Llywydd, UK Government Ministers are today laying amendments to the EU withdrawal Bill in the House of Lords that reflect an inter-governmental agreement that has also been published this morning. Taken together, these are sufficient to enable Welsh Ministers to recommend that the National Assembly gives its legislative consent to the Bill in a motion that we will debate next month. This should also pave the way for the UK Government to withdraw its reference of our Law Derived from the European Union (Wales) Bill to the Supreme Court, and for the Government here to initiate a process to repeal that Bill, which, as Members will recall, was always intended as a backstop in the event that these negotiations did not reach a satisfactory outcome.

I would like to explain why the Government believes that the agreement that we have reached provides sufficient protection for our devolution settlement and allows us to support the UK Bill. In doing so, I want to acknowledge the significant contribution made by the Scottish Brexit Minister, Michael Russell, and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, in the work we have carried out together on these matters.

Llywydd, there are a series of ways in which the agreement represents a major advance over the original proposals. Members will recall that, at its most fundamental, the disagreement was about the principle of powers currently exercised through a common European Union rulebook, and whether the UK Government had a unilateral right to decide where those powers should rest the other side of Brexit. The original clause 11 diverted all these powers to Westminster. We argued that powers in devolved areas belong here, in the National Assembly. Today’s amendment reverses the UK Government’s original position. It creates a default position in which powers over devolved policy lie with the National Assembly, as they have done since 1999. Now, we recognise that, without the rulebook provided by EU legislation, there is a need for UK-wide frameworks in specific areas to avoid disruption to the UK’s own internal market. Some of these UK frameworks will be underpinned by legislation and will be subject to a new, temporary, constraint, which simply ensures continuation of current common arrangements. Llywydd, this is clearly much more compatible with the reserved-powers model of devolution.