Government of Wales Bill

moved Amendment No. 4: Page 52, line 22, at end insert ““, provided that such an Order is not to the detriment of those who have either benefited from or acted in reliance upon the state of the law before the retrospective Order is made”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, the amendment refers to the issue raised in Part 3 about retrospectivity. As your Lordships will recall, both in Committee and at Report, we tabled an amendment seeking to remove from the Act the principle of retrospectivity. This arises because of Clause 95(4) which states: "““An Order in Council under this section may make provision having retrospective effect””—" —that is to say, an Order in Council made as a consequence of the Parliament in Westminster deciding to expand a field, as defined in Schedule 5 to the Bill, or a matter under that field. At Committee and Report, we sought to have that provision removed altogether. Now that we are at Third Reading, we are in characteristically conciliatory mood and propose a less dramatic solution to the problem—to leave the existing text in, but add the expression, "““provided that such an Order is not to the detriment of those who have either benefited from or acted in reliance upon the state of the law before the retrospective Order is made””." As a consequence of our debate at Report, the Minister kindly sent me a letter on the topic. I have read it a number of times. On each occasion, I reached a different conclusion about what it meant. I hasten to add that that is an observation on my powers of concentration rather than on the intellectual coherence of the Minister who drafted it. However, I am certain about one thing: the letter does not answer the question that I posed at both Committee and Report. The Minister will recall that that was, quite simply: can an order change, retrospectively, the decision of a court and the consequences that flow from that decision? The letter only goes as far as to say that a retrospective order, directed at a matter of interpretation raised during a trial, cannot be made while the trial is in progress. Plainly, that does not go far enough. In those circumstances, I intend to press my amendment. In doing so, I invite the Minister to agree that the matters and concerns that he raised at Committee and Report will not in any way be adversely affected by our particular choice of words. I beg to move.