| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
5.15 pm
Dr. Marek: The hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) has completely forgotten a large chunk of our purpose in this place: scrutiny. Three thousand statutory instruments pass through the House each Session. I wonder how many he has read in his time in the House.
I shall try to speak to the amendments. You have been very generous, Mr. Martin, in allowing the debate to range slightly wide. I do not intend to seek to catch your eye in the stand part debate and I hope that I shall not cause you to call me to order.
Yesterday's discussion was important because the Secretary of State has a job to do and he must get right the interaction between primary and secondary legislation. We are looking for him to do something about that. I fear that in this discussion--we are up against the guillotine at 7 o'clock--we can do nothing about that.
I have sympathy with the amendments. I would have preferred a national assembly with more than 40 or 60 Members--a single transferable vote assembly or whatever. That would have made it easier to take into account gender balance, and scrutiny would have been easier. However, I fear, for the reasons given by my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Mr. Rogers), that we have 40:20 and must put up with it.
I am afraid that it was partly necessary to drag some sections of the Labour party kicking and screaming and make them accept that a simple first-past-the-post system was not good enough and that an element of proportional representation was needed. I do not know whether it was the minimum that we could get away with.
There was a further problem. The enemies of the Bill were saying that the assembly would cost a lot of money; we have all read it in the newspapers in Wales. As a result, there was pressure on the Secretary of State to make the assembly as small as possible. There was pressure not to have 50 Members or STV, which caused us to end up with 40:20. This is not my ideal, but I shall support the Secretary of State this time. I can assure him that if he argues, "We have this now; we cannot start taking it all to pieces and looking at it again and because of practicality we must stick with it," he will have my support in the Lobby if the House divides on the amendment.
I shall be brief because we have many amendments and clauses to debate. There is a measure of agreement. My hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr. Rowlands) said that although he did not originally believe in the proposed system he had come round to saying and thinking that a measure of proportionality was right. There may be opponents of proportionality in the Committee, but they are not standing up and speaking in the debates. I believe that we are going in the right direction. In any case, I suggest that the national assembly itself can consider the matter once it comes into being. I regret that there is nothing we can do about the amendments at this point. They have my sympathy, but we should now move on to the other parts of the Bill.
Mr. Hawkins:
I support what my hon. Friends the Members for Poole (Mr. Syms) and for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne) said. By means of the amendment, the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru are trying to make a bad situation worse. Last night, the Committee decided,
Mr. Paul Flynn (Newport, West):
Does the hon. Gentleman recognise--there is an early-day motion about the democratic deficit in Wales--the glaring unfairness in Welsh politics which led to a party that won a considerable number of votes at the election sending no representatives to Parliament? Does he realise that PR will give the fringe parties in Wales, such as the Greens and the Conservatives, some chance of representation?
Mr. Hawkins:
The hon. Gentleman has not been here for most of the debate, but I can tell him that my opposition to proportional representation is absolute. It is a disastrous system which has been abandoned by many countries in Europe where it has been tried and found wanting.
My hon. Friend the Member for Poole was right: the people we are here to represent will be confused by the new system. More bureaucratic obstacles will be put in their way and they will not know who to approach. Scrutiny will suffer, too. The way Parliament has always scrutinised primary and secondary legislation will be diluted. I whole-heartedly oppose this attempt by the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru to increase confusion.
Sir Raymond Powell:
I oppose amendment No. 19A. I take it that the Liberal Democrats have ulterior motives for supporting it. They are supposed to be in bed with the Government on this and many other matters, but it looks today as if they will find no support for the idea of 10 extra seats in the assembly. I for one will oppose them.
I sympathise with the views expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr. Rowlands) on most of these issues. He referred to the opposition that there had been in the Labour party to the proposed number of seats in the assembly; he referred especially to proportional representation. The latter was discussed over a long period by my party--for many years, in fact. I suspect that your Scottish colleagues, Mr. Martin, have also discussed PR and the correct representation for a Scottish Parliament at great length and in great detail.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney mentioned, there was at one time agreement on the first-past-the-post system for the Welsh assembly. Some years ago, some of us formed the all-party first past the post system group; we believed in first past the post for all manner of elections in this country. That view was held by quite a number of colleagues who are now Ministers.
Some time later, I was notified that a new agreement had been reached at a conference held in Llandudno: an agreement to go for proportional representation. Possibly some of us should have given up our other duties to participate in that discussion--but we did not. Perhaps my hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney was among those who failed to do so. In any case, the
whole idea was changed by a democratic decision. That is not to say that Members of this House who objected to PR were entirely convinced. I do not know of any form of election in this country, in local government or anywhere else, in which PR is used. I believe that the Committee may come to regret the fact that the system is to be introduced for a Welsh assembly.
Still, I am a democrat and a decision has been reached. That decision has been referred to time and again in these debates and in the White Paper. I am therefore considering opposing the amendment and supporting the Government's moves to introduce a system which was, after all, voted for in the referendum and promised in the White Paper--although I harbour some reservations about the manner of its introduction.
Another good point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney was that so many responsibilities are to be taken away from Members of this House and given to the Welsh assembly that our work load here may well be reduced--possibly by 25 per cent. or more. I do not know whether that will mean a reduction in the number of seats in Parliament, but all the documents on the subject that I have read suggest that it will. Indeed, the Bill itself hints at a reduction in the number of parliamentary seats and even in the number of assembly seats. A reduction in the number of seats for Members of Parliament in Wales would mean a reduction in the number of seats in the assembly. People who have studied the work of the committees proposed for the assembly conclude that the numerical strength that is currently suggested would be insufficient to cover the work load already designated to the committees.
The committees would experience difficulty, but we, too, would find it difficult to agree to the number of parliamentary seats being reduced. If that happens--it could also happen in Scotland--there will be numerous objections from hon. Members.
Mr. Dalyell:
With reference to Scotland, dare I use the word "stoochie" again? There has been great trouble about the proposal that after the assembly has been in operation for some years, the membership should be reduced from 129 to about 112 because of the alteration of seats here in Westminster. No one would wish it on an assembly that it should be set up and, after a decade, have the number of seats reduced. That would create awful stoochies.
Sir Raymond Powell:
My hon. Friend is right.
The Institute of Welsh Affairs has produced a pamphlet on an effective national assembly, in which it refers to the key amendments to the Government's proposals in the Bill. On the size of the assembly, the pamphlet states in the third paragraph of the section on determining the total number of Members:
5.30 pm
"The consequences for the size of the Assembly (and indeed for the membership of the Scottish Parliament) are serious if those numbers are reduced. For automatically the number of constituency members has to be reduced since that is tied to the number of parliamentary constituencies for the time being. Further, the number
21 Jan 1998 : Column 1044of additional members must also be recalculated to maintain the ratio of 2:1 (Schedule 1, para. 8) in the case of the Assembly. So a reduction of 4 Welsh MPs results in a loss of 6 members from the Assembly, without any legislative action."
The constitution working party of the IWA was set up to examine all aspects of the Bill. I respectfully suggest that the pronouncements in such a paper should be studied carefully by the Secretary of State and the Welsh Office.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |