Government of Wales Bill

My Lords, I support these amendments. I shall tell the House why I am convinced that the Government must rethink in this direction. We have a great step forward here. It is not as big a step as the Liberal Democrat party would have wished, but at least we are moving towards a Parliament, a Senedd, that will have more responsibilities, possibly on the Scottish model, within a few years. With additional responsibilities, we need sufficient Members of the Assembly to allow them to carry out their duties thoroughly. If we look at local authorities in Wales, very few of them have fewer than 40 or 50 councillors because they need to share their responsibilities. I suggest that the National Assembly for Wales is at least as important as any county council in Wales. According to the Government’s plans, 60 Members will be elected. Of them, two will immediately be out of the ordinary running of the Assembly and will be the Presiding Officer and the Deputy Presiding Officer. Then there will be 12 Ministers who will have specific responsibilities, which do not include the scrutiny of legislation. So we are down to 46 Members, which is less than nearly every county council in Wales. I suggest that with the additional responsibilities, it is time for the Government to agree that this is a reasonable amendment. One fact brought up time and again is that we have a bicameral system in Westminster whereby the House of Lords exercises scrutiny responsibilities, which it does very effectively. Wales does not have a second Chamber, which means that there is no similar level of scrutiny. With additional Members, it would have people who could scrutinise legislation far more thoroughly. As my noble friend Lord Livsey stated, an STV system, a proportional system of election, will be far more representative and will dispose once and for all of that lack of satisfaction with the dual candidatures—a list candidature or a constituency candidature. With an STV system in multi-Member constituencies every Member has the same responsibilities and is elected with the same amount of authority. We could of course go to a first-past-the-post system throughout Wales, but that has already been rejected as being unfair, inadequate and unrepresentative. You can have 40 per cent of the electors, or, say, 36 per cent as in the UK elections of last year, who can elect the government of the country. We say that a fair system would mean that 40 per cent is 40 per cent of the Members, and with 50 per cent we will have about 50 per cent of the Members. That type of electoral system exists throughout Europe. Why do we have to be the odd people out in Europe? I went to the opening of the new Assembly building in Cardiff. I was delighted to see that it was a circular chamber—not adversarial but a chamber where people were going to gather together and discuss in a consensus the needs of Wales. The same goes for the Parliament in Scotland. STV is to be adopted there for its next set of local elections. So democracy moves; it cannot be static. Democracy must always evolve and move forward. Adopting this new system—new to us—of the single transferable vote would be our recognition that we, too, are still an evolving democracy. With those words, I support the amendment.