3. Statement by the First Minister: Report of the Commission on Justice in Wales

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:28 pm on 5 November 2019.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 3:28, 5 November 2019

Llywydd, I thank the Member for his very engaged response to the report. He started by pointing to 'the jagged edge' that the report points to between responsibilities that we already exercise here in Wales and on which effective operation of the justice system depends. While there will always be, wherever you draw the line, some jagged edges, I think the report does a very convincing job of showing how that current system has those jagged edges embedded into the middle of the way that it operates, and how you can redesign that so they become peripheral to the way that the system operates rather than constant barriers right in the midst of it. I entirely agree with him that the report is of significance far beyond Wales. The cuts to legal aid, the cuts to the court service, the way the probation service was privatised and lost the confidence of the courts in the process, all of those are things that are true not just for Wales but for England as well.

I thank Mark Reckless for what he suggested in relation to apprenticeships, and how they might be designed. We'll look carefully at that. Every now and then, Llywydd, in reading the report, which took up quite a bit of my half-term, I found myself at the edge of my own technical grasp of some of the issues with which it deals. As far as the Supreme Court is concerned, as I understood it, the court report suggests that there should be a Welsh judge formally appointed to the Supreme Court, and Mark Reckless's points—and I was trying to make sure I was following them—were not to dissent from that outcome, but to ask us to look carefully at what the report says about the method by which that might be brought about. And the Counsel General was sitting here listening carefully to that, and we'll make sure that we explore those points in the detail that they deserve.