6. Statement by the Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution: Interim Report of the Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:50 pm on 31 January 2023.

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Photo of Mick Antoniw Mick Antoniw Labour 4:50, 31 January 2023

Thank you for your comments, Peredur. I actually think the Gordon Brown report is progressive. It's progressive because it talks about additional powers here; it talks about providing a constitutional framework to protect devolution and to protect the Sewel process; it talks about an unlimited subsidiarity as a fundamental principle—that power should be as close to the people as possible and it is only for the extent of what the interdependencies are that we have to have democratic governance; and the fact that there are no closed doors. This seems to me to be pretty progressive, and it seems to me pretty radical. If you adopt what I would sort of call the ‘shopping-list approach’ to devolution, where you have a whole list of things and you tick them and so on, well, maybe there are those who would not be happy with that approach. I suppose what I would say is, having been involved in the process of trying to organise and support decentralisation of power and devolution since the early 1970s, I see what is happening as something that is of significant change if it moves us forward. Maybe it doesn’t move us forward as quickly as some would like, maybe it doesn’t even move as quickly as I would like, but I think the proposals within it are pretty fundamental, and if they were implemented, I think it would result in significant change in terms of the devolution settlement, and greater devolution stability and coherence.