COMMISSION ON THE POWERS AND ELECTORAL ARRANGEMENTS

OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY FOR WALES

MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS

of the

EVIDENCE OF

MS MARI JAMES

 held at

 National Museum of Wales, Cathays Park, Cardiff

 on

Friday 25 October 2002

LORD RICHARD: Thank you very much for coming. We are all looking forward very much to hearing what you have to say. I wonder if you would be kind enough to introduce yourself for the record.

MS JAMES: My name is Mari James. I am managing director of a public affairs company based in Cardiff called GJW Wales. I was previously, many years ago - five years ago now, slightly more - vice chair of the Yes For Wales Campaign and I was on the National Assembly Advisory Group following that. More recently I was a member of the Electoral Commission on Local Government Electoral Arrangements in Wales. I think that is all that is relevant.

LORD RICHARD: Thank you very much indeed. Would you like to open the discussion, please?

MS JAMES: First of all, thank you very much, I was very flattered when I got the phone call asking me to come and give evidence to the Richard Commission. Having looked at your remit after that, it is so broad that it is difficult to know where to start. I only had a few days so I have not prepared a written paper but I will send something in to you afterwards if it helps. Now that I have gone through the thought process it will be cathartic to do that. There are really three points that I want to touch on, and I will try not to make it too much my personal views but drawing on some of the evidence.

First of all I want to say something about the subject committees in the Assembly and the way they work. Secondly I want to say something about the plenary sessions, and the way it works. Thirdly I want to say something about what I call loosely the support structures. I am not sure if you are looking at electoral arrangements at the moment. There are a couple of brief comments on that I want to make if there is time.

First on subject committees. I think the subject committees are one of the most innovative and interesting parts of the Assembly system. I think this is really where the Welsh way is being delivered in a new form of governance, if it is happening anywhere. The points that I think are strongest here are the way in which the subject committee system militates in favour of a collegiate approach to the formulation and the development of policy, and also the way in which they encourage iterative debate and policy development. These are comments as well I should add that have come, also, from some of our private sector clients that we advise within the company. They have been often very impressed at the way in which the parties will work together and produce a collegiate approach to a policy or a response to an issue from the subject committees. They are not used to politicians doing that, it does not appear to be the culture in Westminster. I feel the subject committees can achieve something in terms of the executive power that they have.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Have you looked at Scotland at all?

MS JAMES: I cannot say that I know the Scottish system well enough to be able to comment. I know it slightly but I would not be able to compare it on this.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: The Welsh system and the Scottish system, they are not entirely dissimilar. They are much more like each other than they are like Westminster.

MS JAMES: Yes.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: When you say Wales has been a great success, I think you have to possibly couple that with Scotland.

MS JAMES: I think that is possible. In none of my comments do I compare this with Scotland because I do not claim any detailed knowledge of the Scottish Parliament in that way. Where I do think that subject committees have helped in policy development is the way in which not just the parties work together but the way in which other parties will be brought in to a policy development discussion, which I know also happens in Scotland. The physical representation of this is when one goes to some of those committee meetings and sees around the table elected members of the Assembly, officials, being able to take part in the discussion in a way that, again, is not always usual elsewhere and also then third parties who might be public bodies, they might be voluntary groups, they might be companies but they are able to contribute in a way that is not adversarial and is not like giving evidence to a select committee, and is not being dragged in because you have done something wrong as in Westminster. There may be comparisons here with Scotland but I think that this is something which does work well in the Assembly. Sometimes the process takes too long and I think that is something the Assembly will learn to get through these. I do think that one of the roles that the subject committees have got that they have not taken enough opportunity to use is their role for development and scrutiny of secondary legislation. I think there are opportunities in the future for the subject committees to be able to link some of their policy development work more closely into the development of secondary legislation, and to use those powers of the Assembly.

I understand that yesterday you had evidence from one of the ministers, from Jane Davidson, who I think is in an interesting position because, of course, also before that she was Deputy Presiding Officer. I think the Minister’s role on the committees is an interesting one. It was one of the things that I was never quite sure about how it would work and was interested in watching, the role of the Minister on the committee vis a vis the chair of the committee. I think my view now, and the view of some of my colleagues with whom I work, is that there are actually as many models as there are subject committees and that it is down to the personal dynamic between the Minister and the chair. How effective the executive feels the committees are I am not sure, but I think if there is a scrutiny on the executive it probably happens through those subject committees rather than in the next issue I was going to come on to, which is in plenary.

LORD RICHARD: Can I ask you something before you leave that first part. You have painted a picture of a great strive towards consensus politics, that is the effect of it, but how do you think that would be affected by a change in the opposite direction, having the executive slightly detached from the rest of the Assembly and, if you like, an erosion of the idea that the Assembly is in fact a corporate body, which I personally have never understood but that is another matter? How are you going to run those together?

MS JAMES: I have never understood how the Assembly as a corporate body is meant to work. That was one of the reasons why I highlighted the role of the Minister as being quite important in the operation of the committees because I genuinely do not know how the Welsh Assembly government feels that the committee either contributes to its own policy development or might hinder it. Maybe a related question to yours is how dependent is what I have described on a minority government and on a coalition government.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Is it working better since there is the coalition than it did beforehand?

