But this is first and foremost a question of social justice. Making the law accessible is vital to enable citizens to understand their rights and responsibilities under the law—something that has become increasingly important since repeated cuts have been made to legal aid and to other services designed to advise those in need of assistance or representation. 

We are the custodians of the Welsh statute book, made up not only of the laws made by this Assembly and the Welsh Ministers, but also those pre-devolution laws that we have inherited. That element of the statute book, in particular, is, frankly, not in a good state. In recent decades, legislation has been allowed to proliferate without pausing to fully rationalise and integrate what is new with what had gone before.

A statute book of thousands of Acts and statutory instruments has long been difficult to navigate, but Welsh legislation is even more inaccessible due to our highly complex system of devolution and the absence—because of the single England and Wales legal jurisdiction—of a formal body of distinct Welsh law. It is difficult for the people of Wales to know what the law means and to understand who is responsible for what. That undermines democratic accountability.

So, this Government is committed to a systemic, ongoing and comprehensive consolidation of legislation within our competence, and the organisation of that law into subject-specific codes. Whilst this will be groundbreaking in the UK, we will be following similar precedents set across common-law jurisdictions. Australia and Canada, for example, have routinely consolidated their legislation since the beginning of the twentieth century, after inheriting laws from the UK Parliament in not dissimilar circumstances. The United States went a step further and created a code of law in 1926 that has been maintained ever since.

But we need not only look afar for examples of good practice. The laws of Hywel Dda were organised in codes, and the lawyers of the day had access to those laws in one book. So, codification is an important part of our legal tradition, and our task now is to make sure it's a part of our legal future. We in Wales have done this before, and I am determined that we will do it again.

Our vision for making the Welsh law more accessible is not confined simply to rationalising legislation—significant a task though that is. A well-ordered and clearly drafted statute book must also be effectively published, and supplementary material is often needed to set out the context and fully explain the practical effect of the law. For this reason, further improvements to the legislation.gov.uk website, operated by the National Archives, and to the Cyfraith Cymru—Law Wales website are intended to form part of the programme.

Making bespoke, bilingual provision about how our legislation should be interpreted is also part of our wider ambition to make Welsh law more accessible. An Interpretation Act was first enacted by the UK Parliament in 1850, and this practice has been replicated in common-law jurisdictions across the world, including in Scotland and Northern Ireland.