The Senedd's Electoral Cycle

Part of 3. Questions to the Senedd Commission – in the Senedd at 3:22 pm on 25 November 2020.

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Photo of Alun Davies Alun Davies Labour 3:22, 25 November 2020

I'm grateful to the Presiding Officer for that answer. I think she will agree with me that we need more democracy and not less democracy in Wales, and the root of the change to our electoral cycle, of course, lies in the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, and that dreadful piece of legislation has now been on the statute book for a decade. In that decade, of course, we've had three UK general elections, which renders it utterly meaningless, and the one part of the Conservative manifesto that I welcomed last year was its commitment to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. That removes, of course, the justification for changing our electoral cycles, and it removes the need to do so.

Many of us here feel that this place has sat for too long. We need an election here, and we need an electoral cycle that provides for regular elections every four years, as was envisaged by the framers of the Welsh constitution. It is important, therefore, that those people seeking election next May understand that that Parliament should only sit for four and not five years. I would be grateful if a commission would work with Members on all sides of the Chamber—I can see particularly noisy support from the Conservative benches, which I welcome by the way—and ensure that we're able to frame legislation to ensure that we return to a four-year cycle for this Parliament, for all Welsh elections, as soon as the Fixed-term Parliaments Act is rightly thrown in the bin of history.