6. Statement by the Chair of the Committee on Assembly Electoral Reform: An update on the work of the Committee

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:15 pm on 8 January 2020.

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Photo of Dawn Bowden Dawn Bowden Labour 4:15, 8 January 2020

It's okay, I was waiting for the questions, and they were very supportive statements, so thank you both for that. Can I just deal, firstly, with the point that Delyth Jewell raised about the lack of a Conservative Member on the committee? I think I too and other members of the committee would very much welcome the Conservative Party reviewing their position on that. I have had conversations with the leader of the Conservative group, and I know that the Conservative group are very keen to be involved in the work of the committee, and it's certainly the view of the committee that we need to reach out to all political parties, even those that are not on the committee and to seek their views, and we will be looking to do that. But, of course, the committee can change its membership at any time, and if the Conservatives do come forward and offer somebody up to sit on the committee and work with us, then I believe the Business Committee can look at that and can make recommendations to this Assembly, and we can take an additional member on board, so I very much hope that will happen.

The other issues that have been picked up are the issues of capacity, diversity and scrutiny. Certainly, on capacity, we've already had, as was described by David Rowlands, a round-table discussion with some initial stakeholders, and these were primarily third-party organisations and the media that work with the Assembly very closely, and they were able to give us their observations about how they work with the Assembly. I thought what was interesting about that was how they were able to contrast and compare how they can interact with MPs in Westminster and how they are unable to interact with us in the same way, because of our lack of capacity, our lack of numbers, our availability and so on, and the need for us to be able to specialise in particular areas.

Again, they referenced the fact that MPs quite often only sit on one committee, and I think, Llywydd, when you gave evidence, you mentioned the fact that something like 100 MPs don't sit on any committees. So, that does give the MPs much more scope to be able to specialise, to concentrate on particular areas, that we as AMs don't. I think one of the things that have come across loud and clear in the information that we've received so far is that, to enable us to scrutinise more effectively—and that is, after all, what this Assembly should be here to do, to scrutinise the Government—we need to have the capacity to be able to do that.

Another point that came out of those discussions that I think is worthy of flagging up here was that we constantly talk about having 60 Members, but, in actual fact, we've really got about 45, because 15 are in Government, and so, we really only have 45 Members then, who are available for committee work, Commission work and scrutiny work. So, we need to look at it in that context.

But I think one of the key aspects for us, and I think all of us have identified that, is that we have a huge amount of work to do with the public. That will be very, very important for us in terms of the outward-looking approach of the committee, how we engage with members of the public, how we explain to them what this place does, and how they can influence that and how they can make us more effective.