My Lords, I will speak very briefly indeed, in strong support of the government amendments, to make one observation and one point.
My observation follows on from something that the noble Lord, Lord Dunlop, said in his speech concerning the memorandum of understanding. The current memorandum of understanding, which is dated October 2013, is only a draft—it was never finally signed off. Since that date, of course, we have had the Scottish
referendum and very serious Bills in this House that have given more and more powers to the devolved Administrations. I have said before in this House, as others have, that it is frankly not fit for the purpose of acting as the constitutional glue that the structure it controls should be. A well-functioning memorandum of understanding would breed a healthy atmosphere and the ability for the differing nations of the United Kingdom to talk together. Instead of the C words that we have been discussing today, “consult” and “consent”, there may even emerge—from my experience of international companies, where quite often you have the French arguing with the Germans or whatever—a third C word, “consensus”, which would be enormously helpful in this situation. My observation is that this situation is much to be regretted, and I hope the Government are going to put a lot of weight behind getting it resolved and getting a proper memorandum of understanding structure sorted out so that we are not in the position that we are in today where we have a fractious and pretty horrible discussion going on about these issues.
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I move on to my one point, which is about the ability of the devolved parliaments to exercise the powers. I have spent quite a lot of today, which has been long and interesting, looking at this wonderful frameworks analysis. I congratulate whoever has prepared it because it has taken a lot of work. It sets out very clearly what is being handed out and what is being discussed, so that one is not talking about the numbers of policy areas but one actually has an idea about what those areas are.
I am lucky enough to be on the European Union Select Committee. Last year we had serious visits discussing these issues to both Cardiff and Edinburgh. They were very helpful days in both places, and we made a lot of progress and eventually produced our devolution report, which several noble Lords have referred to in the debates today. What is always interesting at these events is what happens in the margins, and on both these days the margins were at lunch. In Wales, the discussion at lunch focused very much on the shortage of numbers of Members of the Assembly—I think there were only 56—so they simply did not have the capacity to look at legislation in the way that they would like to. That was an interesting discussion and it lodged in my mind. I worry terribly; I think this House has responsibility to have regard to whether the structures to which we are trying to give powers have the ability reasonably to exercise them. We must have regard to that when we make our decisions.
I turn to what happened at lunch in Edinburgh. There we were entertained by the Presiding Officer, and the conversation came around to whether or not the Edinburgh Parliament should have a second Chamber so that it could look in detail at legislation. Again, the conversation was about resource shortages and the lack of ability of the Scottish Parliament to properly exercise the powers that it had been given.