LORDS AMENDMENTS (Hansard, 24 July 1978)

§ Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH
My Lords, I beg to move that this House 684 doth not insist on their Amendments Nos. 36 to 41 to which the Commons have disagreed for the Reason numbered 42. These Amendments would provide that the Secretary of State shall fix by order the salaries and allowances of Assembly Members and make provision by order for the payment of pensions et cetera to former Members. The orders are to be subject to Affirmative Resolution by the House of Commons. The Government, as has been made clear, are opposed to these Amendments. We accept that the Government will have to set the initial level of salaries before the first election to enable potential candidates to know their likely level of remuneration. Thereafter the level of salaries should, in our view, be determined by the Assembly itself in the light of their assessment of the workload of Members. This House wrote similar Amendments into the Scotland Bill. The other place rejected these Amendments and those to the Scotland Bill decisively, by majorities of 29 in the case of Wales and 22 in the case of Scotland. Last week this House accepted the Reason given by the other place for disagreeing to the Amendments to the Scotland Bill without a Division, and the Government trust that they will similarly accept the Commons Reason for disagreeing to the present Amendments to the Wales Bill. I beg to move.

§ Lord ELTON
My Lords, these Amendments provided that the Welsh Assembly should not decide for themselves how much they should pay themselves and how generous their pensions should be, and said that Parliament should take that decision for them. Here we have another matter in which the Welsh public has a very great and understandable interest. Some of them, in fact a great many of them, do not trust the Assemblymen to be fair and moderate in deciding how much they shall earn or how much work they should do to earn it, and in deciding what pensions they should be paid and how long they should have to serve in order to qualify for them. It is a very understandable view, is it not?—especially when the whole country is feeling that official 685 regulation of incomes has gone on for a very long time.
However, it is the Welsh who are advancing that argument, the argument that the temptation for the Welsh Assemblymen to over-reward themselves will be dangerously strong. We advanced a different one, be it noted. It is the argument that if they do not succumb to that temptation, and Her Majesty's Government are anxious to persuade the Welsh public that they will not, then they will be in a difficulty of an opposite kind, the difficulty in which Members of Parliament constantly find themselves, the difficulty of never arriving at a point in time when it is expedient, for reasons of example and policy, to award themselves a pay rise—a sort of built-in poverty trap, or at least a build-in hard lying trap from which they can never quite climb out. That was the difficulty from which we tried to save them.
To both these arguments the Government, and indeed the Commons, if not deaf, are at least mute. The Government may or may not have stopped their ears, but they have certainly stopped their mouths. This really is an extraordinary circumstance. We have the Lord President of the Council saying in a speech in Wales that the Lords Amendments are a denial of democracy in what I understand he has recently said he would like in any case to be a republic, and speaking of your Lordships' Amendments as though they should be considered with all the attention to be given the amendments drafted by the Brewers' Association to the terms of the Sunday opening laws, as I recall. Then we have immediately after that two dramatic ways in which the Government show the level of importance they attach to these democratic processes. The first is the imposition of the timetable motion itself, which secured the result that important matters such as this should not be discussed by the Commons at all. The second was the hour at which that Motion was itself timed to take place; it was called at twenty-nine minutes to one on the morning of Wednesday last week, and one hour only was allocated to it. To the media those are the dead watches of the night.
I said earlier that we on this side of the House were not happy about the way 686 this Bill is being run in this place, and it is interesting and illuminating that honourable friends of noble Lords opposite in another place are even less happy, and Welsh ones at that. Might I quote the Labour Welsh Member for Bedwellty in that debate. He said: We are faced with an abbreviated guillotine on a runt of a Bill … Those were his words. Later he said: … at nine minutes past one in the morning we are in the course of a one-hour debate on a guillotine that is substantially shorter than the one proposed for the Scotland Bill."—[Official Report, Commons, 18/7/78; col. 448.]

§ Lord HUGHES
My Lords, is not the noble Lord, Lord Elton, out of order in quoting what was said by a Member of another place who is not a Minister?

§ Lord ELTON
My Lords, I am vastly obliged to the noble Lord for putting me in order when I had inadvertently strayed out of it. I apologise to the House. I will, however, make one argument of my own, and that is this, The material in the Wales Bill, as is now recognised by the staff of this House and many Members of it, is more complex than that in the Scotland Bill, and yet less time is being given to it. Those two circumstances seem to me to put a very bad light on the weight of importance which the Government give to the consideration of the Wales Bill.
On another point of interest, could the noble Lord perhaps tell us how much the sum in view will be, because the figure will have to be published before the referendum, presumably, so that people will know whether they wish to serve in such a body and whether they wish therefore to go out and proselytise for it. The majority in another place was a comfortable one. I think the arguments I gave for not pursuing the last Amendment further apply also to this one. In renewing my apology to the House for introducing material which I should not have introduced, I will leave the matter to rest where it is.

§ Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH
My Lords, I do not want to add very much, but in answer to the direct question which the noble Lord has asked me, I must say that up to now no decision has been made on this particular matter.