Inter-governmental Relations

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:47 pm on 18 January 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:47, 18 January 2022

Well, diolch yn fawr, Llywydd. Those are all important points. This Government opposes the UK Government's importation of techniques from the United States to suppress voting amongst populations who it thinks who may not be supportive of their political party. We opposed the restrictions on judicial review, which I see the UK Government has revived again, and we oppose the measures that they intend to introduce to limit people's ability to carry out legitimate protest. So, I agree with all the points that the Member made there. 

The inter-governmental review isn't perfect, but it is a significant advance on where we have been up until now. One of the most significant advances, and this was one of the areas that the Welsh Government and Welsh civil servants led on, as part of the review, is in the introduction of that independent dispute avoidance, and then resolution, mechanism. It's been entirely unsatisfactory that, when a devolved government attempted to raise a dispute within the arrangements of the Joint Ministerial Committee, it was the UK Government alone who could, first of all, decide whether the dispute was admissible—so, it dealt with some disputes simply by saying it didn't recognise there was a dispute—and then, even if it was admissible, it turned out to be the judge and the jury and the court of appeal and all the other things that you'd expect in relation to a dispute. That is now on a very different basis. Not, as the Member said, entrenched in statute, but there for everybody to see, and with a very significant political penalty for a government that tried, having signed up to the agreement, then to ride roughshod through it. So, parties of very different political persuasion—the Conservative Party in London, the SNP in Scotland, Sinn Fein and the DUP in Northern Ireland, and the Labour Government in Wales—we're all signed up to the review, and we certainly will approach it in the spirit of doing everything we can to make sure that we all now live up to the new ways that that review has agreed.