5. Statement by the First Minister: Constitutional Policy

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:16 pm on 15 October 2019.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 4:16, 15 October 2019

Llywydd, I thank Mick Antoniw for those comments. He's right, of course: it is not just the Welsh and, indeed, the Scottish Governments who are frustrated by our inability to get responses out of the UK Government. The House of Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee called for a clear statement from the UK Government on its policy for the union, and in September last year, 2018, the UK Government committed to producing such a statement, and they and we are still waiting for it.

I completely agree with what Mick Antoniw said that there's a real richness of debate and contribution to be found in reports both of committees here and in the House of Commons, and indeed in the House of Lords. A great deal of interesting stuff written there, and we are all struggling in a way to get purchase on a UK Government, as I often think of it, overwhelmed by Brexit and just unable to find any space—thinking space, time space, political, capital space—to grapple with the issues that we've been talking about this afternoon.

Mick said, 'How can we make change happen?' Well, I'm afraid that the question might be slightly different to that. Change is going to happen. Change is happening all around us. Leaving the European Union introduces enormous amounts of change. It's not how change should happen in the sense of, 'Should there be change?', but, 'How do we get a grip of change so that we are in charge of change, rather than being driven along by it and faced by its consequences without having made the necessary effort to make the change happen in the way that we have talked about in different ways across the Chamber?'

The Speaker's conference idea is, of course, a very interesting one. It started its work exactly 100 years ago this autumn. When the proposition of a Speaker's conference on devolution was voted for on the floor of the House of Commons, Wales was the only part of the United Kingdom where not a single Welsh Member voted against setting up that Speaker's conference. And as some Members here will know, when it reported, it advocated a strictly federal approach to the United Kingdom and even solved the English question in its own time as well. So, the precedent in terms of the effectiveness of the conference is not great, but in terms of some of the richness of its debate, it is worth revisiting, and I'm agnostic about how to get the conversation going. We suggested a constitutional convention. If a Speaker's conference could be got off the ground in a different way and could do the sort of engagement that we've talked about, I'd have no trouble with that at all.