Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:05 pm on 22 January 2019.
I thank the Member for those, and, Dirprwy Lywydd, just to say again, as we've said previously here, that reports from Assembly committees, and particularly the committee that David Rees chairs, have been genuinely influential in our thinking and have allowed this National Assembly to be part of a wider set of relationships with other legislatures, making sure that things that matter here in Wales are shared with our counterparts at Westminster, Scotland and, hopefully in time, with the Northern Ireland Assembly as well.
David Rees asked me whether we have prioritised our legislation. Yes, we have. That has led to some challenging conversations with the Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee, for example, about whether we are bringing sufficient material for scrutiny in front of the Assembly, whether we are over-relying on taking legislation through Westminster. But that is a prioritising exercise; it was trying to make sure that the time of the Assembly, which will be scarce, is devoted to those legislative changes that have a genuine policy impact, and allowing legislation to be taken through at Westminster, where it is simply technical in nature or has no policy change from our current position.
On capacity, we are stretched, Dirprwy Lywydd. That is the truth: we are stretched. We don't have an infinite army of people working for the Welsh Government that we can redeploy to deal with the urgency of Brexit. What we are having to do is to move people from other important work in order to do even more urgent and important work in the Brexit field. And while we do have some welcome funding from the UK Government to allow us to temporarily employ people to deal with the Brexit impact, all that takes time as well. The skills you are looking for are not always skills that are automatically in easy supply.
David Rees is absolutely right, Dirprwy Lywydd, in his last point about the technical notices. They were very short on solutions and very long on telling us that solutions were being looked at, were being worked on, were being explored, were being discussed, but very seldom delivered. Where does this all get us? It gets us to the position that Dr Liam Fox had to admit to only in the last few days—that the 40 trade deals that he said would be the easiest to negotiate in the history of trade deals—. I remember hearing him once say that all it would take would be a bottle of Tipp-Ex, where we would be Tipp-Exing out the initials 'EU' and inking in the initials 'UK', and that's all it would take. Not a single one of those deals will be ready on the day that we leave the European Union.