Item 7, motion to amend Standing Orders on consolidation Bills. And I call on a member of the Business Committee to formally move. Rebecca Evans.

Motion NDM7668 Elin Jones

To propose that the Senedd, in accordance with Standing Order 33.2:

1. Considers the report of the Business Committee, ‘Amending Standing Orders: Consolidation Bills’, laid in the Table Office on 17 March 2021.

2. Approves the proposals to introduce a new Standing Order 26C, as set out in Annex A of the Business Committee’s report.

Motion moved.

Formally moved.

The Chair of the Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee, Mick Antoniw.

And I welcome the motion, which, if agreed, will put in place procedures that will further enable the Senedd to improve the accessibility of Welsh law. Our committee began considering the Welsh Government’s plans for the consolidation of Welsh law early in 2017. We scrutinised the Legislation (Wales) Bill, prior to it being passed by this Senedd in July 2019. Notably, it places a duty on the Counsel General and the Welsh Ministers to prepare at least one programme for each Senedd, beginning with the sixth, that will include activities that are intended to contribute to a process of consolidating Welsh law.

Having a Standing Order procedure that will facilitate the introduction and scrutiny of such consolidation Bills is a crucial part of the process of improving the Welsh statute book. Given our role in scrutinising the Legislation (Wales) Bill, the Business Committee consulted with us on a draft version of the Standing Order. I would like to take the opportunity to thank the Business Committee for its response to the comments we provided in our correspondence in 2019.

So, turning to the proposed Standing Order itself, the exercise of consolidation should involve existing law only. I draw Members’ attention to paragraph 24 of the Business Committee’s report, which summarises the extent of proposed Standing Order 26C.2, and what a consolidation Bill may do. We set out a number of points in relation to this specific part of the Standing Order when we wrote to the Business Committee. I welcome the reiteration from the Business Committee that there will be a clear and important role for the responsible Senedd committee to assess and judge what is appropriate and within the parameters of proposed Standing Order 26C.2. Consolidating Welsh law will be a substantial task, and the responsible committee’s role and the work involved should not be underestimated.

I would also like to highlight the prospect of two consolidation Bills progressing in parallel as a package, which is documented in the Business Committee report. The first would be a principal consolidation Bill, and a second Bill would contain consequential amendments to existing legislation in light of the principal Bill. Amending stages for two Bills would need to happen consecutively, and it is anticipated these Bills would stand or fall together.

In our correspondence with the Business Committee, we acknowledged comments made by the Counsel General that there will be a process of learning as the first consolidation Bills are brought forward. We agreed with the Counsel General there should be a review of the procedure after the Senedd has scrutinised the first consolidation Bill, to ensure that the Standing Orders and procedures are fit for their intended purpose.

And I'd just like to conclude my contribution by saying that the accessibility of the Welsh statute book is not an issue that only affects us as Members as we undertake our duties here. Improving the accessibility of Welsh law will not only help legal practitioners working in Wales, but accessibility of the law and access to justice go hand in hand. Diolch, Llywydd.

I'm pleased that we're debating these many items on Standing Orders separately. I didn't request that by signifying an objection to their grouping in order to extend the fifth Assembly unnecessarily—we want to see the Assembly abolished, not continue artificially and unnecessarily. So, I do though believe that a lot of these Standing Orders are very substantive, and there are a range of different issues that I think deserve separate debates. And there are also prepared, I think, excellent documents for Business Committee on each of them that also deserve attention.

On consolidation, I initially thought that consolidation of the law was probably a sensible and not very controversial thing. And of course, there are provisions for the consolidation of laws at Westminster. However, having reflected further, I no longer believe that's the case, and I think this consolidation Standing Order will, for starters, ease the path to more legislating by this place, and I don't support that.

The Chair of the committee referred to the importance of consolidating Welsh law, but, of course, we don't have a separate jurisdiction in Wales. We have the law of England and Wales, as applicable in Wales. And I think that point draws into question many of the other points I've made about why this is such an obviously good and non-controversial thing to do, to assist users and improve access to justice and accessibility, et cetera.

I think, in the Business Committee paper, paragraph 2 puts the case from the other side quite well. It refers to the fourth Assembly's Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee having considered this in its report 'Making Laws in Wales.' We get a definition of consolidation, or at least described consolidation of law as,

'taking an area of law that has fallen into disrepair as a result of layers of amendments and modification, and producing a single clean text, in accordance with best contemporary practice.'

Now, I'm not really sure if that's true. Clearly, as laws get amended and changes are made, and there are amendments and modifications, that can increase complexity, and it can make the laws harder to use, both for legal practitioners and in terms of accessibility to the public, but often that's a factor of the growing complexity of the law, rather than necessarily just reflecting that it's coming from different statutes or different places. As that happens, of course, it increases the risk of ambiguity or contradiction, but to the extent that happens, the consolidation of law becomes a controversial process because it is potentially resolving or at least having an influence on those ambiguities and contradictions. And when the committee says it would lead to a single clean text, I just don't believe that's true in the context of devolution, and a shared devolution.

What it would lead to, in most areas, is a text for Wales and then a different range of texts for elsewhere in the UK, or at least for England, and over time it becomes possible that the interpretation of those two different bodies of law becomes different, or that it becomes very difficult to be sure that you're looking at the right law in terms of the case law, because if you have a judge who interprets things in a particular way, but is doing that in Wales, it's not clear if that then gets picked up by judges in England interpreting the law of England and Wales as applicable to England there. And, of course, there's far more interpretation in terms of volume going on in England. And if those things from the previous legislation were consolidated or referred to, it can then become very challenging for the lawyers and the practitioners to actually pin those changes back onto what's happened in Wales, and whether those changes—. Some of them may be binding, but they've been made with reference to other statutes and other provisions that have ostensibly been consolidated into a single clean text, but it's not a single clean text because the law continues to exist as it was in England. And that, to me, really brings all this into question, and we intend to oppose this new Standing Order to ease the path to this type of further legislative behaviour.

Thank you. I have no further speakers on that item. The proposal is to amend Standing Orders in relation to consolidation Bills. Does any Member object? [Objection.] Yes, there is an objection, and we will defer voting until voting time. 

Voting deferred until voting time.