Crown status (Hansard, 25 March 1998)

Mr. Davies
If accepted, the new clauses would replace clauses 52, 55, 56, 57 and 58. I know that the right hon. Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) is concerned about the Opposition's ability to scrutinise the whole Bill in the absence of precise details on the Bill on registration of political parties. Perhaps it would assist him if I told him that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has invited him and the shadow Home Secretary to discuss the Bill.
I can confirm the assurances given in Committee, that we accept the validity of some of the right hon. Gentleman's arguments. I share his concerns, and I certainly want to make sure that the registration Bill, when it is eventually introduced, takes account of the points he has raised.

§ Mr. Ancram
I am grateful to the Secretary of State, and I hear what he says, but the process in the House is 536 not between the two Front Benches: it is for all hon. Members to take part in debates on legislation. When crucial areas require detail—of the kind to which I have alluded and that he has acknowledged—and that detail is not available, that is a serious matter for the whole House. That is what I am asking him to cure.

Mr. Davies
The flaw in the right hon. Gentleman's argument lies in the fact that the House accepted the European Parliamentary Elections Bill, which contains a reference to registration, and Conservative Members did not raise the question of the registration of political parties Bill at that time.

§ Mr. Bernard Jenkin (North Essex)
We did.

Mr. Davies
In which case, the House has accepted the precedent that we can proceed to deal with such matters without the registration Bill before us.

§ Mr. Jenkin
rose—

Mr. Davies
I will not give way, because I suspect that you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, would rule me out of order if I did not proceed to deal with the amendments.

§ Mr. Jenkin
rose—

Mr. Davies
If the hon. Gentleman can ensure that any intervention is in order, of course I will give way.

§ Mr. Jenkin
I am sure that it is in order, because otherwise you would soon rule it out of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
Under this Bill, and in the Scotland Bill, people will cast two votes. Under the European Parliamentary Elections Bill, they will cast only one, so the double-ticket voting does not apply, and that is where the problem with registration is especially germane to this Bill and to the Scotland Bill in a way in which it is not so germane to the European Parliamentary Elections Bill.
That is why it is inadequate to proceed on the basis on which the Secretary of State has forced us to proceed by the sheer numbers—

Mr. Deputy Speaker
Order. That is not necessarily germane to the amendments now under discussion.

§ Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow)
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I have listened in bewilderment for the past 10 minutes. In the light of what has happened, could you possibly raise with Madam Speaker exactly what the position of the rest of us is in all this? The House as a whole has some rights in these matters.

Mr. Deputy Speaker
The hon. Gentleman knows—I do not want to repeat myself too much—that the procedures that have been employed for the consideration of this and other Bills have been on the basis of recommendations from the Select Committee on Modernisation of the House of Commons. Those recommendations have been accepted in terms of the composition of the Business Committee.
537 I am well aware, as is Madam Speaker, of the concern that all Back-Bench and party interests should be represented. The hon. Gentleman would be well advised to make representations to the Modernisation Committee if he feels that the procedures that it has recommended so far are defective in the sense he suggests.

Mr. Davies
The purpose of the amendments is to enable the assembly more easily to establish a Cabinet-style process of decision making. They come forward, as the right hon. Gentleman will recall, in response to arguments advanced by Opposition Members, including the right hon. Member for Devizes and the leaders of other Opposition parties, and in the light of advice from my national assembly advisory group.
The House will understand from the motion before us that we have some three hours available to discuss these relatively non-controversial amendments. The Government have generously provided another two hours injury time this evening because we have had a statement. So we are debating non-controversial amendments tabled to comply with the legitimate request from the Opposition. We provided three hours to discuss them and a further two hours of injury-time debate from 10 pm to midnight this evening.
Therefore, I hardly think that the right hon. Member for Devizes—[Interruption.] He is waving two fingers at me. I think that he is suggesting that we had two statements, but it is now slightly after 5 o'clock. The debate was due to start at 3.30 pm. The debate on the guillotine continued for something approaching half an hour. The right hon. Gentleman must accept that the Government have been more than generous.

§ Sir Teddy Taylor (Rochford and Southend, East)
I—

Mr. Deputy Speaker
Order. We are straying again into more general matters related to the procedure for dealing with the Bill. We should be using the time available to deal strictly with this group of amendments. I take it that the Secretary of State had given way to the hon. Member for Rochford and Southend, East (Sir T. Taylor).

§ Sir Teddy Taylor
Will the important change in the structure to a Cabinet-type structure have implications for the only amendments that I and my colleagues have tabled? They relate to the Official Secrets Act 1911 in clause 79.

§ Mr. Ron Davies
I understand the right hon. Gentleman's concerns. I do not wish to pre-empt the later debate, but I have listened carefully to the case that he and other hon. Members have made on the provisions contained in the Bill relating to the Official Secrets Act. The Under-Secretary of State for Wales, my hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Mr. Hain) will have some news that the right hon. Gentleman will find welcome when we come to the matter. We have listened carefully to what has been said.

§ Dr. John Marek (Wrexham)
Will my right hon. Friend give way?

§ Mr. Davies
I am anxious to proceed with the amendments rather than to have an extended debate at this 538 point on the Official Secrets Act. On the understanding that my hon. Friend will use all his ingenuity to ensure that his intervention is in order, I of course give way to him.

§ Dr. Marek
I do not have to use any ingenuity, because my intervention is precisely on the amendments. As there will be Cabinet government for the national assembly, and every servant of the assembly will be a member of Her Majesty's home civil service, there is now a need for the assembly to appoint staff who are independent and owe their loyalty to the assembly rather than to the Government, as the Clerks of the House and the Comptroller and Auditor General owe to this House. Amendments Nos. 231, 232 and 233 would make that possible, and there is a case for considering them carefully.

§ Mr. Davies
As my hon. Friend says, such amendments have been tabled, and I understand that they have been selected. No doubt he will want to speak to them later. It would be inappropriate for me to address those amendments now.
My hon. Friend has suggested that we are about to prescribe a Cabinet-style system for the assembly. We are not. We are making it easier for the assembly to have Cabinet-style government if that is what it wants. It is my expectation that the assembly will establish a Cabinet-style system from the outset.

§ Sir Raymond Powell (Ogmore)
As this is an important step to take, can my right hon. Friend tell me why the matter was not referred to in the paper that we published before the referendum, and why it was not discussed in the debate on the referendum? It is an important issue.

§ Mr. Davies
My hon. Friend is right. It is an important matter. It was debated extensively in the referendum campaign, and reference was made to it in the White Paper. My hon. Friend will recall having discussed the matter before the general election and subsequently.
We discussed at what point on the continuum between the local government committee system and the more centralised Cabinet system the assembly should be located. It has always been the case that there is a judgment to be made as to where on that continuum the assembly should operate. We are now facilitating the opportunity for the assembly, if it so wishes, to ensure that its internal architecture is placed somewhere along the continuum closer to the Cabinet style than the local government committee style. That is what we debated at great length. It is something that my national assembly advisory group considered and recommended to me, and which was put to me by representatives of all political parties in the House. We have debated it, and I am genuinely trying to reflect the consensus that has developed around it.
I deal first with new clause 23. The assembly's functions will generally be exercisable by those to whom it delegates those functions. New clause 23 sets out the possible delegations—to Committees, which can include the Executive Committee, or to the First Secretary, and then to the Assembly Secretaries. The pattern of delegation of functions will determine the assembly's 539 decision-making style. If functions were predominantly to be delegated to subject Committees, a local government style of decision making would operate. However, if functions are predominantly delegated to the First Secretary and to the Executive Committee, something more akin to the Cabinet style will emerge.
As I said, my advisory committee has recommended a Cabinet style of decision making. I have accepted that advice, and the guidance that I shall give to the Standing Orders Commissioners will reflect that. The assembly's initial Standing Orders will incorporate a substantial delegation of functions to the Executive Committee and to the First Secretary. The assembly will therefore begin life with a delegation of functions consistent with a Cabinet model of operation. It would, however, be open to the assembly subsequently, if it wished, to change those Standing Orders and instead delegate functions to subject Committees, but that would be possible only with a two-thirds vote in favour of such a move.
New clauses 20 and 21 make new provision for the Executive Committee. The First Secretary is to appoint Assembly Secretaries, subject to a limit on numbers, to be prescribed in Standing Orders. I will seek advice from the advisory group on the maximum number of appointees, and I will listen to the comments that the right hon. Member for Devizes will doubtless make later this evening when he moves an amendment relating to the maximum number of Assembly Secretaries.
The Assembly Secretaries will be members of the Executive Committee, and the First Secretary will allocate portfolios among them, although not necessarily to all. There is provision for a limited number of non-portfolio Assembly Secretaries. Individual Assembly Secretaries will account to the assembly for their performance of functions which the assembly has delegated. New clause 21 makes provision for the questioning of Assembly Secretaries for that purpose.
The combination of an extensive delegation of functions to the Executive Committee and the First Secretary, and the appointment by the First Secretary of Assembly Secretaries and the allocation of portfolios among them, provide for the creation of a strong political centre for the assembly and meet the case made by Opposition parties.
Individuals will be clearly responsible and accountable for the assembly's decisions in particular areas of its work. That reflects the points made in the House, and by my advisory group, for a process of Executive decision making. This has been the subject of intense debate in Wales, and certainly the subject of strong representations to me and my colleagues in the Welsh Office by, among others, the CBI in Wales.
I have always made it clear that the Government's wish is to draw the best from both the Cabinet and local government models. The local government system allows for wide participation in the policy process. That is reflected in new clause 22, which makes new provision for subject Committees.
Under new clause 22, each Assembly Secretary with functional responsibilities will be a member of a subject Committee with responsibilities in the same area. The role of the all-party subject Committees will extend well beyond that of scrutiny of the Executive on the Westminster model. Thus, they could examine draft subordinate legislation, review policy outcomes and 540 propose policy initiatives, monitor the performance of public bodies in their spheres, and make recommendations feeding into the assembly's resource allocation process.
The Committees will work in partnership with the Assembly Secretaries, and will have a distinctive and important role to play in the assembly's policy process.

§ Mr. Dalyell
On the subject of resource allocations, in the Scottish context it is becoming clearer week by week that the proposals are vastly more expensive than anyone had imagined. What are the estimated costs of the changes in Wales? Are they all to be borne by the Welsh allocation, or do they come out of the UK allocation?

§ Mr. Davies
If my hon. Friend studies the Bill, he will see that the financial memorandum, which was discussed on Second Reading, makes clear the Government's estimates. On his substantive point, I confirm that any costs incurred as a result of the running of the assembly will, of course, be met out of the existing Welsh block.
I was talking about the role of the Committees in the assembly's policy process. It is a role that I believe can be achieved effectively only if, as we have provided, the Assembly Secretaries are members of the Committees and are actively involved with their work, rather than being external to them as in the classic Scrutiny Committee manner, which we see in the Select Committees in this place.

§ Mr. Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley)
My question follows on from that asked by the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell). Is it correct that the change to the Cabinet-style structure should not mean expenditure additional to that proposed in the first Bill?

§ Mr. Davies
I am not sure what the hon. Gentleman is suggesting. Does he have a more precise question as to where he thinks additional expenditure could arise? If so, I shall try to answer him.

§ Mr. Evans
It is a quite clear question, as the Prime Minister might say. Will the new structure be more expensive than the first structure that the Secretary of State announced'? Is it a more expensive system of local government for Wales?

§ Mr. Davies
I know that the hon. Gentleman has difficulty with some of the concepts involved, but it is not a local government system. We are proposing a new form of arrangement in Wales, which is based on the principle of devolution. If the hon. Gentleman considers carefully the case that he has submitted to me, and which I have broadly accepted, he will understand that there is nothing inherent in the proposals that could possibly affect the costs of the assembly. I have repeatedly said that the costs of running the assembly will be met out of the Welsh block.

