I shall speak to amendments 62, 64 and 167 and new clause 9.
I feel that I am speaking in a bit of a vacuum. I can speak to what is already on paper, and I can speak to our amendments, but we have no idea what the Government will bring forward as an amendment, and it seems to me a very higgledy-piggledy way to deal with legislation.
The real issue, of course, is that there has not been any consultation. There has been no time for anyone to look at this in advance. I had the privilege yesterday of meeting a number of third-sector organisations in Cardiff—some Wales-only organisations, and some that also operate UK-wide but quite properly have offices in Cardiff or other parts of Wales, which facilitates their engagement with the National Assembly for Wales. It is extremely important to consult—even to speak today, I found it essential to consult, listen to and read a lot of the material that those groups have kindly produced in a very short time indeed.
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There was utter disbelief and anger that the Government had made no attempt to consult the organisations. Those are organisations that feed in regularly, whether to legislation or to Select Committee inquiries. They often do enormous amounts of research, and they help us by providing useful facts and figures and giving evidence that we can often use. I think of organisations—perhaps the RSPB—that are well respected, have a wide remit and often operate across the political spectrum, perhaps uniting groups of people who might not otherwise meet, to campaign together on a specific issue.
The Welsh Assembly elections are an additional challenge for groups operating in Wales, because taking into consideration the period in which the legislation would apply—12 months before a general election, plus the
few months before a Welsh Assembly election, plus the European elections—a rather large chunk of any five-year period is a no-go area, when those organisations cannot operate. The real shame is that many of those organisations are involved in policy formation. Some of the work that they do—their ideas and discussions—results in substantial contributions to policy. If any one party were then to adopt that policy, the whole of the legislation could then apply retrospectively to many of the activities that they had carried out, including the staff time to put that policy together.
Not only would those organisations be less inclined to get involved in the work that is so vital to us, but the net would be flung far wider and bring in far more organisations, some of which are user groups, local groups, that have far less experience of such activity. For many of them, it would be much more practical to provide clarification of existing Charity Commission law and Electoral Commission advice, so that—