Government of Wales Bill

My Lords, I am obliged to repeat the arguments that I made in Committee. The Government do not believe that the work of the Assembly should be impeded by legal challenges that might be entirely spurious. No legal challenge can be made in respect of things done in Parliament as set out in Article 9 of the Bill of Rights, on which I know that Members of the Opposition are great authorities in this day and age. Further, as the noble Lord conceded, similar provisions to these subsections appear in the Scotland and Northern Ireland Acts, so the principle has been established. If legal challenges to Assembly measures or Acts were allowed on purely procedural grounds, that could give rise to significant problems in terms of delay and legal certainty. Such challenges could be brought following any technical error in complying with the Assembly’s procedures for passing measures, which could lead to problems over whether a proposed measure or Bill subject to such challenge could be approved by Her Majesty, or, if approved, whether the measure or Act would be vulnerable to being struck down by the courts. This would leave the law in a very uncertain position and could be dramatically and disastrously unfair. Let us look at the process whereby the Clerks put before Her Majesty an eventual measure after the Order in Council has been proposed giving the Assembly the right to pass it. If that measure is passed within the Assembly’s competence and goes to Her Majesty to be signed in Council, a challenge could be made on the grounds that the Clerk of the Privy Council or the Assembly had failed in some technical way. Of course we know that those distinguished personages do not make mistakes, and we are grateful for that. But if they did, the whole process would collapse.