The failure of the current protocol is plain for all to see. It's been compared a number of times, hasn't it, to the old legislative competence Orders, which plagued the Senedd back in the late 2000s. They were very rapidly replaced because of concerns over the complexity of the negotiations involved in those, and this arrangement should also be dealt with in a similar way. The protocols have fallen at the first hurdle, as far as I'm concerned. It's the first time these have been tested, and they've been shown to be flawed and failing. And, frankly, the Treasury is trying to get too deep into operational issues instead of the higher-level principles of where these powers should lie. Of course, they're intentionally making the process unnecessarily complicated and drawn out, because we all know what this current Westminster Government thinks about devolving any further powers or responsibilities to Wales. 

In my time as Chair of the Finance Committee in the last Senedd, I saw how the Welsh Government went to significant lengths to set out the rationale for the vacant land tax, but it's just another case of Wales fulfilling its end of the bargain and Westminster failing to meet theirs. And the Minister's right; this process isn't fit for purpose, and the crux of the problem, of course, is that the UK Government is the final arbiter of its own decisions. Professor Gerry Holtham gave evidence to the Finance Committee in the last Senedd, and he said that

'the judge and the jury and the witnesses are all the same person, and so it's a little unclear how to proceed. If the British Government says "no", what do you do then, even if your request is perfectly reasonable? So, I think it is something, like a lot of things in the British constitution, that would benefit from a little more clarity and perhaps a little more codification'.

The Minister has said that there's a case for some kind of third-party assessment of the information, some sort of independent view and oversight of it. Well, if we are to stick to this protocol, then that is something that we have to insist on, because it's very lopsided towards the UK Government as things stand. Now, it's a bit like my local grocer telling me that he won't sell me eggs unless I tell him whether I'm boiling them, scrambling them or poaching them. It's quite perverse, isn't it, really?

Fundamentally, this is a competency issue, not a policy issue. We saw in the last Senedd how the Chief Secretary to the Treasury just wouldn't engage with the Finance Committee, refusing to appear before it and I know that those sentiments are still there. If truth be told, Westminster Government has absolutely no intention of devolving any further powers on this or any other area to Wales. In fact, the UK Government's mission is pretty clear, isn't it? They're taking back everything through legislation, the internal market Act, we've had references to the raft of LCMs that are now coming before us at an unprecedented rate. There is an irony here, of course: it's Labour putting forward this motion, when of course, it was the Labour Minister, Mark Drakeford, the finance Minister at the time, who agreed this protocol with the UK Government. So, I hope now that you realise that Westminster just doesn't want this protocol to work. It's a fudge; it's a mechanism not to facilitate progress, but to block progress, and of course it's working. So, the sooner we're freed from those Westminster shackles that are holding Wales back, the better.