Making rights a reality was a fundamental pillar of the 1945 welfare state. Legal aid, when it was introduced in 1949, covered 80 per cent of the population. Seventy years later, in 2019, the commission found a very different picture. Budget cuts by the UK Government have seen what the commission calls growing 'advice deserts' in areas of rural and post-industrial Wales, where people can find it difficult to access legal advice and services at all. And at the same time, there are increasing numbers of people representing themselves in courts and tribunals.

Legal aid is an entirely reserved responsibility, but the commission found that it is decisions made here by this Welsh Government and this Senedd that are having to plug the emerging gaps. The single Welsh advice fund now makes over £8 million available to advice services, which have become an essential part of our justice system. And that is only one example of where money provided for devolved services is having to be diverted to meet the urgent needs of Welsh citizens in their interactions with the justice system. Indeed, the commission reported that some 38 per cent of total justice expenditure in Wales in 2017-18 was derived from the Welsh Government or Welsh council tax payers. We could use that money to make different decisions here in Wales. 

Llywydd, as Members know, research undertaken by the Wales Governance Centre suggests that Wales has one of the highest imprisonment rates, if not the highest, in western Europe. In the case of women in the prison system, the majority are convicted of minor offences and serve short sentences, but sentences nevertheless that bring disruption to home life, loss of employment and housing, and impacts on the care of children or elderly relatives. For women in Wales, the position is worse because all women imprisoned are imprisoned in one of 12 women's prisons in England, making family contact more difficult for women from Wales and exacerbating the problems that they and their dependents face. We could and would do things differently in Wales.

Or if we look at the experience of children who are separated from their peers in young offender institutions, as recently highlighted by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, separation in such circumstances should be for the protection of children, but the chief inspector found that most separated children are effectively held in harmful solitary confinement with little human contact and in conditions that risk damaging their mental health. Again, we could and we would do things differently and better in Wales.

How then are we taking the commission's report forward? We face three essential tasks: to enact those recommendations that fall directly to the Welsh Government; to provide co-operative leadership in those areas where the report's proposals rely on other Welsh actors; and to oversee discussions with the new UK Government on the Thomas proposals. Work on all three counts has already begun.

We are exploring apprenticeship provision and how we ensure the long-term viability of legal practices across the country. We are taking forward the commission's recommendations on legal education and establishing a law council of Wales. The Law Commission will advise us on a number of the recommendations relating to the areas of the justice system that are already devolved, particularly the Welsh tribunals, and we are learning the report's lessons in how we might reduce the number of children in care.

Our initial assessment is that some two thirds of the commission's recommendations potentially require the co-operation of the UK Government to take them to implementation. This is not a surprise, given that justice is generally a reserved matter. I set out the importance of transferring responsibility for justice to Wales in my very first correspondence with the Prime Minister after his re-election. I have also written to the justice Secretary, who said only recently that every UK department should see itself as a justice department, that decisions about how the justice system operates need to be aligned with other social and economic priorities, and co-ordinated with the delivery of public services such as health and education. 

In Wales, of course, those services are devolved, and the Thomas commission report tells us that where powers sit is not a question of abstract theory. There are real, inevitable and unnecessary practical challenges arising every day that flow from the current division of responsibilities between Westminster and Wales, despite all the efforts that are being made in Wales on all sides to ameliorate the impacts of those challenges.