—European jurisprudence, but I'm sure that the Counsel General will agree, because it's mentioned in the statement itself that codification can also occur, of course, in common law jurisdictions, such as the United States and Canada, and merely making sense of the disorganised, uncontrolled development of a series of different statutes or Orders and consolidating them into one single unit that can be more easily accessed is not quite the same thing as moving in the direction of a sort of teleological approach, such as is found in European law jurisdictions.

I have myself been a consolidator at times, as the editor of Butterworths' Land Development Encyclopaedia more years ago now than I care to remember, and I had annually to update any statutes or statutory instruments that were produced in the year and put them within the confines of one book, removing what had been made redundant and inserting the new measures, and this is an entirely benign process, which doesn't necessarily mean any change in the corpus of law itself. Nobody, rationally, could object to what the Counsel General said was the aim, which is to make law accessible, to enable citizens to understand their rights and responsibilities under the law.

One of the big problems with the law today, of course, is the extent to which it has grown, year in and year out. When I was, many, many years ago, a tax practitioner, Butterworths published annually a tax code. In 1965, it was 750 pages; it's now 17,000 pages and has been increasing year in and year out. The more law there is on the statute book in various forms, the more inaccessible, inevitably, it becomes and the more specialist it becomes. But it is vitally important that we should make it as easy as possible to navigate around these various tributaries. So, I welcome this exercise.

Nobody could object to a consultation. Whether this leads to the grander enterprise of creating a separate jurisdiction for Wales is another matter altogether, although I've had a couple of very interesting conversations already with Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd about this, and he does make some very important points about the practicalities of the law within Wales developing sufficiently well to serve people in a practical sense by merely such nuts and bolts issues as developing a system of forms, for example. And that cannot easily be done within a legal system that is currently directed and controlled from London. So, I do see this as a benign development.

I am concerned about the possibility of an interpretation Act for Wales possibly making it more difficult to understand the law than easier, to the extent that it might be that the interpretation Act itself might be interpreted as conflicting with whatever measure might be in force in England. I know that there are interpretation Acts in Scotland, and this may not be an insuperable difficulty, but it is vitally important that as the law in Wales inevitably diverges from the law of England—and the devolution process and, particularly, leaving the EU is going to accelerate this and expand this process—we should, at least in interpretation terms, so far as we can, align both the canons of interpretation and the way in which they operate in a way that is unified throughout the United Kingdom. Otherwise, that way, even greater confusion lies. So, I hope that the Counsel General can at least on that point satisfy me in the course of his response today.