§ Mr. Lembit Öpik (Montgomeryshire)
My understanding is that we are discussing a strategic set of amendments and new clauses which will shape how the assembly runs. Does the Secretary of State agree that 541 moving from the original proposals to the current ones involves what will ultimately be only marginal changes in costs?

§ Mr. Davies
I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is right. The essence of the decision we had to take—a debate in which all parties involved themselves—was whether, in constructing the assembly, to opt for a form of decision making that was as inclusive as possible, or whether to put a premium on a decision-making process which was accountable and capable of making rapid decisions.

§ Mr. Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield)
rose

§ Mr. Davies
I should be grateful if the hon. Gentleman could contain his enthusiasm. I am trying to deal with an intervention by the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Mr. Öpik). Once I have done so, I shall certainly try to accommodate the hon. Gentleman.
One has to decide whether to construct an assembly that is as inclusive as possible and which seeks to produce a consensus, or whether to come up with something that is less than transparent. It is my understanding, based on the strong recommendations made to me by all political parties in Wales, that the assembly should have the capacity—I stress the word "capacity"; we are not prescribing or mandating it—to go for a Cabinet style, which would ensure the accountability of individual decision makers, and that it should have the capacity to make rapid decisions.

§ Mr. Grieve
The right hon. Gentleman must understand the thrust of the various questions, as they are perfectly straightforward. Clearly the costs will be met from the block grant, but I take it from what the Secretary of State has said that no one in the Welsh Office has suggested to him or his colleagues that the new system that is being devised will in reality be rather more expensive and take more money out of the block grant than the old. Is that so? It is the only question to which an answer is being sought, but I am bound to say that the Secretary of State did not provide one. Has anyone costed the new system?

§ Mr. Davies
I have already given the answer in reply to the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans), although I acknowledge that the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) has asked a rather more explicit question. I said that there was nothing inherent in the proposals that would lead to an increased cost.

§ Mr. Dafydd Wigley (Caernarfon)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

§ Mr. Davies
Yes—I suspect that I shall not be moving on for some time yet.

§ Mr. Wigley
I agree. My question relates not to the matter of cost, but to the relationship between the Assembly Secretary and the Committee itself. Given that a form of Cabinet system is being set up, am I right in interpreting that to mean that the Assembly Secretary would not be bound by a decision of the Committee; that he would be a member of the Committee and, if the
542 Committee voted in a way that overruled his policy, that vote would not change his policy; and that only if the assembly as a whole changed the policy of the Executive as a whole would the Executive have to change their policy? Is that interpretation correct?

§ Mr. Davies
I understand the reason why the right hon. Gentleman raises that question; unfortunately, I cannot give him a precise answer, because it will depend in part on the Standing Orders eventually adopted by the assembly, which will in part reflect the way in practice develops in the assembly, which practice will be influenced by the existence or absence of political control within the assembly. Let us assume that one party has overall control of the assembly, although that might not be a prospect that the right hon. Gentleman views with great relish—

§ Mr. Wigley
Oh, but I do.

§ Mr. Davies
The right hon. Gentleman will not be surprised to learn that I am perfectly relaxed about that prospect, too, although we might differ on which party that should be.
Let us assume for the purpose of argument that the assembly has one-party majority control. In those circumstances, one can reasonably assume that the subject Committees themselves would have one-party majority control, and that therefore there would be a majority on the Committee that was broadly supportive of the Assembly Secretary. If that was the case, or if there was a coalition, or in any other circumstances, the Assembly Secretary would have to carry the subject Committee with him or her.
If he or she failed to do so on a matter of—[Interruption.] I am addressing the right hon. Member for Caernarfon (Mr. Wigley), and I hope that the hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) will have some regard for that. If the subject Committee found itself in conflict on a matter of principle with the Assembly Secretary who was a member of that Committee, there would a situation which presumably the First Secretary or the assembly itself would want to address, either by changing policy or by changing the Assembly Secretary. [Interruption.]

Mr. Deputy Speaker
Order. The hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) has joined the proceedings, and I am sure that we are pleased to see him, but we are not doing anything other in the Chamber than debating the Government of Wales Bill.

§ Mr. Davies
Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Perhaps I can now get back to the point that I was making some time ago, which is the way in which the Assembly Secretaries will sit on subject Committees.

§ Mr. Oliver Letwin (West Dorset)
I am sorry to detain the Secretary of State longer, but I want to follow up the line of questioning raised by the right hon. Member for Caernarfon (Mr. Wigley). Will the Secretary of State carry his clarification just one step further?
If the subject Committee in question had already delegated functions to the Assembly Secretary, even if the Assembly Secretary was sitting on the subject Committee, and the subject Committee came to a conclusion contrary 543 to the policy established under that delegated authority by the Assembly Secretary, presumably that decision would be matter of academic interest only. Is that correct?

§ Mr. Davies
Yes, it is certainly a matter of academic interest.
What we are doing is providing for a strong political centre to emerge in the assembly. We are also making effective provision for all parties in the assembly to make their own distinctive contributions to its work through the subject Committees.
Finally, I refer to new clause 24. It was explained during Committee stage that we needed to make specific provision in the Bill for delegation of functions to staff, as it was not clear that the Carltona principle would apply in the context of the Assembly. New clause 24 simply makes it clear that any such delegation to staff will operate in accordance with the established principle that it is for the permanent secretary of the Department to manage departmental staff, and that he or she will decide which of the staff are actually to discharge any functions so delegated. New clause 24 therefore provides a worthwhile reinforcement of the position of assembly staff as civil servants, free from political interference.
New clauses 20 to 24 are important amendments that will have a major and beneficial effect on the business style of the Assembly and I commend them to the House.

§ Mr. Ancram
May I start, perhaps rather surprisingly in view of my earlier remarks, by welcoming the new clauses tabled by the Secretary of State? I do so because they are an attempt to meet some of the concerns expressed by Opposition Members earlier in the debate. I call them an attempt, because I am not yet certain that he has delivered what we were asking for.
Some of us tabled amendments earlier to create a Cabinet structure, because we believe that a Cabinet structure creates a clear line of accountability in a way that is not possible under a Committee structure. We believe also that it gives the electorate a clearer view of what they are actually electing than is possible under a Committee structure.
To summarise our arguments, we believe also that a Committee structure is more prone to being run by officials than is a Cabinet structure. When we heard last week that the Secretary of State was tabling new clauses in order to achieve a Cabinet structure, we welcomed that. I did so publicly and I do so again today, but only in so far as the right hon. Gentleman has gone.
I am little concerned that one of the concerns I expressed in an earlier debate has not been met. When we last debated this issue, I said: I am surprised that the Government seem to have set about creating what I can only describe as a constitutional mule—it is neither one thing nor the other, neither local government nor the type of cabinet structure to which we are accustomed."—[Official Report, 2 February 1998; Vol. 305, c. 750.] The Secretary of State appears to have achieved the removal of that total ambiguity, but he has created two choices, so that we are still not certain whether what we end up with will be a Cabinet structure, or one based on the Committee structure that was originally in the Bill.
The right hon. Gentleman said that the amendments do not prescribe, but allow the assembly to decide. He went on to say, which I found even more puzzling, that it would 544 not be a question of a clear decision being taken on whether there would be either a Cabinet structure or a Committee structure, but that it would depend on the decisions of the assembly as to whether there would be predominantly a Cabinet structure or predominantly a Committee structure.
Only after those various decisions on what functions to delegate in which directions had been taken would we be able to say, "That is a Cabinet structure," or, "That is a Committee structure." We are certainly not able to say at this distance, in the words of the former President Bush, that, if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it is likely to be a duck. In this case, it is going to be allowed to quack and bark at the same time, so we will not know whether the structure is a duck or a dog until the assembly has taken those decisions.

§ Mr. Ron Davies
If it quacks and barks, it will obviously be the product of a Ministry of Agriculture experimental farm.
The answer to the right hon. Gentleman's question is that the Standing Orders under which the assembly will meet initially will prescribe a Cabinet system; however, it will subsequently be open to the assembly, if the two-thirds majority requirement is met, to change its method of operation. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will accept that is not unreasonable to allow the assembly to review and modernise its own internal procedures.

§ Mr. Ancram
I am grateful for that explanation, but it is precisely because the provision appears to be the product of an experimental farm that I am questioning it a little more closely. I am not sure that the product of an experimental farm is what the right hon. Gentleman intended in terms of devolution for Wales.
Perhaps the Secretary of State can enlighten me, or tell me whether I am wrong, but my understanding of new clause 23 is that it allows the assembly to delegate functions in a number of different directions, and it is on the basis of how those functions are delegated and in terms of the primary legislation allowing the assembly to so delegate, not on the basis of the Standing Orders by means of which they may be delegated, that the decision will be taken whether there will be a Cabinet structure or a Committee structure.
That appears to be what new clause 23 provides, so it leaves the whole question still to be resolved. What is does not do is create the clear position that we sought of a Cabinet structure of the sort that we find, for example, within the Scotland Bill.
It is worth reminding the House that "The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Science" defines a Cabinet as A form of government in which a group of ministers, usually drawn from the majority party or parties of a parliament, combine to make collective decisions about the country's Policies … Two points are central to the concept. First, the decisions of a cabinet are meant to be collective, not those of a single person; ministers are bound by the doctrine of collective responsibility publicly to support all the decisions taken by cabinet. Second, the cabinet acts as a political link between the executive and the parliament because ministers are answerable to the parliament. If I read that right, one either has a Cabinet structure or one does not. One cannot have a series of functions being moved in different directions, which do not clearly meet those two points which are described as being central, and say, "On the balance of probabilities, this is 545 a Cabinet." However, that seems to be what new clause 23 would achieve. I should like to hear the Minister's response on the ambiguity and doubt that could be created.

§ Mr. Dalyell
Will the right hon. Gentleman clear up some of his own ambiguity and doubt? When he made these proposals to the Government, did he have any clear idea, for example, to whom the civil servants would be responsible? Are they to be responsible to the Welsh Cabinet structure, or to the home civil service? What was his view on that?

§ Mr. Ancram
The hon. Gentleman knows that we asked that question in connection with the structure of the Scottish Parliament. It does not arise from new clause 23, however. We are now considering whether the civil service in Wales will be responsible to the assembly as a whole, as was the case under the original legislation, or whether it will now be responsible to a Cabinet.
In fact, that makes may point rather well, because, if I read new clause 23 aright, we may end up with it being responsible for some functions to the assembly as a whole, and for other functions to members of what would be, effectively, a Cabinet. That lack of clarity, which the hon. Gentleman rightly points out is inherent anyway in the Bill, is exacerbated by the new clause. I wish to hear a response from the Secretary of State on that.

§ Mr. Ron Davies
The right hon. Gentleman knows that there is no lack of clarity there. The assembly is a corporate body, and the functions that will be transferred will be transferred to it as a corporate body. It is then for the assembly to decide how it wishes those functions to be exercised.

§ Mr. Ancram
Intentionally or not, the right hon. Gentleman is again missing my point. I am saying that, if the assembly follows the route of new clause 23, and of what I understood him to say in his speech, it will not be a question of deciding whether there is a Cabinet; it will be a question of giving some functions to the Executive Committee, which would be along the lines of a Cabinet, and giving others to the subject Committees of the assembly, forming a Committee structure.
I say in all seriousness to the Secretary of State that that could be the undoing of the way the assembly works in future unless there is some more clarity on it.

§ Mr. Davies
I have made it clear to the right hon. Gentleman several times that I intend that the Standing Orders under the which the assembly meets for the first time will provide for a Cabinet system. It will be open, however, to the assembly, if it subsequently wishes, to revert to a different system. Nevertheless, I intend that, when the assembly meets for the first time, it will meet with a Cabinet system; that will be provided for in the standing orders.

