Part of 2. 2. Questions to the Counsel General – in the Senedd at 2:29 pm on 11 October 2017.
The first point is that you are totally wrong in terms of the position that the Supreme Court adopted. That was a position that we put forward and that was actually accepted by the Supreme Court, so there was no change there. It has never been our case or our argument that the Sewel convention is justiciable. The fact is that, under the Wales Act 2017, the Sewel Convention is put into statute—that is, it’s on the face of the Bill—but that does not per se make it justiciable. It is certainly the case that the issue of the Sewel convention, certainly post Brexit and post further constitutional reform, actually needs to be reviewed, because there is a very strong argument that it should be a justiciable convention. But in terms of what we argued, and in terms of what the Supreme Court held, there has been total consistency there and there is total agreement between the current constitutional analyses.