Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:37 pm on 5 July 2022.
Well, Llywydd, I share the anxieties that Rhys ab Owen has expressed. We have faced, since December 2019, a very different UK Government to any that we have seen in the devolution period. Until 2018 the Sewel convention had never been used once to override the will of the Senedd, and I think we've now seen it five times in the last couple of years. Now, this tells us that something very different is happening, and we have a Government with a very different set of attitudes at Westminster. And that is a challenge to us—I don't dispute that. When I said that the best way to resolve the challenge is to have a different Government, though, I was making a serious point, really—that that is the way in which we can find a way to entrench devolution so that future Governments of the current persuasion cannot, as the current has done, seek to reverse decisions made previously and endorsed in referendums successively here in Wales.
In the meantime, we continue to look with colleagues elsewhere in the United Kingdom, and in the UK Government, to find better ways of proceeding. In the new inter-governmental relations structure, colleagues will remember that there are two main committees that sit below the committee of First Ministers and the Prime Minister. One of those committees met last week; the Sewel convention was one of the two items on that agenda. And there are a series of practical ways in which the Sewel convention could be made to operate in a way that offered us greater confidence and greater ability to defend the devolution settlement. The risk, and the risk that I put to UK Ministers, is this: that unless they are prepared to respect the current devolution settlement, or the responsibilities that rest in different parts of the United Kingdom, it ends up not undermining devolution, it ends up undermining the United Kingdom itself.