§ Mr. Ancram
In that case, I ask the right hon. Gentleman another question. In new clause 23, which will be part of primary legislation, not the Standing Orders, does that mean that new clause 23(1)(a), which says: 546 The Assembly may delegate functions of the Assembly … to any committee of the Assembly", will be operable only if the Standing Orders have been changed by a two-thirds majority at that time? Is he saying that that provision, which will be in primary legislation, is already qualified and pre-empted by non-primary legislative decisions that he will have taken in relation to the original standing orders? That places a very serious question mark over the meaning of the new clause. Either it is there to provide powers, or it is not.

§ Mr. Davies
New clause 23 is perfectly clear, and new clause subsection (1)(a) provides for the assembly to delegate its functions to any Committee of the assembly if it so wishes. That provision will be allowed for in the Standing Orders.

§ Mr. Ancram
In that case, this argument goes round and round. My original suggestion that we might have a bit of this and a bit of that and not know whether it was a duck or a dog is likely to come true. I say to the right hon. Gentleman in all seriousness, because I believe he is moving in the right direction, that he has left things dangerously open. I am afraid that it creates another area of uncertainty.
I do not want to be unduly unkind to him, but we are becoming used to the non-decisions of this Secretary of State. Will it be Swansea or Cardiff? Will it be Pier head or Bute square? Will it be a Cabinet or a Committee? We do not know. If the people of Wales are to have confidence in the devolution proposals, they should have a clearer idea of the answers to all those questions.

§ Mr. Öpik
Will the right hon. Gentleman acknowledge that his anxieties would seem groundless if we were discussing the setting up of a new business? The more progressive management consultants would adopt the approach that the Government are taking, and allow the organisation to define its reporting structures. The Conservatives are advocating adherence to much more traditional, more rigid systems of government, more associated with old Westminster than with new Cardiff.

§ Mr. Ancram
I hope that the right hon. Gentleman can relieve us both of our concerns, because I understand that, if the assembly is to operate as a business in this regard, it will first need a two-thirds majority to overcome the Standing Orders that he has said will direct it in a particular—what the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Mr. Öpik) would call "old-fashioned"—way. We need to know the answers to those questions. That is one reason—I shall not trespass on this, Mr. Deputy Speaker—why I was worried that we did not have enough time in which to discuss this group of amendments. These are not minor or straightforward—

§ Mr. Ron Davies
The right hon. Gentleman is going round and round.

§ Mr. Ancram
I am going round and round because the new clause is circular, and it will take us round and round in circles.

§ Mr. Tim Collins (Westmorland and Lonsdale)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that there is a further 547 confusion, which illustrates this point, inherent in new clause 22, on the system of subject Committees? For the past two decades, Cabinet government in this House has been balanced by accountability to cross-party Select Committees, usually acting unanimously. The subject Committees can hardly operate in that way if the person whom they are scrutinising is sitting on that Committee, asking questions with them and scrutinising the same evidence as them. Is that not another example of a quacking dog?

§ Mr. Ancram
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that example. He is absolutely right. He will notice that the amendments that we have tabled to new clause 22—amendments (a) to (j)—seek to meet that objection by renaming the subject Committees "Select Committees", so that they will operate as a Committee should operate under a Cabinet structure, like the Select Committees of the House. We are trying to bring clarity to what we consider to be a move in the right direction, which is not achieving what it set out to achieve.
Having made those points, on which I hope that we shall receive clarification from the Secretary of State because they are important, I shall briefly explain the amendments in the names of myself and my hon. Friends.
Our amendment (a) to new clause 20 would require the First Secretary to appoint one person as Financial Secretary and another as Business Manager. Our amendment (d) to new clause 21 would provide that neither be given responsibility for a specific field of policy. That is another constructive attempt to make more sense of the Cabinet structure, because we believe that, if a Cabinet is to work, there should be Ministers in the Cabinet who are not departmental Ministers but can look after the financial side. We know that a large sum of money—about £7 billion—is likely to be within the purview of the assembly. We believe that one Minister should be responsible for that.
We believe that there should be a Business Manager—a post along the lines of the Leader of the House—to ensure that business is properly pursued. That will make clear sense in the Cabinet structure, which is why we favour a Cabinet structure.
Amendment (b) to new clause 20 would prevent the First Secretary from appointing more than eight other Secretaries, including those two. The Secretary of State said that he looked forward to hearing me explain why we chose that number. There is no magic formula. There are 60 Members of the assembly. It seems to us that six departmental Ministers—a tenth of them—is generous.
Ministers currently on the Treasury Bench are carrying out all the functions that the six Secretaries plus the First Secretary will carry out. If the Secretary of State is in the place of the First Secretary at the moment, there are two hard-worked Ministers sitting next to him on the Front Bench whose work will now be undertaken by three Ministers each. That seems to be quite generous.
Although we know the skill and hard-working capabilities of the hon. Members for Neath (Mr. Hain) and for Bridgend (Mr. Griffiths), we believe that three other Welsh men or women should be able to undertake the work that they currently undertake. Therefore, it seems to us that the number six is about correct.
548 I have referred already to amendments (a) and (c) to (j) to Government new clause 22. They are designed genuinely to make sense of the Cabinet structure by having the Committees as Select Committees—

§ Mr. Robert Syms (Poole)
What happens to the rest of the Welsh Office structure upon the appointments that we are discussing? It is implicit in the Bill that there will be a Secretary of State. Will there be junior Ministers supporting the Secretary of State, as well as the structure within the assembly?

§ Mr. Ancram
It is my understanding that, unless they apply for P45s fairly soon, they will find themselves without work once the Bill has passed through Parliament. We are told that the Secretary of State will continue in office. We have not been told that personally; we await the end of what might be called the right hon. Gentleman's coy period, when he will tell us whether he will stand for the assembly or remain with us in the House.
I find it difficult to believe one story I read—that the right hon. Gentleman would try to do both things. That would make nonsense of devolution. The right hon. Gentleman would be bound by the collective responsibility of the Cabinet in Westminster, which he would have to apply to the collective responsibility of the assembly's Cabinet. I think that we would all agree that that would be constitutional nonsense.
I fear that the role of Secretary of State will be severely downgraded by the nature of devolution. We have discussed that previously, and I am sure that the issue will be raised again in another place when these matters are further discussed.
Amendments (a) and (c) to (m) to Government new clause 21, and amendment No. 198 to clause 149, are designed simply to rename the Executive Committee the assembly Cabinet. I believe in calling a duck a duck or a dog a dog. When the Secretary of State makes up his mind—that is, if he does so in the direction that I hope he will—the amendments will make total sense. I therefore hope that he will be prepared to accept them.

§ Dr. Marek
I shall make a quick intervention or, perhaps, a short speech. I did not intend to do so but earlier I asked my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State about the amendments that I have tabled on the responsibilities and loyalty of the civil service. I would not say that he brushed off my intervention, but he said that I could make my own points. I now propose to do so.
On those matters, I have considerable sympathy with the Opposition Front Bench. It would seem that they have not been thought through very carefully. For me, the problem is deciding where civil servants owe their loyalty. We know that civil servants, including permanent secretaries, meet all the time. They probably meet regularly once a week. The head of the National Assembly of Wales civil service will continue, I am sure, to meet heads of the civil service in the different Departments in Westminster. I am sure also that he or she will continue to do so once a week.
Furthermore, if there are problems within the civil service—I do not know the code in detail but there are procedures whereby problems are raised at a higher and higher level—at the end of the day, the person who carries 549 the can is the secretary to the Cabinet, the head of the home civil service. That is the head of the Cabinet here for the Westminster Government, not for the assembly.
I happen to believe that, if a body has servants, those servants should owe loyalty to that body. Under a system of Committee government, that could have worked. The home civil service could have staffed the entire assembly. However, when we move to a Cabinet form of government, surely there must be servants whose primary duty is not to the Executive Committee or to the Westminster Government. There must be servants of the assembly whose loyalty is to non-executive members of that assembly, in much the same way as we have Clerks of Select Committees. We have also Clerks to the House of Commons. Until a few years ago, the Comptroller and Auditor General was a Government employee, but the previous Administration rightly changed the nature of that employment so that the Comptroller and Auditor General is paid for out of House of Commons voted money and owes his or her loyalty—in this instance, his—to the House.
I do not think that we can set up a system where a Back-Bench Member of the assembly will have no servants of that assembly to whom he or she can turn. It is an important issue, and I do not think that the Government have thought it through. There should be officers of the assembly and my amendments—no doubt they are imperfect, and there is no need for my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to say that that is the position, if he comments upon those matters before the guillotine comes down at 7.30 pm—Nos. 231 to 233 illustrate the point. I hope that they will be taken up in another place if Members there see that there is merit in them.
Codes of practice are dealt with in new clause 29, which I tabled. It must be right that further consideration is given to codes of practice. Let us suppose that there is a difference of opinion between the national assembly and its Executive, the Executive Committee and the Cabinet in Westminster. How will that issue be resolved if the loyalty and codes of practice of civil servants—Her Majesty's home civil service—rest ultimately with the head of that civil service, who is Secretary to the Cabinet and the senior civil servant here in Westminster, whose loyalty is to the Westminster Government?
5.45 pm
I do not think that the issue has been thought through. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State may try to brush it away or under the carpet. I am not being rude to him, but I ask him to consider the matter. It is an important matter that needs to be clarified. It is important that officers of the national assembly should be servants of the national assembly in just the same way as the Clerks and officers of the House of Commons are servants of Westminster Back-Bench Members.
I do not want to speak for a long time because I appreciate that this will be a short debate. I have said what I wanted to say and I do not intend to amplify my remarks. As I have said, we are discussing an important matter.

§ Mr. Öpik
Throughout the many days of consideration of the Bill, we have complained that Ministers and the Government generally have not listened to various of our suggestions. Now, it has come as something of a surprise 550 and a delight that the Government have made such a substantial effort to try to take on board points made by the Opposition. Slowly but surely, the Secretary of State is beginning to recognise the enormous value of the Liberal Democrats as the constitutional gurus in this place. I applaud that unequivocally.

§ Mr. Wigley
The hon. Gentleman's modesty knows no bounds.

§ Mr. Öpik
Indeed. Our constitutional prowess is second only to our humility.
My colleagues and I welcome the general thrust of the block of amendments that is before us. It has been interesting to listen to the concerns that have been raised by other hon. Members, which have been mainly about the confusion between whether it is a Cabinet structure or a Committee structure. As I tried to say earlier in a brief intervention, I do not see that this is a problem.
In modern management systems analysis, it has become clear that some of the best organisations, in ascertaining for themselves how they operate—slightly intuitive, slightly trial and error—come to the conclusion that, if they trust the individuals who are running those systems and consider them to be responsible and bright, they can trust them also to define what would be the best system for them to operate.
In that context, we must make the assumption that the good people of Wales will elect 60 responsible individuals who will be capable of making the right decisions. It is an exciting experiment, not a dangerous one, to allow the Welsh assembly to define its processes to such a degree.

§ Mr. John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings)
As a constitutional guru, how would the hon. Gentleman answer the charge that, despite what he said about talented and bright individuals, the purpose of a constitution is to put in place institutions, conventions and rules that will control the excesses of individuals? A constitutional guru would surely recognise that. Perhaps he will point to a serious organisation, a state or a system of government where the constitution does not put in place such safeguards.

§ Mr. Öpik
I shall happily ask one of my colleagues to put together a seminar, at no cost, to the official Opposition so that we might discuss those matters at greater depth. However, to answer the hon. Gentleman's question briefly, as I try always to answer direct questions, the purpose of having a constitution is not to regulate every detail of process but to facilitate an outcome or result. We all want the assembly to work, but that does not mean that we must define in minute detail exactly how it will choose to structure itself any more than a company manager would need to define in detail how all staff members choose to operate in order to deliver a result.

§ Mr. Hayes
I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way twice. He has replied to my first question by referring to businesses. I do not know whether he has a background in business or industry, but I spent a long time in that sector. Companies do not have constitutions, because they are not subject to the pressures 551 that I described. Business institutions do not have to have public safeguards in the way that the hon. Gentleman suggests. That is a totally inappropriate analogy.

