Government of Wales Bill

I did not intend to speak in this debate until I listened to the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan), who has not added a great deal to previous debates on this issue. There should be an opportunity to put matters right in the House, as the people of Wales have the right to understand why the Government and the Labour party have introduced the proposals. The hon. Lady is terribly confused about the electoral system. It was only a couple of weeks ago that we discussed the top-up system on the Floor of the House. She suggested that we ought not to change it, because it is too early to do so, and she has repeated that assertion today. She said, too, that the Labour party introduced the system in the 1997 referendum, so we should not change it. The purpose of the Bill, however, is to reflect on what has happened in the past few years to see whether improvements can be made to the way in which our country is governed in Wales. That point was completely and utterly missed by the hon. Lady. There is something else that the hon. Lady has failed to grasp. When we debated the system of top-up Assembly Members she rejected the consultation that my hon. Friends and I proposed so that we could consider whether we should revise a system which, I believe, has been discredited. Today, however, she said that the system was confusing. In our earlier debate, she asked me to talk about e-mails from my constituents about the electoral system. I remind her that hon. Members who represent Welsh constituencies do not need to look at e-mails, as we talk to our constituents in markets, pubs, meetings and churches, and they tell us how they feel about different public policy issues, including confusing systems. If she went to Wales a little more than she has done in the past she would undoubtedly hear the same points being made.