Government of Wales Bill

My Lords, as the House will have been informed, my noble friend Lord Evans wrote a very detailed letter, precise in its content, and including some interesting language, to the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, which we had hoped assuaged his anxieties and would not give rise to any further representations on this matter. I regret we appear at this stage to have signally failed. Let me attempt, therefore, to explain why we would like to see this amendment withdrawn and why Clause 93(7) is fair and accurate. The amendment would remove a provision which is intended, as I think the noble Lord recognised, to resolve any doubts about whether any particular element in an Assembly Measure is within the Assembly’s legislative competence—as he said, within the ““field””. It is important to stress that if this were removed, the Assembly could be severely hampered in its ability to make new and innovative legislation, or legislation which cuts across several different subject matters or tackles problems in new ways. It would prevent the Assembly’s ability to create good legislation, and at the same time greatly increase the scope for legal argument about whether something was within the Assembly’s powers. The Government’s view is that the safest way to avoid legal argument is to include in the Bill a statutory interpretative provision, leaving no room for doubt how the matter is to be dealt with. In reaching that view, the Government, ever mindful of learning from experience, adopted the approach taken in Section 29(3) of the Scotland Act 1998. The Government are committed to ensuring that the approach of the courts to the interpretation of the Assembly’s legislative competence is as consistent as possible and that the use of the tried-and-tested provision, which as I said we have seen in the Scotland Act, which is now expressed in Clause 93(7), is the safest and most sensible way of achieving that aim. We had hoped in the letter to the noble Lord to make this point as effectively as we could. He is correct that the interpretation would be based on the exact words in the legislation. I want to give him the assurance that there is no attempt to shy away from precisely that commitment. But we have a formula with the Scotland Act which works in these terms and we think this is the safest way of guaranteeing this position with regard to the Assembly.