‘A stain on the Government of Wales Act’
Bubble — By Rhodri Glyn Thomas AM on April 22, 2010 7:00 am
Or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down...
When Parliament was recently dissolved and the excitement of a general election campaign got underway, for those of us at the Assembly the fact that the One Wales governments Housing LCO became a wash out during the wash up only served to reinforce the view that the current system has to go.
The somewhat chaotic history of the Housing LCO has been well documented. It has had a difficult path with both Labour and Conservative MPs placing political point scoring above legitimate scrutiny. Neither of these groups can truly claim to be free from blame, but it is the system itself that is the real culprit.
Jocelyn Davies AM, the Assembly’s Deputy Minister for Housing, should be praised for her patience throughout this process. Over the past three years not only has she successfully secured the support of the One Wales Government and Liberal Democrat Assembly Members in taking this LCO to Westminster, but also – and perhaps even more importantly -she has reached out and engaged with the entire housing sector. Local authorities, the organisations that represent social landlords, businesses and charities in this sector – such as Shelter Cymru, Community Housing Cymru, the Chartered Institute of Housing and Community Housing Cymru – have been part of the process which has pulled out all the stops over the past three years to ensure this competence order was a success.
For the people who wanted to seek more powers in order to protect social housing and the rights of tenants, to ensuring better quality and more affordable housing, who wanted the tools to modernise the system, to meet tenants aspirations for home equity share ownership and to reform the Right to Buy scheme and to help capability to provide housing for homeless people as well as strengthening the regulatory system, there is no doubt that this is a serious setback.
People interested in the constitutional question in Wales shouldn’t be deceived by the smoke and mirrors pantomime that took place during the dying days of this already discredited parliament. There is no doubt that the Conservative MPs on the Welsh Affairs Committee undermined the LCO, but make no mistake that Labour MPs did all they could to delay any progress. Their sudden reversal was more to do with political opportunism than a willingness to assist their colleagues in Cardiff Bay. Or maybe they simply felt their job in blocking the LCO was done. This political point scoring shows exactly how useless the current system is and why it needs to be overhauled.
If Labour MPs want to be taken seriously as radical reformers of constitutional problems, (and offering the carrot of referendums on electoral reform as part of their Westminster manifesto a decade after such promises have already been broken does not quite cut it), then they need to recognise the failure of the current settlement. Equally, if the Woolly Welsh Tories are ever going to be more than Anglo-centric wolves in sheep’s clothing they must address the inconsistency of their approach to devolution.
I know that Jocelyn Davies AM and the One Wales government remain committed to this Legislative Competence Order. The LCO will be taken up again with whatever government is formed after this election. However, even if we re-introduce the LCO following the election, it is almost impossible now to get these powers in time to get the Measure through the Assembly before the next Assembly election.
This episode offers the greatest incentive yet for the referendum’s YES campaign. That the Housing LCO has failed to be delivered within the window of opportunity of the last Westminster term is a stain on the record of the Government of Wales Act 2006. This LCO has single handedly highlighted the basic failings of a system designed not to facilitate the transfer of power to the Assembly but to restrain it. We simply can not continue with a political system based on the political posturing of Westminster MPs.
The Conservatives though not in power in either Wales or Westminster yet has the ability to block the transfer of powers. That simply can not be right. At present we have to wait years for Westminster’s permission before making changes that will have a significant impact on the lives of Welsh residents. Ventures such as the Welsh mortgage scheme have shown that the One Wales government has the innovative thinking needed to tackle the housing problems.
Delivering a successful referendum result is now essential, as playing the lottery of the LCO system is a risk that can no longer be taken.