§ Mr. Öpik
The hon. Gentleman and I can agree to differ. As ever, I find myself mentioning Procter and Gamble. As far as I know, that company has no intention of governing Wales or any other part of the world. Nevertheless, it must achieve specific outcomes. It must secure a profit for its shareholders and, in the same way, the Welsh assembly must secure a profit for its stakeholders who, in this case, are the people of Wales.
We are dealing very much in analogies. It is perfectly correct for hon. Members to question the legitimacy of making a comparison between business and politics. However, I suggest that, if we are to be progressive and to take the best of Westminster and leave behind the worst elements—

§ Mr. Hayes
We do not want to leave Westminster.

§ Mr. Öpik
I am sure that the people of Wales welcome the hon. Gentleman's decision. If we are to look at politics in a different way—

§ Mr. Evans
Does the hon. Gentleman intend to stand for the assembly?

§ Mr. Öpik
That is a rather puerile intervention. I have said many times that I have no intention of standing for the assembly because my work at Westminster is not yet completed.
I believe that my analogy of business and politics is quite robust. Those who seek to find fault with taking the best from modern business structures contradict the basic ethos of the Welsh assembly. The assembly's goal is to govern the United Kingdom differently and to be courageous enough to believe that there is perhaps a more effective form of government than the somewhat tired processes that occasionally find us moribund in this Chamber at 6 am. As far as I am concerned, the analogy of the quacking dog is not necessarily a bad one. However, I define the Welsh assembly as a barking eagle: it should soar above Wales and survey the problems while retaining the capacity to defend Welsh territory against those who may not be so supportive of its endeavours. In summarising my first point, I implore those who seek to detract from the hybrid nature of a Cabinet-cum-Committee structure to think bigger. Let us see how it goes, and let us be grateful that the new structure proposed in this block of amendments will allow the assembly to make course corrections as it discovers what works and what does not.
There is one caveat: the relationship between the Assembly Secretaries and the subject Committees must be very effective. That is the most important element of the relationships in all the assembly structures. We favour allowing the Assembly Secretaries to have clear roles in terms of not just conveying messages to the Committees but being advocates for the Committees by conveying information to the Cabinet. If that works, we shall be on to a very good thing.

§ Dr. Marek
I agree entirely that the national assembly should be able to see its way forward. However, it is 552 written in primary legislation that every civil servant must be a member of the home civil service. Therefore, the assembly will not be able to feel its way in that area if anything goes wrong.

§ Mr. Öpik
I listened to the hon. Gentleman's contribution and I think that he has raised a genuine concern. I look forward to hearing the Secretary of State's response, as—without labouring the point—I think that all hon. Members share that concern.

§ Mr. Wigley
Taking up that thread, the hon. Gentleman may recall that the legislation that came before the House in the 1970s—which became the Wales Act 1978 and was defeated in a referendum—proposed an integrated public service in Wales. The Government have moved away from that position. It might be interesting to know the logic behind that decision, as the proposal would have created an embryo civil service in Wales that was answerable to Wales.

§ Mr. Öpik
That is a very lucid expansion of the point raised earlier by the hon. Member for Wrexham (Dr. Marek). It would be helpful to hear the Secretary of State's view on the matter, and I hope that he will return to it in his summation.
I shall briefly summarise the aims of the Liberal Democrat amendments. They would make several important changes with regard to limiting the delegation of functions. We do not wish to see a huge number of political functions delegated to non-elected members. We believe that only administrative duties should be delegated to assembly staff. We recognise that there is another view on the matter, but we believe that the new clause is too broad. There should be more restrictions on the functions that may be transferred.
The other point of our amendments is to create three categories of staff: parliamentary, political and executive. In essence, those distinctions would be useful in preventing staff members from being pressured to perform inappropriate functions not related to their roles. That aim ties in with our other amendments.
I shall deal now with the amendments tabled by others. Allowing the assembly to confirm decisions to appoint Assembly Secretaries is an interesting concept, and I look forward to hearing the argument in defence of that position. I believe that that proposal would be too prescriptive and would fly in the face of the course that I advocated earlier in allowing the first assembly to follow etiquette in that area.
New clause 21 allows for Secretaries without Portfolio. I can understand the rationale behind that proposal, but that phrase makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I sincerely hope that, if a Secretary without Portfolio were appointed, we should not see the construction of a Swansea dome as compensation for not siting the assembly in that city. Incidentally, if such a dome were built, I hope that the Lord Chancellor would not be responsible for its interior decoration.
New clause 22 sensibly provides for a clearly defined Cabinet structure. The relationship between Committees and Cabinet may be complex, but the Cabinet will be quite easy to set up. I cannot imagine that the assembly will wrangle over that point.
553 My final point responds to earlier comments made in the debate. I was concerned to hear the Secretary of State say that, if one party has an overall majority, that majority must be replicated across the Committees. That does not follow the principle of inclusivity, which we have discussed so much in the context of the assembly.

§ Mr. Ted Rowlands (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney)
The hon. Gentleman is a keen advocate of the Cabinet system, but the Cabinet is not inclusive, either.

§ Mr. Öpik
There is no reason to believe that the Cabinet should necessarily comprise only one party. If we are serious about taking advantage of proportional representation and its manifestations, we should recognise that this is an opportunity to get the best from the various parties—new and old—that are likely to be represented in the first assembly. I encourage the Secretary of State to provide an assurance that he will at least consider allowing the First Secretary the latitude to give significant responsibilities to minority parties.

§ Mr. Grieve
That may be an expression of hope, and surely that is all that it can be. Representation and such matters will be decided by the assembly. Conservative Members strongly suspect that the inclusivity and the holistics about which we have heard a great deal may be rather more absent than present. I understand what the hon. Gentleman says, but there is not much point in Conservative Members going on about representation in the assembly, because the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.

§ Mr. Öpik
There may be some point in Conservative Members going on about representation. The Welsh people are magnanimous, and we have agreed to a proportional representation system that might allow Conservative Members back into Welsh politics. We expect no thanks for that, but we expect maturity from any Conservatives who are elected to the assembly. Members of the assembly from all parties must act responsibly and co-operatively if the assembly is to be a progressive development from the Westminster Parliament.
Still, the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) may be right, and our hopes may be dashed by the first assembly. If it seeks to impose one-party-rule attitudes, my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Livsey) will have been deceived.

§ Mr. Evans
Where is the hon. Gentleman?

§ Mr. Öpik
My hon. Friend is in his constituency swapping views about this very debate, and will join us shortly. Had we not had a privatised rail network, he would have been here already.
The hon. Member for Beaconsfield was right to make the crucial point about representation, which hangs on the question of whether the ruling party, should there be one, will have the maturity and self-confidence to allow other parties to hold significant responsibilities. We must wait and see.
554 We had a tactical debate about the additional cost of a Cabinet structure. Surely we can all agree to the small on-cost, or perhaps even the small on-saving, of a Cabinet structure, if it is the strategically correct government structure. A Cabinet structure will not have a major effect on the cost of running the assembly. I hope that we shall not descend to whingeing about prices when we should be planning the future decision-making body for an entire nation.
My last point concerns positive thinking. It is always easy to condemn a structure that is not yet operating, but it is better to ask how a body can be made to work. As long as we are reasonably confident that we are within 10 per cent. of the right structure, we must believe that the rest will be achieved by responsible assembly Members who will have great enthusiasm and an enormous interest in making the first assembly work.
The Cabinet-Committee structure, which has been advocated by the three Opposition parties, will provide an excellent opportunity to see how high is up. Britain should look beyond the old structures inhabited by Westminster Members of Parliament to new structures that will allow Wales to spread its wings and prove that it can be a world player with a truly up-to-date democratic system.

§ Mr. Rowlands
I must tell the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Mr. Öpik) that I have not managed to call my nation or my constituency a company in 30 years in Parliament. I do not believe in using that term in such a way, and I do not believe in the values associated with it. The management-speak that poured from the hon. Gentleman is not appropriate to arguments about how we shall be governed under the new arrangements in the Welsh assembly.
Over the past 20 years, too many of our services have been gripped by management-speak. Some people believe that it can be crudely applied to the concept of service. That is a worthy concept, which is worth standing up and fighting for. It is a privilege to represent people. Management-speak books do not contain such words, but I hope that we find them in politics and in the Welsh assembly.

§ Mr. Öpik
I am sorry to intervene after making a lengthy contribution, but does the hon. Gentleman recognise that the words "integrity" and "service" are at the core of almost every successful multinational organisation?

§ Mr. Rowlands
Many features of multinational corporations are unlikely to exemplify those virtues. No, the hon. Gentleman's assumption is not right.
I shall address most of my remarks to amendment (c), but shall first speak to new clause 20. The Bill and I are not destined to get on. I vigorously defended the original clause on behalf of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, only to find that the persuasive qualities of the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the nationalists—clearly not those of Labour Members—brought about a change.
I am grappling with the changes, and am trying to understand and appreciate them. The alteration of the wording caused me a bit of a problem. Will there be a Cabinet-style approach, which was mentioned in a press release; a Cabinet-style process of decision making, to use 555 my right hon. Friend's words; or a Cabinet system, which was mentioned in debate? The Opposition amendments propose a straightforward Cabinet. We have had a great deal of time to think in the past 12 or 14 hours, especially in the small hours.
I am at sea on those issues, so I went not to management-speak, but to Walter Bagehot's classic definition of the constitution. He said: A cabinet is a combining committee—a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens the legislative part of the state to the Executive part of the state. If that is a valid description of a Cabinet, I cannot for the life of me see why the Opposition are pressing so vigorously for a Cabinet structure in the Welsh assembly, especially as they do not support a formal legislative function. The definition is old-fashioned and beautifully written; it also has an authentic feel. If the assembly is not to be a legislative body, why try vigorously to implant or impose on that new democratic institution a Cabinet structure of the sort that would be provided by the Opposition amendments? New clause 20 also moves some way towards such a structure.

§ Mr. Letwin
The hon. Gentleman says that the assembly will not be a legislative body. Did I hear him correctly? Will not the assembly be legislative, albeit through passing secondary legislation?

§ Mr. Rowlands
The assembly will have a subordinate legislative function, but we should not get sidetracked because the issue has been debated at considerable length.
Throughout the debates and throughout the referendum campaign, the point was sturdily made that we are not constructing a Welsh assembly with the power to pass primary legislation of the kind and character to which Bagehot referred when talking of the legislative state.
We fail to remind ourselves of what the Welsh assembly is supposed to do. Its fundamental function is to allocate a block grant of £7 billion—a large sum of money—according to what it decides are the priorities and needs of the Welsh people. Distribution of expenditure does not necessarily have to be decided under a Cabinet system. The nature of the Welsh assembly's fundamental function means that secret, closed Cabinet decision-making is unnecessary. The whole idea of devolution and the setting up of a Welsh assembly was to introduce openness and to have all the options up and running, not closed down, one by one, by Cabinet Ministers and Executive Committees that would filter decision making. I thought that the idea of the new politics of devolution was to move away from that process, but there is a hankering to return to the old-style Westminster system of Cabinet decision making.

§ Mr. Hayes
The hon. Gentleman's speech is compelling and lucid. He says that the Cabinet binds the Executive and the legislature. He has made it clear that the assembly will have a legislative role, albeit a reduced one, and that the Executive will also have a role. Without the structure that Cabinet provides, how would he link those two roles?

