The most ambitious legislative programme yet

A big programme

ALL THINGS must come to an end, both good and bad, and this week the One Wales Government moved into the closing stage of its mandate with the unveiling of its legislative programme for the final year of its mandate. Well, not quite a year, really. Actually there’s really just six working months left because we now have a two month recess period before any new legislation is formally introduced; and when the Assembly returns in September all business will need to be concluded by March next year when the Assembly election is called.

This tight timeframe was acknowledged by the First Minister in unveiling the programme this week when he said:

“In recognition of the capacity of the Assembly in the remaining weeks before the Assembly elections to scrutinise any new legislation, we have had to temper our ambitions for this final programme. We will aim to provide the Assembly with as much time as possible to scrutinise these items of legislation, while optimising the capacity of the Assembly to deliver our legislation and realise important changes for the better for the people of Wales.”

This is perhaps the most optimistic statement he has yet to make as First Minister and the pressure to deliver will be considerable. Four brand new pieces of legislation were announced this week and will all have to be dealt with in the six month time block. Three of these are Measures that follow on from primary powers recently gained, dealing educational collaboration and improved standards; school transport; and also a wide Measure which will enact the new powers of the Housing LCO which finally finished its Parliamentary passage this week. These are sizeable items of legislation which will need to be considered both thoroughly and quickly.

An even larger piece of legislation, though, is the Local Government (Wales) Measure which was laid this week and represents the last item from the previous legislative cycle. It is not the only Measure yet to complete it passage: the Mental Health Measure, Carers Strategies Measure, Welsh Language Measure, Waste Measure and Rights of Children and Young Persons Measure all need to complete their final stages during the coming months too. They are hangovers from the last Assembly year and, although they have moved relatively quickly, all of them need significant Plenary and/or Committee time to complete their passage.

On top of this is the new WAG request for a Legislative Competence Order on devolving the powers over organ donation to Wales. This is a complex area with differing opinions and has already begun to attract media attention. More particularly, though, no LCO has yet gone through in under six months. WAG may have previously consulted on the issue and this may speed up the early stages of the process, but it is still going to be a tall order (excuse the pun) to get this through within six months, especially if there are significant objections at a Westminster level.

To take a full picture we need to add in too the Measures and LCOs that arise from Committees of backbench member ballots. Both Dai Lloyd’s Playing Fields Measure and Ann Jones’ Proposed Domestic Fire Safety (Wales) Measure need to complete their course, the latter only being laid this week; while there are also draft LCOs and Measures from a range of other backbenchers to consider too from Jeff Cuthbert’s Measure on training rights for those with Additional Learning Needs through to Joyce Watson’s LCO on Hard Surfaces.

In the round this is a huge programme to complete and it can be predicted with confidence that the bulk of Assembly time will be devoted to legislative scrutiny in the coming months.

Indeed, because of the backlog, which mainly arises from the very dysfunctional way both the LCO and Measure systems operated in the first eighteen months of this Assembly, there will be huge pressures on all AMs to complete this stated programme. And it won’t be easy just to blame the LCO process: the vast bulk of the work that needs to be completed is in respect of the Measures over which the Assembly has sole legislative competence.

Far from being a programme in which ambition has been tempered, in reality because of the sheer amount of unfinished business it is the busiest legislative plan yet attempted in the National Assembly. Don’t believe the non-hype.