My Lords, I am pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, and I am confident that the Minister, whom I have known in another place—if I can call the Welsh Assembly that—at the other end of the line, is not someone who digs his heels in. He successfully danced a fine tune to move his party, the Welsh Conservatives, into a stance on devolution which brings us to where we are today.
I come to the amendments in my name, which I am pleased to share with my noble friend, Lord Wigley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, my sister in the Assembly. Amendment 9 attempts to define “devolved matters”. This is another issue that was addressed by the Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee in the National Assembly. The Minister will no doubt say that “normally” occurs in the Scotland Act and that the Welsh devolution settlement does not require any definition of “devolved matters”. I am not very
enamoured of the argument that empowering the National Assembly to be able to legislate for devolved matters is somehow an overruling of parliamentary sovereignty, as if the traditional constitution of the United Kingdom, of Parliament assembled in these two Houses, could somehow be undermined or be in any sense overruled by legislative activity in Cardiff.
8.45 pm
The issue is the complexity of Welsh devolution, which remains unclear and undefined. The issue of what it is within the Assembly’s competence to do is made even more complex than it was before by the Bill. I speak as someone who was involved—for too long, I suspect—in trying to determine what was within the competence of the Assembly and what was not, but I was well advised by excellent lawyers in the National Assembly and assisted more recently by the Supreme Court. It is not for me to comment on the activities of the Supreme Court, but clearly what we are doing here by not specifying more clearly what “devolved matters” are is not providing the required clarity, not just for politicians, lawyers or interest groups, but for the public in Wales. This is my greatest concern about what we are legislating in the Bill: we are continuing the cawl—Hansard will know how that is spelt—of Welsh devolution. There is no clarity in this soup, Minister.