§ Mr. Rowlands
The buckle that joins the assembly to Westminster and Whitehall has nothing to do with the internal decision-making process in the assembly. That 556 link is supposed to be through the Secretary of State and concordats. If we manage to debate the concordats, I hope that that will be brought out. Sadly, we shall not debate the role of the Secretary of State. The hon. Gentleman's point is irrelevant in this context, because there are other instruments for the function that he describes. Whether they can do it is another matter.
I did not want the assembly to have an old-fashioned local government structure. Equally, I do not want an old-fashioned Cabinet structure. I do not know whether the new clauses have created a hybrid or a hydra, but it seems that a third way is being sought. It has been found for economic policy and it is now to be in constitutional policy. Unfortunately, at the moment it is a rather convoluted and confused way to decide where we are going.
Nowhere in the White Paper or in the first draft of the Bill is there a reference to a permanent secretary. Why has one suddenly emerged in new clause 24? Oddly enough, the new clause states: (whether or not that person is known by the title of Permanent Secretary to the Assembly). Has the term been introduced to try to give the assembly the smack of old Westminster to satisfy those who have been pressing for a Welsh Government?
Above all, I question the Minister's reason for the change. In the press release and, I think, in his opening speech, he said: People want decision-making arrangements which provide for identified individuals to be clearly accountable to the public for particular decisions. The new structure is supposed to provide that. Cabinet-style Government is much more collective in its decision-making process, and a permanent secretary who derives his authority from the role that he may claim in a subject committee is likely to have a perfectly identical profile. I cannot envisage many wallflowers in Welsh politics. I am not sure what the Minister meant or why he thinks that his alternative system will make people more identifiable. They will be identifiable when the First Secretary hires or fires them. That will raise their profiles.
6.15 pm
Why are we slavishly trying to return to tight, collective decision making? When one person is given the right to hire and fire, sooner or later a collective system of government will emerge. Instead of following a career in the assembly and in working with the Committees, people will follow the patronage system with which we are familiar. I have been a beneficiary of that, and understand it as well as anybody. There will be a plethora of Secretaries, the equivalent of Ministers, and there will be shadow Secretaries. When that happens, the new assembly will have returned to the world of personal patronage. I thought that devolution was more and better than that.

§ Mr. Grieve
I sympathise with much of what the hon. Gentleman says. He spoke about a hybrid or hydra. Has not the Secretary of State engaged in hype? The assembly will be toothless in relation to its officials. We face a dilemma. The early system seemed to offer no government for Wales, but the system that has been adopted could be criticised for not being much different 557 from the Westminster one, which would allow the assembly to control officials. Without that, there is no control.

§ Mr. Rowlands
I do not think that it is hype. It has more substance, I would not spend time making my case. It is a significant and important change. It shifts the nature and balance of the assembly's chemistry, and its politics will be altered by the changes. That is clear from an examination of the first secretary's role. He will have power to hire and fire. In the press release and in other statements, the Minister was at pains to explain that the Assembly Secretaries will have an important role in the Committees and that that will in no way lead to a downgrading of the Committees.
It is stated that each Assembly Secretary will have to work in partnership with the all-party subject Committee of which he or she is the leader. If one of a Secretary's major functions is to relate to an all-party subject Committee, surely our amendment (c) should apply. If the First Secretary seeks to sack that person, the Committee on which he sits should be asked to approve the dismissal. We should at least slightly temper what is otherwise a good old-fashioned return to a full-scale system of patronage in the hands of the First Secretary, who will rapidly become the Prime Minister or Premier. I understand the difficulties of finding the third way, but we must develop institutional structures that will reflect what we hope will be the new politics of devolution and not the old-fashioned politics to which so many of the clauses and Opposition amendments would like to return.

§ Mr. Wigley
I am glad of the opportunity to follow the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr. Rowlands). He described the Westminster Cabinet system, which is the type of system that generally operates in most central Governments, comparing it with the local government system and speaking about old-style local government. As he knows, I was a councillor on just such an old-style authority in Merthyr Tydfil. Anyone who says that that was an open, inclusive system of government is talking through their hat. Those in opposition—and, I suspect, sometimes Labour members of that authority—were kept in the dark most of the time about what was going on.
Therefore, I do not think that the argument is between local government and central Government-type systems. The argument is how we achieve the most effective system from the proposals that are before the House, which will, I hope, serve Wales well.
As the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney has said, I approach the subject from the view that we should take more power from Westminster and have a central Government-type system in Wales, so I welcome the Government's move. Not only have we been pressing for it, but, in strategic terms, it is important: it gives better coherence.
I accept that getting quick decisions is a managerial consideration, but we must consider what sometimes happens in local government and the delays in decision making even in new local government, which can be astronomical, hampering leaders' ability to take decisions. The proposal will facilitate quicker decision taking. Provided that there is proper answerability, this system can be made to work.
558 I intervened earlier on the question of answerability. What is the relationship between the Secretary and the Committee on which he or she serves as a member? I do not think that we have properly thought that through. Perhaps that was the Government's intention—to leave flexibility for the assembly itself to think it through—but the Committee needs at least some initial guidelines, so that both the commission that is working at present and the assembly know the framework within which the Committee will initially work.
I am a little at a loss to know how exactly the Secretary will relate to the Committee. He or she may be a member of the Committee and sit on it. It may behave similarly to a Select Committee, before which a Minister appears from time to time to answer for the policies being pursued. To start with, Select Committee members sit around in private to discuss the questioning of the Minister—who will say what the main points to be followed are. That will be difficult in the Welsh assembly if the Minister is a member of the Committee that will do the cross-questioning.
Will the Committee draw up the strategy and priorities within that Department's remit? If so, will the Minister be obliged to argue that case from the bottom up, as it were, in what will effectively be the Cabinet—the Executive Committee—or will he impose the policies from the centre down and have only to answer before the Committee? If that is the case, it is difficult to see that the Secretary will genuinely be a member of the Committee. He or she will come to the Committee—and certainly relate to it—but will not necessarily answer to it and be a member of a body that has developed the policy.
There is the question of the Committee's sanction against the Secretary. If the Committee feels that the priorities which it has determined, and which it believes the Secretary has been espousing and advocating within Cabinet, have not been genuinely put forward—perhaps the Secretary has deliberately not followed the Committee's line—does the Committee have the sanction of removing the Secretary?
I understand that one could argue that that should be a matter for the entire House. I should like to take up the point on which the Secretary of State intervened. Although the governing party may have an overall majority in the assembly—and although that majority will be reflected in the membership of the working Committees—that does not mean that every member of a Committee does not have his or her own opinion. The balance of feeling within a Committee may be different from the balance of feeling in the Cabinet and assembly as a whole.
The Committee may therefore want to follow a different line from that being pursued by the Cabinet. It may concentrate on one issue and not relate it to the other issues that the Cabinet or Executive Committee has to consider in parallel, not least in terms of resources. I am not sure whether we have fully understood the balance between answerability and being inter pares—advocating what the Committee wants in the Executive Committee.
There is the question of the balance within the Committees themselves. I accept that the balance in the Committees can be only that within the assembly; it could not be anything else. That is as good as anything that we, as a minority party, could want, although we, like other parties, aspire to being a majority party some time in the Welsh assembly.
559 The Chairs of the Committees could be powerful people, as those who chair Select Committees sometimes are: one thinks of the tremendous work of Committees such as the Public Accounts Committee. A Chair can be almost as powerful as a Minister—at least in terms of scrutiny, he or she is powerful. There will be an interesting relationship between the Chair and the Secretary, but they may not be of the same party; presumably, there will be a sharing of the Chairs. If they are not of the same party, do problems arise in terms of proper answerability and the working relationship that is necessary to allow quick and effective decision making? There could be a conflict between the two.
I welcome the new clauses. More work will need to be done on them. As we are on Report, this is clearly a matter for another place. I would much rather that it had happened here, but questions still need to be answered before we can say what amendments need to be tabled. I hope that, in his winding-up speech, the Secretary of State will deal with some of them.

§ Mr. Denzil Davies (Llanelli)
I was saddened, although not critical of the fact, that, in the face of the weight of the establishment forces in Wales ranged against him—the advisory committee, which is taken from the great and the good in Wales, the Conservative party, the nationalist party and the Liberal Democrats—the Secretary of State has moved away from what was in the Bill originally. Various people criticised what was in the Bill, saying that it contained a local government model, as if that were wholly bad.
In fact, it was not a local government model. I thought that the draftsman, or whoever instructed the draftsman, drew up an elegant model in the Bill, which lay somewhere between the local government model and a type of Cabinet system. I thought that it was well done, but my right hon. Friend has no doubt been pressurised. Whether he is actually happy with the direction in which he is moving, I do not know, but he certainly has moved.
I took a note of what my right hon. Friend said at the beginning of his speech. He said that it was a "Cabinet-style process of decision-making." By the time he had concluded, it was going to be a Cabinet. Indeed, he made it clear that, once the procedures were drawn up, it would be a Cabinet.
Let us make no bones about it: it will be a Cabinet and it will meet in secret. Ministers of the Cabinet, whether they have portfolios or not, will have red boxes or perhaps red and green boxes—I am not sure what the appropriate colour might be for this inclusivity or hybridity. They will have motor cars. Just as years ago the National Union of Mineworkers sometimes mirrored the coal owners and the coal owners sometimes mirrored the NUM, so the Welsh assembly will mirror Westminster in almost every form.
We are to have at least one permanent secretary. I am sure that there will be more than one. There will be a second permanent secretary. Indeed, when I was at the Treasury, there were four second permanent secretaries and, beneath them, there were deputy permanent secretaries. no doubt there will be deputy permanent secretaries and second permanent secretaries and they will each talk to the next layer up. We will have the whole system.
The hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Mr. Öpik) told us about multinational companies and his great experience of them. When it came to money, he was very cavalier— 560 far more cavalier than a treasurer of a multinational company would be—and said that the Cabinet-type system might cost a little more. Of course it will, but we must remember that that money comes out of the budget: it comes out of money for hospitals and schools, so he had no right to be cavalier about it. It is not additional money that can come from somewhere else, wherever it can be found. So a Westminster structure will cost more money. I am sorry that my right hon. Friend has succumbed to pressure to take that route. We are talking partly about secrecy. Those of us who have been round the course before—in 1978–79—felt that one reason for having a Welsh assembly was that the Welsh budget or allocation of money to Wales could never be debated on the Floor of the House as time did not allow for it. It was debated within the Welsh Office by civil servants and Ministers and, in most cases, proper decisions were reached. I make no criticism of that. However, there was no open debate of the allocation of funds to Wales; it was all done behind closed doors. Once we have moved to the black cars, the red boxes, the permanent secretaries, the Cabinets, the Premiers, the Chief Ministers and the First Secretaries, we will replicate exactly the same procedure.
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Matters related to the allocation of funds will not be discussed in public because of commercial confidentiality or because there will be too many pressures. So it will all be decided by Ministers, with or without portfolio, sitting in Cardiff or wherever, making decisions behind closed doors.

§ Mr. Letwin
As always, the right hon. Gentleman is making a most interesting speech. Does he agree that the result to which he is alluding will arise because the concomitant of Cabinet Government—procedures for debating money Bills, budgets and so on—is not proposed for the Welsh assembly? So we have only half the package.

§ Mr. Davies
Yes, but I am addressing my remarks to what we have—Executive devolution. Although I appreciate that there may be secondary legislation, the basic intention was to establish a body that would distribute the money that the Treasury allocates to the Welsh Office—mainly in secret. I make no criticism of Ministers, as that is the process. The money is then distributed to various sectors. The rate support grant is decided partly in public and allocated to housing and education. That is the nature of the beast. My hope was that at least that debate would take place in the open. I hope that I am wrong and that that will still happen, but I suspect that it will not once the right hon. Member for Caernarfon (Mr. Wigley) has his trappings of power.
Indeed—who knows?—Perhaps the Ministers without portfolio will become Privy Councillors. Perhaps they will all be kissing hands and generally acquiring all the trappings of Westminster power. However, once that is set in motion, the nature of Government being what it is, everything will be decided in secret.
All the other members of the assembly will be sitting around without very much to do. Like Government Back Benchers, they will be expected to approve the third way 561 or whatever. We are here to facilitate—to make sure that, once the third way has been decided on, it will be carried out.

