8. Debate on the Committee for Electoral Reform Report — 'Senedd reform: The next steps'

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:13 pm on 7 October 2020.

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Photo of Huw Irranca-Davies Huw Irranca-Davies Labour 4:13, 7 October 2020

Thank you, acting Presiding Officer. The point I was making is that there needs to be more cross-party work on how job sharing for Members of the Senedd and diversity quotas for protected characteristics other than gender could work in practice. And there needs to be financial support for people with disabilities who want to stand for election, changing the rules so that spending as a result of disability or childcare or other care responsibilities does not count towards election campaign spending limits. And where parties can get on and do these things, they should just do it voluntarily, but, where legislation is needed and within our powers, subject to clarification with the UK Government, we should work towards this too.

But until 2026, we will be living with a 60-Member sixth Senedd, come what may. So, interim measures will be urgently needed to help the already overstretched 60 Members fulfil their representative, scrutiny and legislative roles effectively. The report makes it clear that we've already made many adjustments for the increased workload over an underpowered Senedd and that, going forward into the sixth Senedd, this may have difficult implications for working patterns of the Senedd and some unintended consequences, not just on the quality of our work but on the work-life balance that this Assembly, then, proudly set out to achieve. But it may be possible to learn lessons from new ways of working used during the COVID pandemic to try out other options between now and the end of this fifth Senedd. Now, there's far more to be discussed than can be covered in five minutes, so I go to my earlier comment: read the report in detail; it is compelling.

But, in my final remarks, I just want to address where we go from here, and this all depends on the will of this place right now, but also at the beginning of the sixth Senedd. The committee has tried to be of service to the Senedd by mapping out very clearly the very tight timescales for implementing these major reforms in time for the elections to the seventh Senedd. They are challenging, with key milestones to be met and decisions to be taken in the first few months, let alone the first couple of years of the next Senedd. And there will need to be a two-thirds majority to deliver these major reforms. These are high mountains to scale, but even before we get to those high mountains there's another whole range to overcome, and that requires the leadership of the main political parties—all of them—to be willing to take these matters back into their own parties, wrestle with them and come to a conclusion. I suspect for Plaid Cymru and the Lib Dems, those mountains will look relatively puny. For my own party, we'll see some heights rising ahead of us. I think the Conservative Party may have decided already not to bother under the current leadership—I don't know—and assorted others have already turned their backs on the challenge, or even on Wales or the Senedd already.

But ultimately, acting Presiding Officer, our committee has done what was asked of us. We took the decision early on, by the way, as a committee, which I commend, to constrain our activities, recognising that responding to the virus is of paramount concern. But having completed our work as best we can in these difficult circumstances, and having come to clear conclusions, we now return to the fundamental truth that we all recognised in the beginning: ultimately, this is a matter for political parties to resolve, for political leadership of those parties and for leadership of the next First Minister and Llywydd in this Senedd. There are mountains to scale, but we are a nation of mountains and used to scaling them. Twenty years after devolution, after at least five substantial changes to the governance of Wales, yet with no accompanying electoral reform—