National Assembly for Wales (Legislative Competence) (Environment) Order 2010

My Lords, the Minister is absolutely right to say that this complex-looking order was thoroughly discussed and considered in a committee of the other place as recently as last Tuesday. It also featured as a case study in the Welsh Affairs Committee report of 15 January entitled, Review of the LCO Process. The order is closely related to the committee’s key finding that LCOs must be more user-friendly and that a more straightforward approach to drafting is required. Those who have studied this document will readily agree. The Minister implied that he also agreed. Incidentally, the chairman of the Welsh Affairs Committee, Dr Hywel Francis MP, and its Members are to be highly commended—if that is not out of place—for their scrutiny and development work to improve the quality of LCOs over recent years. Similarly, our own Constitution Committee, which until recently included the noble Lord, Lord Rowlands, has done sterling work in the same field and we are all indebted to it. On the content of the order, all I have to say is that the National Assembly and its Government must be aware of the havoc that the recession is causing to our industrial landscape in Wales. We can no longer take great companies and employers such as Bosch at Miskin and Rio Tinto at Holyhead as semi-permanent features of that landscape. Nor can they be replaced in a hurry—and who knows what further damage is yet to come? Today’s announcement of 0.1 per cent growth in GDP in the last quarter of last year does not give us much clearance from the recession, although technically we are out of it. However, even now and later this year unemployment may well rise and companies continue to fail. Many of the Assembly’s environmental policies and ambitions were formed in the decade of comparative prosperity and reflect those benign conditions which, alas, no longer prevail. For example, the Explanatory Memorandum talks about the environment strategy setting, ""the direction for the next 20 years"," and establishing a, ""framework to achieve an environment which is clean, bio-diverse healthy, and valued by the people of Wales"." I suggest that the havoc caused by the recession may well affect any such strategy with a 20-year perspective. In other words, much of the content of the environmental policies described in the policy background section of the Explanatory Memorandum attached to the order will almost certainly have to be adapted—and so will the mindsets behind these policies as the need to provide jobs, preferably in wealth-producing units, becomes ever more pressing. Those are my comments on this order. I shall not go into the detail of it; I accept the ample explanation that the Minister has given.