§ Mr. Ron Davies
My right hon. Friend could have fooled me.

§ Mr. Davies
My right hon. Friend is amused. He should not take me too far on this issue, as he knows that we all subscribe 100 per cent. to the third way, despite the fact that occasionally we like to please ourselves and debate a few of the commas and full stops. Basically, we are all here to ensure that the third way proceeds easily.
Most members of the assembly will be there to do the bidding of the Chief Minister, the First Secretary, the permanent secretaries and all the trappings of Westminster Government that, sadly, we are now transplanting or adding to the Welsh assembly.
I am sorry that the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire, who likes to appear as a moderniser, is in the vanguard with the traditionalists. He wants a Westminster model, as do the Welsh nationalists. I understand the purpose of the nationalists. They want to create the trappings of a state. It is a state that does not raise enough money to keep itself going, but we shall discuss that in other debates.
I am sorry that my right hon. Friend has succumbed, but even a man of his iron will sometimes has to bend and, on this occasion, I am afraid that my right hon. Friend is bending.

§ Mr. Leigh
I very much agree with what the right hon. Member for Llanelli (Mr. Davies) has just said. The longer the debate proceeds, the more worried people should become. The Secretary of State's opening speech was very short. The proposal has appeared somewhat late in the day. I understand the reason for it—to create a clear sense of responsibility. I can see where it is coming from.

§ Mr. Ron Davies
It is coming from the Opposition Front Bench.

§ Mr. Leigh
Yes, but I am also entitled to speak for myself. That may be a strange concept to the Labour party, but I am not put up against the wall by my right hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) and told what to say.
We have had a loose discussion about the Cabinet style of Government. However, it is a term of art that has developed over many centuries. It originally grew out of the King's Privy Council. The Cabinet was a fundamentally secretive body, a function of Executive government because it had to be. It was concerned with the King's business and issues of war and peace. However, I thought that in the Welsh assembly we sought to create something very different. That is why I echo the words of the right hon. Member for Llanelli who spoke from the Back Benches, not the Front Bench.
I am concerned that, sadly, in our own Chamber, because the Executive is drawn out of the legislature, people's primary ambition is to join the Executive. Therefore, more often than not, they will follow the party line on pretty well every occasion. The process has developed to a sophisticated degree.
562 When the Americans were trying to organise their new constitution, they wisely decided that the Executive should be entirely separate from the legislature. Therefore, Congressmen are entirely independent. I am concerned that we are now replicating in the Welsh assembly the worst aspects of what happens in the House.

§ Mr. Letwin
I am following my hon. Friend's line of logic. Does he not agree that something much worse is being done? The very safeguards that we have in the House—my hon. Friend may regard them as too slight, but they exist none the less—in the form of positive debate of legislation and money Bills are precisely what is not being offered by the Secretary of State in respect of the Welsh assembly.

§ Mr. Leigh
I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. Therefore, the concentration of power in the Welsh Assembly may be much more serious than what has developed in the Westminster Parliament in the past 200 years. Anyone who approaches the matter with any seriousness should be extremely worried about that.
Let us consider what is likely to happen. Let us assume for the sake of argument that the Labour party becomes the governing party in the assembly and has an overall majority. Let us assume that the current Secretary of State becomes the First Secretary. He would have enormous power, so it is not surprising that he is considering carefully whether to take up that position. He would appoint his own Cabinet. Members of the Cabinet will not be separated from the Parliament or the legislature as they are here. They will not have to persuade the Parliament from a separate point of view; they will be embedded in its structure and sit on the Committees.
Surely any self-respecting member of the majority party in the assembly will want to be a Secretary or a Minister and want to join the First Secretary's team. The First Secretary will appoint the Secretaries and they will be embedded into the Committee structure. Where will be the honest, open debate? As the right hon. Member for Llanelli said, speaking from the Back Benches, the assembly will develop a culture of secrecy and rule by a single party.
The right hon. Member for Caernarfon (Mr. Wigley) said that, when he was on Merthyr Tydfil council, he felt that there was some secrecy on that body. I quite understand. Most of us were involved in local government before being elected to Parliament. The advantage of local government is that, because it is an administrative body, councillors sit on committees and elect a chairman. There is more sense of audience—member—participation in local government committees than there is in our governmental structures in this place, where ordinary Back Benchers exercise very little power.
What worries me, therefore, is that we are embedding in the new assembly—we hoped that it would develop a third way—all the worst aspects of our centralised government structures. We should think twice before setting off down that road.

§ Mr. Rhodri Morgan (Cardiff, West)
Several speeches this evening have highlighted the fact that there is now a problem with the legislation. We need to resolve it or to gain an undertaking that it will be resolved in another place. The problem is that, in moving away from 563 the proposals of the referendum and the White Paper—at the request of the three Opposition parties and on the advice of the advisory committee—the Secretary of State has opted for a Cabinet-oriented system of government as his preferred choice. He has said, subject to the legislation proceeding in the Government's desired manner, that the Welsh Assembly will open using a Cabinet-style model—but that it will not have to follow that model. It can, in fact, revert to the original proposals in the first draft of the Bill as it reached the House a few months ago. That model was a Committee-style model, subject to two-thirds majorities and so on.
The problem with commencing with a Cabinet-style model but allowing the assembly to opt for a Committee-style model later is that other consequential changes will need to be made to the Bill to make it consistent from day one. Had the Secretary of State done things the other way round, there would have been fewer problems. Starting with a Committee-style model would not necessitate so many consequential changes.
The real problem is that the Secretary of State has expressed a preference for a Cabinet-style model from day one, but without the consequential changes. If we start by making a distinction between Front and Back Benchers, certain consequences will flow from that. Indeed, they lie behind my new clause 32 and new schedule 1. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Dr. Marek) has pointed out, an assembly separate from the Executive will need a Clerk and a separate staff to protect the interests of Back Benchers and to give them advice on drafting amendments and obtaining information not supplied by the Government or the civil service. That is the reasoning behind new clause 33, which has the same purpose as the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham.
Amendment no. 250 would amend clause 1 of the Bill, to drop the expression The Assembly shall be a body corporate". No such reference is to be found in the Bill setting up the Scottish Parliament, which is referred to simply as the Scottish Parliament. The Welsh assembly, however, is referred to as a body corporate. That is fine if we follow the Committee model but not if we follow the Cabinet model, which would give rise to a distinction between the Executive, run by the Cabinet, and the legislature—the quasi-parliamentary body which is to challenge, and occasionally change, what Front Benchers want to do. That is the whole point of Back Benchers, after all.
We do not need the expression "a body corporate", any more than the Scottish Bill needs it. The Scotland Bill does not define the legal status of the Scottish Parliament. In a sense, all parliaments are sui generis, so it is pointless defining their legal status. If the Executive and the legislature are to be separated, there is no need to call the legislature a body corporate. I would argue that the expression should be omitted from the Bill.

§ Mr. Letwin
The hon. Gentleman makes his points with great force. Does he agree that there is at least one further issue of equal magnitude: the question of clause 66, which would permit the so-called Cabinet to arrogate to itself the power to legislate, leaving the assembly only the ability to pray a negative resolution? So on the first day of meeting, the assembly could delegate all powers of legislation to the Cabinet and never reconvene, provided that it never prayed a negative resolution.

§ Mr. Morgan
I am grateful for that intervention. I cannot say that I had intended to cover the subject later in my speech, because I had not. Indeed, I had not spotted the significance that the hon. Gentleman discerns in the clause.
Then there is the problem, if we adopt a Cabinet model, of the Official Secrets Act 1989, referred to in clause 79, which I suspect we will discuss later. It appears that it would be deemed to apply only to Front Benchers—the Executive Committee—and would thus need to be amended. We shall discuss that later, too, I suspect.
Then we need to consider the departmental staff—the people who do the conventional civil service work. If BSE continues to be a problem, a vet from the state veterinary service in Scotland who visits a sick cow will be employed by the Scottish Office Agriculture, Environment and Fisheries Department, under the Scottish Parliament. In England, a cow suspected of having BSE will be visited by a vet employed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. In Wales, however, a sick cow will be visited by a Welsh assembly vet, not a vet from the Agriculture Department, because civil servants carrying out usual departmental work will belong not to Departments but to the Welsh assembly. Here, too, consequential changes are called for.
We need to think seriously about two further changes, although they may seem optional. The first concerns the vote of confidence procedure that can trigger elections. We need to debate—I am not convinced of it myself—whether fixed-term elections can be sustained with a Cabinet system. What happens if the First Secretary or the Cabinet loses the confidence of the assembly? Could they stagger on for another four years after losing the confidence of the assembly, perhaps by replacing the First Secretary and the members of the Executive Committee? Would there be a right to ask for a dissolution, in the same way as the Scottish Parliament could?
Finally, under a Cabinet system, would each party be required to elect its leader in advance of the elections? We know of the problems that the Tory party is experiencing in its consideration of the various voting systems—

§ Mr. Ancram
indicated dissent.

§ Mr. Morgan
I am not making a party political point; I am simply saying that the Conservative party is considering the one member, one vote, system of electing its leader.
Will that need to be done in Wales as well by changing the Welsh Labour party rules, as the Scottish Labour party did some 10 days ago when it said that the putative Scottish First Minister will need to be given a democratic mandate in the party political sense? If we are to adopt the Cabinet model, we must think about changing the rules in the Welsh Labour party. We could then have a Prime Minister designate, selected by one member, one vote.
The alternative approach is to use the local government model, whereby the leader of the assembly is selected the day after the election from the 20 or so—or however many is required to have a majority—of the 35 Members elected. The minimum number of votes with which one could win a majority in the Welsh assembly is 31. If someone is voted for by 31 Members of the Assembly, 565 as Labour might hope to achieve, 16 will constitute a majority. If a person can get 16 votes on the day after the election, he or she will be the First Secretary of the Welsh Assembly. Although those 16 people will have been voted in by the people of Wales, theirs will not constitute a big democratic mandate as compared with that of the British Prime Minister or the Scottish First Minister.
That may not be a matter for this House, but it is a matter for all the parties represented in this House which will contest the election. They are concerned with the quality of the democratic mandate that flows from having a Cabinet system.
The points that I have made follow the same line as those made by the vast majority of Labour Members who have spoken. If we adopt a Cabinet system, at least initially, we need to follow through the changes logically so that we have a consistent package. If we do not—many Labour Members think that we should not—that is fine, because we will not need to make those consequential changes until we opt for a Cabinet model. However, if we adopt the Cabinet model first, we need to make the consequential changes that go with that so that we have a coherent whole. If we do it the other way around, there will be less of a problem, provided that permission is included in the Bill.
I am inclined to think that we should not have gone down this road, in spite of the pressing and blandishments of all three Opposition parties and of the advisory committee. It is far too easy to make the fundamental mistake of choosing a Westminster solution to a Welsh problem and Welsh political circumstances. We have not yet reached the stage where we need to opt for the kind of recommendations that have been made by all three Opposition parties because they are far too liable to "Westminsterise" the new Welsh democratic creation which we have spent so much time and trouble trying to get right.