Tags: 2010 General Election, devolution, House of Commons, housing, Legislative Competence Orders, Plaid Cymru, referendum, Rhodri Glyn Thomas, social housing, Welsh Conservatives
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8 Comments
Rhodri Glyn is totally correct here. If you blame the Tories or Labour MPs – and, let’s face it, they both have an element of blame in scuppering this LCO – one thing this mess shows is that the LCO system has been a complete failure. It could very well be that it was intended from the start to be a failure on Hain’s behalf but I don’t think there is anyone outside of Hain’s inner circle that believes this is anything other than a dated system that has created constitutional chaos. In fact, I doubt even Hain himself believes it is working anymore.
The sooner a successful referendum is won, the better.
I realise that this is a simplistic question (even though it has been put to me many times), but if, as Rhodri Glyn Thomas has so expertly pointed out, the LCO system is patently not working, why is a formal ‘referendum’ required to correct the deficiencies? Some of us understand that maybe a referendum is, in principle, required to acquire more ‘powers’ for the Assembly but why do we need, as voters, to be consulted, via a referendum, on fixing the minutae of the operation of those powers that we already have (even if this appears to be an internal Assembly political football)? It is issues like this that unnecessarily complicate the Referendum question and make voters shout …“Oh for God’s sake, get on with it!”.
Agreed. The fact that a party which is not in government in either Cardiff or London can block a bill in such a manner is hardly democratic, regardless of who that party is.
The system needs changing, fast. But these sort of difficulties with the status quo need to be conveyed effectively to the general Welsh public.
CambriaPolitico – the issue of the appropriateness of the referendum was also discussed in a column I wrote for WalesHome earlier this week http://waleshome.org/2010/04/something-on-referendums-which-you-should-read/
Well done WalesHome for covering this issue. I am not surprised that non-one has blogged to defend eith the Tories or Labour on this issue-there is no defence.
I am surprised you feel they need defending.
Both parties have accepted that the current system has faults and support a referendum.
However the current set up requires democratically elected MPs to scrutinize legislation and that is what has happened.
I must say it would have been easier if the Assembly minister involved would have understood this and not picked a fight at every turn.
I am of course talking about our housing minister Jocelyn Davies.
“I am not surprised that non-one has blogged to defend eith the Tories or Labour on this issue-there is no defence.”
I won’t defend the parties as such, or the system. But it’s worth pointing out that by the time this LCO came to Westminster, the chances of the government being able to pass it before dissolution were extremely slim. The convention nowadays is that the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments examines such measures prior to them being laid (you will recall this was the committee that ruled and earlier version of the LCO not intra vires). This ate into the time available to pass it. So the fault, if there is one, may lie with the time it took to get out of the Assembly (including negotiations with Whitehall).
It’s also worth noting, as this is a point that is often overlooked, that the measure is not dead. It’s still there – all the new government need do is give it the necessary Parliamentary time. In that sense, it is quite incorrect to talk of the “defeat” of the LCO.
I don’t think that we can apportion party blame for the fate of this elco.
It (and the development of housing legislation and policy in Wales) has been the victim of a power struggle between Welsh MPs and the Welsh Assembly Government.
For those who had assumed that the GOWA 2006 Schedule 5 elco process would simply involve devolution of useful chunks of legislative competence to Wales wholesale, in the way in which Westminster primary legislation had done to the old executive Assembly (and indeed in some cases to the new Assembly), this has been a painful learning process.
It was perhaps naive to assume that certain intelligent, eloquent Welsh MPs hostile to devolution and anxious to display their own power would allow that to happen. Add to that the desire to micromanage the process, and we got the ridiculous constraint on legislative freedom that the Secretary of State should have to consent to certin laws being made by the Assembly, which killed the original elco once it was ruled unconstituional by the joint committee on statutory instruments. But for that nonsense, and the ensuing false start, we could have had this elco passed a long time ago.
The problem is not a party political one, it is a Cardiff / Westminster one. The Welsh Affairs Select Committee has an able chairman, who can achieve consensus. Unfortunately in this case (and also in the case of certain aspects the Welsh Language elco), achieving consensus has meant letting the hawks have their way. All parties, without exception, have been complicit in this.