4. Statement by the Minister for Housing and Local Government: The Local Government and Elections (Wales) Bill

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:34 pm on 19 November 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 3:34, 19 November 2019

I won't rehearse the voting issues either. In terms of the issue around when a local authority, a principal council, decides that the voting system should be changed, and that STV would better suit the need of the local people, they need to agree the change by a two-thirds majority of council seats, and the new system has to stay in place for at least two electoral cycles, for the reasons that Mark Reckless outlined. And then it would have to go through the process again to change it back, if it wanted to. So, there's a system in place that allows it both to change it and to change it back. And that's two full electoral cycles—so 10 years, effectively—in between them. And the reason for that is that we don't want the chopping and changing, and we also want to have—if the system goes into effect, we want to allow it to bed in and make sure it has a second electoral cycle. In order to do that, the local authority would have to work with the local boundary commission in order to change all of its wards to multi-member wards. So, there's a process set out in the Bill in order to facilitate that and to work with the commission. And, yes, that's work for the commission, but we are in the process of redoing the entire boundary system at the moment, and, by the time this Assembly ends, they will have completed that process and be ready to start the next process in any event. 

In terms of the general power of competence, the reason that we're doing it now is because it sits alongside the rearrangement of the way that we do performance management for local authorities here in Wales. So, they are allowed to have the power of general competence—it's something I've personally believed in for a very long time—but it sits alongside the self-improving peer review mechanism, and I think both are needed for local authorities to be able to take best advantage of it, and that's the reason why we didn't do it at the time, because we didn't have that system in place.

And, in terms of the corporate joint committees, they have to have the corporate joint committees for the four areas of work outlined in the Bill, which I set out in my statement, and then a local authority or local authorities in the area can add anything else to it that they wish to do. Some of them will choose to change their arrangements, because it will suit them better. Others will choose to stick with the arrangements they have in place, and we are not imposing any kind of one-size-fits-all on Wales. So, the committees will have to exist for the four mandatory areas in the Bill; otherwise, the local authority's entirely empowered to add or not, as it sees fit.