§ Mr. Syms
I agree with a great deal of what the hon. Member for Cardiff, West (Mr. Morgan) said. We are almost always on opposite sides of the argument in this Chamber, but he made some good points. I agree that the Bill must be logical.
However, I support the changes proposed by the Government because, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) said, a Cabinet system would be better because it recognises what will inevitably happen: after an election, the party with a majority will hold a meeting to elect who it wants to run the Committees. The proposed change makes that more explicit than it would be if we adopted the local government model.
The whole tenor of the Bill is that a further tier of government is required in Wales, so it is right to recognise it in this form. A Cabinet system would clearly delineate who is running the assembly and who is on the Opposition side. Earlier in the debate, an hon. Member said that we would have shadow Secretaries next. In many respects, that could be a good thing. I believe that an Administration, an Opposition and some debate are what democratic structures are about.
We have heard a great deal about inclusivity and the new politics, but once we get an assembly I suspect that it will be politics as we have always known them, with 566 parties competing, arguing, debating and putting forward their points. The key point about a Cabinet system is that it allows a party to stand on a platform before the electorate. At the end of an election, if that party commands a majority within the assembly, it will have the mechanisms to carry out its mandate. That provides some accountability, which the more general and diffuse local government model does not provide.
I support my right hon. Friend's amendment to limit the number of Assembly Secretaries to eight. Under the Bill as it stands, their number could be unlimited. The idea of a non-portfolio Secretary is interesting. I am surprised that 20 Members will be elected on the alternative member system without constituencies and they could have non-jobs and be Ministers, although, thinking about it more carefully, a "non-portfolio Secretary" sounds like a Chief Whip. In this new politics, I am sure that Whips will run the political structure. Patronage is part of the system and clearly goes with the alternative member system. After all, parties will appoint placemen on those lists.
The hon. Member for Wrexham (Dr. Marek) made a good point about the home civil service. Civil servants will sometimes have divided loyalties, particularly when they represent this country in European institutions. That reveals a more difficult problem—the question of political appointees. If Cabinet members feel that they do not have the whole-hearted loyalty of home civil servants, they may fill that vacuum by making more political appointments. Nothing in the Bill stops them doing that.
Most political parties would think that it is perfectly sensible to have political advisers, but it is probably inevitable that, if we have a First Secretary, we shall have a First Secretary's policy unit, press secretary and other appointments. The Government should think a little more about that. If they do not make it clear to whom people are responsible, the vacuum may be filled by political appointees from a political party, who may start to play a larger role within the assembly's political affairs than would be the case in the British political system.
Despite criticism by hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber, the British system has few political appointees or special advisers to Prime Ministers or Ministers. Most advisers are career civil servants, which is how it should be. If the assembly is not in control of its own civil servants because they form part of the home civil service, it will be tempted to make political appointments.
The hon. Member for Cardiff, West spoke about votes of confidence, which would become an important concept. There would no doubt be a vote of confidence in the First Secretary, but the fact that there are fixed four-year terms would be a problem. Elections are not always a problem, but they can solve problems if there is a logjam in a legislative assembly.

§ Mr. Letwin
Will my hon. Friend expand the point which the hon. Member for Cardiff, West (Mr. Morgan) did not quite make, and my hon. Friend has not quite made? Will he go on to say that, in this case, a strange situation could arise in respect of the Committee that had delegated authority to the Secretary in the first place? If its political position altered, for example by movement 567 across the Floor of one person, the Committee could reabsorb and de-delegate the power, thereby causing a crisis not just of confidence but of legislative authority.

§ Mr. Syms
My hon. Friend raises a good point. The issue of hon. Members leaving parties brings us back to the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Devizes about the registration of political parties. That forms part of the Bill—or the cake—that we have not seen, and is relevant to the way in which political parties operate.
The ability to dissolve is an important part of the political process. A vote of confidence may sometimes be moved and carried, and the party concerned may be unable to assemble sufficient forces to produce an alternative to run the assembly; chaos would ensue. The assembly will dispose of a good deal of money, and will provide important services for the people of Wales. We therefore need to be clear about what will happen under the new arrangements.
That brings us to the question of concordats, in their broadest sense. Will a concordat be concluded with a First Secretary—in effect, the Cabinet—and, if that First Secretary is removed, will the concordat become null and void? Or can the system involving the First Secretary and the Cabinet change, while the concordat remains for the four-year period that may have been agreed with the assembly? That is a grey area, and I think that we should hear a bit more about how the system will work.
Surely it is sensible for an administration involving a First Secretary, Assembly Secretaries and a Cabinet system to agree a concordat with the United Kingdom Government. If that administration were removed, perhaps the terms of the concordat should also go, and should not be inherited by any successor body.
7 pm
Many parts of the Bill may well need tidying up because of proposed changes, but I broadly welcome the change to a Cabinet system. It will make the assembly more accountable, and, as I said at the outset, it will provide a platform, in that the manifesto presented to the electorate will have to be pushed through an assembly explicitly rather than behind closed doors.
In local government, there is a pretence that there is a committee system in which everyone has a say, but, having served in local government for many years, I know that, in practice, the most important decisions are made in group meetings rather than in debates in the chamber. I served on authorities that the Liberal Democrats ran for many years, and theirs was not the most inclusive, democratic, open way of doing things. They had group meetings and drummed measures through, very much like everyone else.
I welcome the changes overall, but there are certain problems. We must look at the question of concordats, and at votes of confidence and how First Secretaries are removed. There is also the question of civil servants' loyalty. My sympathies are not particularly with the assembly, but, if it is to exist, it is logical for it to employ—directly or otherwise—a certain number of civil servants, even in senior posts, rather than people being seconded or working for the home civil service.

§ Mr. Gareth Thomas (Clwyd, West)
I firmly believe that the Government have no reason to be apologetic or 568 defensive about new clauses 20 to 24. Their commitment to the new clauses reflects their willingness to listen to everyone who is genuinely committed to the idea of a successful assembly—and a successful assembly, which will deliver in terms of the expectations that have arisen in Wales, will need a strong executive wing.
The Bill does not refer to a Cabinet as such; it refers to an Executive Committee. I cannot see for the life of me what all the fuss is about. In a thoughtful speech, the hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) pointed out that, in local government, decisions are normally made behind the scenes, by the ruling group. I agree, and I speak as one who served in local government before becoming a Member of Parliament.
The new clauses and amendments would introduce three important changes that would make the assembly more effective. First, they would make executive decision making more accountable, and would increase the focus—and, for that matter, political control—that can be brought to bear on civil servants. That is essential. Secondly, they would increase the efficiency and speed of decision making. That, too, is essential.
One of the criticisms of the local government system in its purest form was that it was unwieldy, and incapable of responding speedily when quick decisions were required. Is it not significant that the present Administration are embarking on a reform of local government? After all, it is generally felt that the Committee system tends to be too slow, and that it lacks transparency.
The third important aspect of the proposed changes is that the assembly's status would be enhanced. We must be careful not to ascribe too many of the trappings of power to the assembly, because this Parliament is sovereign; but, in my view, it is essential for the public to see who is responsible for each area of responsibility. There is a tension between the roles of Back Benchers and executive Assembly Secretaries. I saw force in what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, West (Mr. Morgan) and others, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Mr. Davies). We cannot allow the assembly to adopt the worst practices of Westminster, where the power of the Executive has at times been far too great. There must be a balance between the scrutinising work of Back Benchers and the role of those with executive functions.
The Bill proposes the establishment of a council in partnership with local government, a voting system, the establishment of various advisory bodies and various other measures which, I am sure, will result from greater input into the work of drawing up Standing Orders. There will have to be a proper and fair balance between the Executive and Back Benchers. There will have to be steps to safeguard the role of Back Benchers and allow them to perform independently, but I welcome the new clauses. They give the assembly the tools that it needs to complete an important job.

§ Mr. Owen Paterson (North Shropshire)
I want to pick up the business analogy made by my temporary. hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Mr. Öpik), which I found completely bizarre. No one else has suggested that we are making a major constitutional change along the lines of a change made by business. For one thing, the prospectus on the basis of which we set out 569 back in the summer had the support of only 25 per cent. of the population. I know that Labour Members do not like that, but it is something to think about. They might also remember that management consultants like the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire will go for downsizing and clearness of decision making. I am afraid that that is being lost in the whole devolution process.
Overheads and over-management are a subject on which management consultants like the hon. Gentleman concentrate. Once devolution has happened, all Ministers will be without jobs. More important, however, is the fact that the new clauses go halfway towards improving what was set out in the original Bill. There is no doubt—as my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) said so eloquently—that there are serious doubts about the attempt to turn the assembly into a local government-style institution.
We have gone halfway; the problem is that the semi-Cabinet proposed by the new clauses and amendment is almost autonomous. It constitutes yet another layer. We have a Secretary of State, we will have a mini-Cabinet, and we will have the assembly. Once power has been devolved to the mini-Cabinet, I see no mechanism whereby the assembly can claw it back and make the Cabinet accountable. I should be grateful if the Secretary of State would answer that point.
We are going all the way to devolving power to the assembly. We are told that the problem of the democratic deficit will be resolved, and that all will be green in the new Wales. I fear, however, that we shall hand power to a small group of people in the assembly, after which we shall be trapped. I see no mechanism in the new clauses and amendments, or in the Bill, whereby the power can be returned. All that Opposition Members are trying to achieve will be lost.
I agree with the right hon. Member for Llanelli (Mr. Davies) that we have gone halfway from a semi-local government system to a Cabinet system, but not all the way. I ask Labour Members not to keep knocking the Cabinet system. It has evolved over many centuries, and it works well. What are their criticisms of such a system, when it is set up properly? They are right to criticise the new clauses and amendments, because they do not go far enough. The Cabinet will not be accountable to the assembly.

§ Mr. Letwin
Does my hon. Friend agree that, despite the fact that hon. Members have started from different positions in respect of what they would prefer, it has been remarkable that, to all intents and purposes, there has been a cross-party tripartite agreement between almost all the Secretary of State's Back Benchers—with one notable exception—the leader of Plaid Cymru and the Conservative party, that, if the new clauses are to be accepted, there also need to be some checks? The one party that takes a different view is the Liberal Democrat party, which is left stranded on an island with the Secretary of State.

§ Mr. Paterson
The Liberal Democrats are basically giving management advice. They are concerned about transport systems and the railway. I agree with my hon. Friend that there is now virtual cross-party unanimity that 570 the matter should be looked at again, possibly in another place. Of course, given the way that the Secretary of State has been behaving this week, perhaps he will bounce us with yet more amendments tomorrow. I do not think that the new clauses and amendments in this group will work. The right hon. Gentleman is on the right track, but, when he replies to the debate, I want him to give me a quick answer on how the mini-Cabinet will be accountable back to the assembly, and whether he has any further plans in this regard.

§ Mr. Julie Morgan
I want to speak to amendment (d), in my name. Most of the points that I wanted to make have already been made. My main purpose in tabling the amendment was to draw attention to the dangers of concentrating too much power in the hands of one person, by allowing the First Secretary to appoint the Secretaries who will be members of the Executive Committee without reference to the rest of the assembly.
During the devolution campaign, we campaigned on open government and transparency in decision making. There is a danger that the public could perceive power to have shifted to a selected group chosen by the First Secretary, rather than being vested in the assembly. It is the system that operates in Westminster, but that system has built up over many centuries. It is not what we want slavishly to follow in the Welsh assembly. We are starting with a blank sheet, so we should have something unique to Wales, not something that apes another system.
I strongly believe that there should be as little patronage as possible, because we all know that patronage often leads to the abuse of patronage. We have seen that in the development of the quango state in Wales over the past 18 years. The power to hire and fire should not be uncontrolled. There must be constraints so that the Executive—the quasi-Cabinet—will not be dependent on and built around just one person. Allowing the assembly to endorse the Secretaries—the members of the Executive Committee—would ensure that a concentration of power would not be given to one person. He or she should not be allowed to choose those members. There may be a danger that too much power will be concentrated in the Executive, which may result in Back-Bench Members of the Assembly being dependent on the good will of the First Secretary and the Secretaries, which would be unsatisfactory.
It is important that the Committees are involved in policy making, and I welcome the discretion that the assembly is being given. We want as inclusive a system as possible. There is an issue surrounding Cabinet systems operating in secret. There should be as little divide as possible between the Secretaries and the Members. Only 60 Members make a small group to operate a Cabinet system.
It is important how the system will appear to the outside world. We are trying to develop a new model, and having a partnership council with local government, business and the voluntary sector will help the assembly to be open and accountable. However, many voluntary organisations are uneasy about the delegation of considerable power to the Secretaries over the heads of the Committees. It is important that the Committees and the Secretaries work together in an effective way.
As has been said, it is possible that some members of the Executive may not be linked to the subject Committees. In that case, it is even more important that 571 they are endorsed and accepted by the whole assembly. Obviously, the Assembly Secretaries will have some delegated authority, but accountability to their respective Committees should be built in. I welcome the fact that the assembly will be given the discretion to work that out.
There may be some suspicion about the move to a Cabinet system because, in some ways, that runs counter to the spirit of accountable democracy. Having a democratic layer, such as that suggested in my amendment, would be more in the spirit of the new politics that we hope to achieve in Wales.

