§ 5. Mr. Jon Owen JonesTo ask the Secretary of State for Wales whether the Welsh Office received legal advice concerning the payment of grants from the Welsh Development Agency to the Development Board for Rural Wales; and if he will make a statement.
§ Mr. RedwoodThe Department received appropriate legal advice in 1982 and decided that the Welsh Development Agency Act 1975 and the Development of Rural Wales Act 1976 provided an acceptable statutory base for the payment of grant.
§ Mr. JonesWill the Secretary of State tell us why, over the past 12 years, the Welsh Office has found no opportunity to inform the WDA of the basis of its legal opinion, or to clarify the difference between the two legal 540 opinions taken by the agency? Will he now apologise to the BBC journalists who brought the matter to his attention? He should be very thankful that they did so.
§ Mr. RedwoodThat is a bit rich, coming from the hon. Gentleman. The BBC's allegation that a member of my staff had said that the issue was technically flawed was simply untrue: no member of my staff said any such thing, and it is not the Welsh Office view. A number of other serious allegations were made in the programme, which suggested that my predecessors had deliberately broken the law to further political ends. That, too, is quite untrue.
The hon. Gentleman should recognise that the legal issues surrounding the 1982 policy are very similar to those surrounding the February 1979 policy allowing the issue of loans to companies. That question was settled by officials and Ministers in the Labour Administration. Is the hon. Gentleman suggesting that those actions were illegal, as he has suggested that ours were?
§ Mr. Jonathan EvansIs my right hon. Friend aware that in mid-Wales there is a strong feeling that the amount of grant aid made available to that region in the past 12 years is inadequate, when contrasted with the billions of pounds that have been poured into Opposition Members' constituencies? Has my right hon. Friend ever received any complaints from Opposition Members about any specific grant? Does not their conduct, and that of the BBC, provide a clear example of the bitter pill that people in mid-Wales would have to swallow if there were ever another Labour Government?
§ Mr. RedwoodI certainly do not recall being advised by the Labour party that we should not make the payments. I do not recall Labour Members querying any of them, or suggesting that they were not doing good. My hon. Friend has made his point extremely successfully; he is also right to infer that when Labour passed the legislation for both the Welsh Development Agency and the Development Board for Rural Wales, it had in mind wide-ranging activities to assist industry and commerce in both parts of Wales.
§ Mr. MorganWill the Secretary of State finally come clean and tell us the basis of that legal advice? Perhaps at the same time he will make clear when the formalities were explained to the House. He will know that in June 1982 the Minister of State said that the formalities would be announced later. Even by the Minister's "Lightning Gonzales" standards, to leave the matter until 1994 and give the House no further explanation is to take a somewhat lackadaisical attitude to the legalities of parliamentary accountability for public money.
§ Mr. RedwoodWe have made the basis clear. It is in section 3 of the 1975 Act, which deals with the general powers of the agency, and I made it clear in my statement that legal advice was taken at the time. We have never denied that some members of the WDA took a different view at the time; I understand that that was discussed with Welsh Office officials in 1982. I am also told by my officials, who have looked very carefully at the files, that the counsel's opinion that the agency then took had not been passed across to the Department. I have now asked for that opinion, and am studying it.