the House of Lords, which in this Bill he is giving the final say over democratic devolution:"““a rather fey survivor from the pre-democracy days; it is a constitutional dinosaur . . . Unelected peers reflect an elitist state, which is one of the most unaccountable and secretive in the democratic world. It wields power by a combination of the royal prerogative, massive patronage and centralisation, with only a nod towards democracy””.—[Official Report, 31 March 1993; Vol. 222, c. 357–59.]" The right hon. Gentleman must have had better speech writers in those days—but surely the principles that he enunciated in that speech are the same today. The House of Lords should not have a veto over whether Wales moves forward to democratic devolution.