§ Mr. Evans
I am grateful for this opportunity to speak so soon after my last piece of spellbinding oratory at 6.15 this morning, when I had the Adjournment debate. One piece of advice that I will give the Secretary of State is that, if the assembly decides to have Adjournment debates, they should start the day, not end it. [Interruption.] It is another piece of constructive advice from the Conservative party. That is how we want to continue.
We welcome the Government new clauses. We were not trying to be destructive in our attempt to get more time to debate all the new clauses and amendments. However, we are not being given that opportunity, so we will try to improve the Bill as much as we can in the two days at our disposal, before it goes to the other place.
We feel that the Secretary of State has listened to us. [Interruption.] Perhaps only a little bit, but that is a start—late in the day though it may be. We are debating changes that we and other political parties have been seeking and on which the right hon. Gentleman's advisory group gave him guidance. There is a lot of popular support for the changes, although we have heard some reservations expressed in the Chamber today. The fact that there has been such unanimity across the parties is sufficient reason for us to question some of the consequences of the new clauses, which involve major changes.

§ Mr. Grieve
I appreciate my hon. Friend's point, but is it not a most depressing state of affairs? However suspicious we Conservatives may be of the whole proposal for Welsh devolution, at least it has been possible for us to share, albeit in a mild way and with some cynicism, the Utopianism of some of the proposals. Yet we are now being asked to consider amendments that will reverse all that and, in its place, we are being asked to accept something that will be far worse.

§ Mr. Evans
I am grateful for my hon. Friend's remarks. The debate has shown that there will be a great deal of theorising about what will constitute the workings of the assembly. As the right hon. Member for Llanelli (Mr. Davies) said earlier, the assembly will start to devise its own trappings and systems, for good or for ill. It will start to mirror Westminster or somewhere else—but I suspect Westminster.
I was reading in the business section of The Western Mail the view that one of the plagues of Westminster is the lobby system—yet a new lobbying group is being launched in Wales, led by Leighton Andrews and Andrew Davies, who are known to the Secretary of State. The newspaper quotes Leighton Andrews as saying: 572 There are some good generalist PR companies in Wales but they neither have the contacts nor the experience of the new Welsh political situation to be able to advise on public affairs. We are already seeing in Wales something that many people in Westminster deride. They think that the lobby groups have too much power. A group is starting up in Wales before the first brick of the assembly is laid.

§ Mr. Denzil Davies
It will be more worth while to lobby the Welsh assembly, because the people being lobbied will have money to distribute.

§ Mr. Evans
I am sure that that has not been lost on Leighton Andrews and Andrew Davies. I suspect that it is one of the reasons why they have not only set themselves up but managed to secure positive coverage on the front page of the Western Mail business section.
We asked about the financial aspects of the changes, and I rather regretted the fact that the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Mr. Öpik) said that it did not really matter whether the figure was a couple of per cent. below or a couple of per cent. above. We are talking large sums of money, and we want to seek good value for the people of Wales in the setting up of the assembly, as well as in its running costs, to ensure that money is not being diverted away from front-line services and lost in bureaucracy. We want to get all that as right as we can.
I know that the Secretary of State will want to answer some of the questions asked by my right hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) about how the new Cabinet-style system will work. The analogy with a barking duck or a quacking dog was used, and we should like to know exactly what the system will be like, although we acknowledge the fact that it will evolve.
My hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) mentioned a Whip system. I am sure that, although that is not on the face of the Bill, such a system will come about, and that persuasion and patronage will be exercised by the Whips.
We have tabled several amendments about the number of Assembly Secretaries. As the assembly will consist of only 60 Members, we think that eight Secretaries is the right number. With the First Secretary, that will mean that, with 60 Members, there will be nine Secretaries altogether. I hope that the Secretary of State will look favourably on that idea, although we accept that the assembly will be able to make changes if a two-thirds majority can be secured.
Before I finish, I must ask the Secretary of State one or two questions. One is about the relationship between the First Secretary, the Assembly Secretaries and the assembly itself. Will the right hon. Gentleman say more about that, and also about the relationship between those three and the Secretary of State—unless, of course, the Secretary of State and the First Secretary will be the same person.
The right hon. Gentleman need not worry; I shall not ask whether he will stand for the assembly. I understand that, after the way in which he performed over the siting of the assembly, he has not made up his mind.

§ Mr. Leigh
Will my hon. Friend give way?

§ Mr. Evans
No, I cannot, because I must bring my speech to an end.
573 Will the Secretary of State say something about our amendments on the relationships involving the Select Committees, and tell us whether we can go down the route suggested? I have served on three Select Committees since becoming a Member of Parliament, and they are powerful bodies. We want to ensure that the parallel organisations in Wales grow up, serve the assembly well and become a powerful influence for good.
Will the Secretary of State accept the fact that our suggestions, both now and in the past, have been right for the assembly, but also that there are great reservations about the changes that he has made? We want to be clear about what will happen when the assembly adopts the changes—although we know that they may not represent the final format, and that the assembly may want to make its own improvements.
The Secretary of State has started to listen, and he still has another day and a half to accept some of our amendments.

§ Mr. Ron Davies
If I had to listen to many more speeches like that, I could be persuaded not to spend my time listening. However, I welcome the strong support that has been shown for our proposals by the right hon. Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) and by the Plaid Cymru and Liberal Democrat spokesmen.
I shall make clear at the outset a point that I tried to develop in the opening part of the debate: we are not talking about a choice between either a local government system or a Cabinet system, but about a new political institution that must be built by drawing the best from both local government and central Government practices. We shall have the best of a Cabinet system and a Westminster system, as well as the best of a local government system.
I believe that the new political institution that we are creating will be able to establish the principles of inclusivity and collective decision making, while maintaining clear lines of accountability and effective decision making. That is what we are trying to achieve, and I have no doubt that our amendments will achieve it.
Many separate and sometimes conflicting amendments have been tabled, and I shall try to deal with as many as I can during the limited time left to me. Three separate sets of amendments were tabled to new clause 20. Amendment (c) would make the First Secretary's appointments of individual Assembly Secretaries subject to the approval of the subject Committees of which they will become members.
Amendment (d) would make each appointment of an Assembly Secretary subject to ratification by the assembly as a whole. Amendments (a) and (b) would remove the ability of the First Secretary to appoint a limited number of non-portfolio members of the Executive Committee, and require him or her to appoint a financial secretary and a business manager. They would also place on the face of the Bill a limit of eight on the maximum number of Assembly Secretaries whom the First Secretary could appoint.
I understand the motivation behind amendments (c) and (d). I am not, however, persuaded to accept them. The concern is that, under the Government's amendments, 574 there would be excessive powers of patronage for the First Secretary in respect of appointments to the Executive Committee. However, I remind the House, especially my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, West (Mr. Morgan), that the First Secretary's power is not unconstrained. The assembly elects the First Secretary, and it will always be open to it to replace the First Secretary with another appointee if it is clear that the First Secretary's proposed appointments or other actions are inappropriate.
Amendment (c) may reveal a concern that it will not be easy for a subject Committee to work with a particular individual who has been appointed as the Assembly Secretary for that policy area. I understand that argument, but I do not accept it. It will be incumbent on the First Secretary to make appointments which will command general respect in the assembly, and it will be incumbent on those appointed to work with their subject committees in a constructive and positive way. That will form an important part of the accountability pressures to which they will be subject. That point was raised by the right hon. Member for Caernarfon (Mr. Wigley).
Clearly, if an individual Assembly Secretary's working relationship with his or her subject committee breaks down, that would be likely to constitute good grounds for replacing that Secretary with someone more capable of establishing a proper partnership with the Committee. The precise nature of the relationship between the Assembly Secretary and the subject Committee will have to develop as the assembly is elected and its internal procedures develop.
The Government are not persuaded that it would be sensible to accept amendments (a) and (b). In fact, we are surprised at the proposal that the First Secretary should be put under a legal duty to make two specific appointments, of a financial secretary and a business manager, when those roles are not defined, which makes the amendments defective. I accept that there may be a case for such appointments—but it is hardly consistent with the concept of a Cabinet system that the First Secretary's choice of offices to be filled should be constrained in that way as a matter of law. We are not persuaded by that idea.
The amendments tabled to new clauses 21 and 22 are concerned with the names of the Executive Committee and the subject Committees. As far as nomenclature is concerned, it will already be possible under the Government's proposals for the assembly to designate the Executive Committee as the assembly Cabinet, and call the subject Committees Select Committees, if it wishes to do so; those names can appear in Standing Orders. The more important point, however, is what the Committees will do and how they will operate, which I have already dealt with in introducing new clauses 20 to 24.
New clause 24 makes provision for the delegation of functions to the assembly's staff. It therefore extends to the assembly the application of the Carltona principle, in accordance with which it is legally permissible for a duly authorised civil servant in a central Government Department to act on behalf of his or her Minister in the performance of statutory functions. Decisions made by planning inspectors provide one example of functions being performed by officials on behalf of Ministers; another example is the confirmation of byelaws.
575 Amendments (a) to (h) to new clause 24 would prevent the assembly from delegating any "functions" to staff, but would limit delegation to "administrative duties"—a point that was made by the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Mr. Öpik).

§ Mr. Rowlands
Will my right hon. Friend give way?

§ Mr. Davies
I have too many points to reply to.
The Government believe that the assembly should be able to take advantage of the Carltona principle if it wishes, and new clause 24 as drafted permits that. The clause is purely facilitative—there is no requirement to delegate any function to staff—and its main purpose is to ensure that, if such delegation does take place, it is done in a manner compatible with the permanent secretary's overall responsibilities for the management of the staff.
New clause 25 proposes three categories of assembly staff—parliamentary staff, political staff and executive staff. All, it appears, would be civil servants. New clause 29 would require the Minister responsible for the civil service to consult the assembly on codes of practice and procedure applicable to assembly staff who are civil servants. Amendments Nos. 231 to 233 envisage the appointment of not more than 10 assembly officers, whose functions are not described in the amendments but who certainly would not be civil servants.
Finally, new clauses 32 and 33 and new schedule 1 envisage the creation of a Welsh Assembly Corporate Body with the powers to hold property, employ staff and enter into contracts. To make room for that, the assembly would be deprived by amendment No. 250 of its Corporate Body status and its legal status allowed to float in the void. Therefore, that makes the amendment unacceptable.
The amendments and new clauses have a common theme—the position of the assembly staff. Under the Bill, they are to be civil servants. That follows logically from the executive character of the assembly and the fact that it will perform its functions on behalf of the Crown.
The position of assembly staff, and the support which will be provided for Assembly Members, is being considered by my assembly advisory group. The statutory assembly's staff will be civil servants, operating to the highest standards of honesty, integrity and political impartiality which apply throughout the United Kingdom. They will have to be organised to support Assembly Members in the carrying out of their various and different roles. Most of the staff will work in support of the Assembly Secretaries—
It being half-past Seven o'clock, MR. DEPUTY SPEAKER, pursuant to the Order [15 January] and the Resolution [this day], put forthwith the Question already proposed from the Chair.
Clause read a Second time, and added to the Bill.
MR. DEPUTY SPEAKER then proceeded to put forthwith the Questions necessary for the disposal of the business to be concluded at that hour.