My Lords, I am delighted to have added my name to this amendment and very much support what the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, said. At an earlier stage of the Bill, we had an opportunity to go into this issue in some detail. I will not repeat that or repeat the arguments that he has put forward. I will just underline that, ideally, I would like to see the control of the number of seats, as with other aspects of the Assembly, in the hands of the Assembly itself. However, an amendment on that will not be forthcoming now, which is why I am very glad to support this amendment.
Although noble Lords made persuasive cases at an earlier stage for the membership of the Assembly to be more than 80—to be 100 or even 120, as the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, said—I accept that 80 is a logical number to go up to now. As my noble friend can confirm, the design of the building is such that it
can expand to accommodate 80 Members without too great difficulty, so that at least avoids any additional cost in that regard.
As an elected Member of the Assembly in the first four years, I found the work pressure enormous. I accept that the nature of the work was a little different then. There were probably more committee meetings and they have been rationalised, possibly because of the pressure on Members’ time. I was on five committees and I was finding that very difficult indeed. Sometimes people say, “Ah, well, you should be there from nine o’clock on a Monday morning onwards”, but that does not overcome the problem of a shortage of Members to sit on all the committees.
An increase to a membership of 80 would also allow for the possibility of having a greater range of expertise in the Assembly cohort. I know from my time there of the benefits of having Members with first-hand medical experience; I think of Dr Dai Lloyd. All parties have people with various types of expertise. Clearly, the more Members you have, the better chance you have of getting a full balance of expertise.
I felt the pressure when there was no more than a secondary legislative role for the Assembly. To do justice to the increased workload of a full legislative role, and not having a second Chamber to go through the detail—I am not arguing for there to be one—much more attention needs to be given to scrutiny of legislation on a line-by-line basis. That requires people with the time, commitment and ability to do the job.
I very much hope that the Minister, if the proposed new clause is not accepted, can indicate that this question will be taken on board between now and St David’s Day.