We come to a further elaboration of the relationship between ministerial functions and those of the Assembly. This is a basic constitutional issue which we have failed to address throughout the years of the pursuit of the holy grail which United Kingdom Governments of both parties and one coalition keep calling a “settlement” of Welsh devolution. I think I have said in this House—I have certainly said it in the Assembly—that there is no such thing as a settlement of democracy or politics: it always evolves. If we are looking for something akin to what is available in Scotland and Northern Ireland, which is what I would look for in the context of the United Kingdom, then this Bill does not deliver it, particularly in the area of the relationship between the definitions of ministerial functions and the competence of the Assembly. In her evidence in July, the chief legal adviser to the National Assembly, Elizabeth Jones, referred the constitutional committee—to which, I am happy to announce, I have recently been re-elected following my change of description—to the position, put forward by the former Presiding Officer, that,
“the situation in Wales should be equivalent with Scotland; that is that all ministerial functions, functions of Ministers of the Crown, exercisable within devolved areas … should lie with Welsh Ministers. From a constitutional law point of view, that would be a very logical situation and would also increase the clarity of the settlement very considerably”.
I must pursue this. Perhaps I could discuss it with the Minister at the same meeting he gave me the option of having earlier when we discussed the royal prerogative. It seems to me that the aligning of executive functions of Welsh Ministers with the legislative competence of the National Assembly would address some of the complexity that will arise in relation to the Minister of Crown consent in the current regime. If there was such an alignment, then UK government consent would not be needed before the National Assembly could affect UK Ministers’ functions in devolved areas because those functions would already have been transferred to Welsh Ministers. These are the issues that I am trying to pursue in this series of amendments. The Minister will, no doubt, be aware of and have read the report of the Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee of the National Assembly, whose work in this area is equivalent only to the work of the Constitution Committee of this House. We have been so exercised by the attempt to make sense of the devolution structure with which we have to work that I do hope it will be possible for the Minister to consider whether a move towards the alignment of legislative and executive competence would not clarify the devolution structure much more effectively. I beg to move.
7 pm