In the three minutes I have, I rise to support this motion. I do so because this is probably a motion on what may be the most important constitutional piece of legislation that we can bring to this Assembly. I don't have time to go into detail, so I'll sum up very quickly: there are two major constitutional issues that are coming before the House of Lords. One is the upholding of the Sewel convention, and where the House of Lords effectively acts as a constitutional wing of Parliament, that it will not legislate in the absence of a legislative consent motion from this Assembly, which, at the moment, it seems that it is impossible for us to give in the light of the Bill. And the second one is the actual support of the devolution statutes, which would require, in those areas that Parliament has already devolved, the consent of this Chamber.

The Bill in its current form—let's be very clear, it is a continuity Bill of its own, but it's a continuity Bill for the British state and one that also seeks a recentralisation of the British state. I think that, in the absence of any clear amendments from the UK Government to accept the devolution statutes and the principles that underline them about decentralisation of power, and in the absence of any guarantee on financial autonomy for this Chamber—because that's another very important area that we mustn't forget to it, the financial autonomy of the Welsh budget, which the withdrawal Bill also seeks to undermine—that means that the position is totally unacceptable. It is lamentable that the UK Government has failed, at every stage, to either engage with or to properly participate with this Government in the actual drafting of a proper constitutional settlement within the withdrawal Bill.

There is no constitutional logic to the UK Government's position, because just about every parliamentary committee and every Assembly committee that has considered the constitutional position recognises that the starting point of the UK Government is fundamentally wrong. For that reason, we are left, in the absence of any last-minute major constitutional changes by the UK Government, with the position of 'What do we do?' We can either wait and see whether the withdrawal Bill goes through in whatever format—and that isn't a guarantee by any stretch in any event—or we can say, ourselves, 'It is time for us to assert what is the correct constitutional position of this Assembly and to have that on the statute books', so that, when the Lords consider this matter, they are not just considering the issue of legislative consent and Sewel and upholding those constitutional conventions, they're also considering legislation we have passed with Royal Assent that properly sets out what the constitutional powers and authority of this Assembly are. Thank you.