MS JAMES: I do not think it is as simple as whether it is working better or not because I think this culture was established in the early days of the Assembly and has not changed in subject committee but it has changed in plenary since there has been a majority government. This culture was established in a period of minority government and therefore maybe was the only option. The culture has remained in the subject committees. In plenary where now the government can get a vote through much more easily than it could before when it had to build a consensus, now the Welsh Assembly government has a much stronger control over plenary than it had during the period of minority government.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Do you think that is a good thing?

MS JAMES: I have always believed that devolution is not just about a talking shop for the Assembly, it is about the governance of Wales. I have always believed that strong government and clarity about where the buck stops and who makes the decisions is important. Yes, there needs to be a strong Welsh Assembly government policy on issues as well as the policy development role. I do not see the two as being incompatible. I think the way in which both the parties - this is not a party issue - have incorporated the policy development process that has come through subject committees in their own policy process has been very helpful. I know you are talking to various academics and I think the big question lots of political scientists ask is where does policy come from. I think what the system has allowed is that policy can come not just from within the Civil Service and from within Welsh Government, it can come from bringing in views, and this is where the iterative role comes in, and expertise from outside of the government system as well.

TED ROWLANDS: May there not be a price to pay for that certain cosiness, that in fact you have a cosiness and you do not therefore have any sharp ended scrutiny in the system?

MS JAMES: I think that the tendency towards cosiness is there.

TED ROWLANDS: A Welsh characteristic.

MS JAMES: I think that is partly a Welsh characteristic and partly a characteristic of something else we need to look at which is the small numbers there because basically in Wales once we know each we work together in a different way. One of the things that people that I bring in from outside comment about the Assembly is how personal it is, not personal nasty and not just about using Christian names, but that people work together, there are alliances that are put together between people and not just between parties or across parties. There is a cosiness and an informality that comes there. I think the other side of it is maybe the other end of the spectrum then, the pomposity that sometimes comes out of Westminster. I know there is a view that we have gone too far in the other direction but I do not hold that view, I think we have got it about right.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: You used the word "accountability" earlier and you were saying that accountability seemed to you to be fairly clear to the committees and the Ministers here, but surely on some issues, quite a number of issues, they have not really been able to do what they wanted either because they lack the powers or because people in Whitehall or Westminster would not give them a place in the legislative timetable.

MS JAMES: I think that is a broader issue. I have always believed that Whitehall has taken quite a while to spot that devolution has not just happened to Wales and Scotland, it has happened to Whitehall as well. We have been involved in various projects ----

LORD RICHARD: The DTI?

MS JAMES: I think it has because some ----

LORD RICHARD: They legislate for Wales.

MS JAMES: Yes, they do, but there are certain areas that are now the responsibility of the Welsh Assembly government that were previously the responsibility of Whitehall. Three years ago one of the commercial projects that we did was to do with an area that the DTI thought that it still had control over and they had been dealing with a company on that basis and it was only after the consultation deadline had closed that they became aware that they did not have the responsibility any more and it had transferred to the Assembly. That is the kind of thinking that I mean. There is a shift of some functions maybe from Whitehall rather than from Westminster to the Assembly. I think the point about the legislative timetable is perhaps a different one and perhaps we can come back to that.

LORD RICHARD: That is a major one.

VIVIENNE SUGAR: We were told two contradictory things yesterday about the size of committees. One was that the size was actually quite ideal for being able to make people feel involved and deal with the business but also that there were not enough people to form sub-committees. I wonder whether you have any comments about the numbers of Assembly Members available to do this work?

MS JAMES: I think it is good that they all have a full-time job as Assembly Members, that is the first thing I would say. I think this was something important in the attitude from the Welsh public towards the Assembly, that it should not be a talking shop of part-timers, and I do not think it is that. I think it is important that they do all have functions. It was always going to be the position that there would not be backbenchers there because everybody would be able to have a job. To a certain extent they are creating more work than they can handle with some of the subject committees. On the other hand, the experience that we have of working with Assembly Members is that there are three days of the week - Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday - when they are working long hours in Cardiff and then the Friday tends to be at home in the constituency or in committees that are elsewhere in Wales, and that is a full-time job. Whether there are other things that could be done if there were more numbers there, I am not convinced that the Assembly’s problems would be solved if there were more people there. I know that a lot of the Assembly Members feel that and other commentators feel that. I do not know exactly why that number was arrived at, it is small, but I do not think that is a huge problem.

EIRA DAVIES: May I ask a further question about the subject committees. They have a dual role, they scrutinise and they are also in a position to develop policy and to be involved in policy development. Some of the committees do both roles and some only do the one role. Is there scope to formalise these roles so that committees can focus on one single role, for example?

MS JAMES: I do not think so. Part of the nature of the system and what makes the subject committees serious bodies within the system is that they do have several roles. The Minister’s role in the subject committee is a challenging one and there is the issue of whether the scrutiny happens there. As practice has emerged there is effective scrutiny although it is not necessarily in the formal part of the meeting that is, as it were, put down to scrutiny, which is the Minister’s report and the questioning of the Minister’s report, it is much more in the fact that the ministers have to get certain decisions through committee or they have to take the committee with them so that there is a process of discussion and, if you like, consensus building before and outside of the committees. I think that is how the scrutiny works and I do not think you can divorce it from the policy development, it is tied up with it.

LAURA McALLISTER: I was just going to ask a question which develops the point made there. What is the most opportune role for the Minister in relation to subject committees? You answered the question about problems of scrutiny in the current arrangement but what about policy variation? If a subject committee is to function in a way described there as being an innovative body, surely it needs to be an arms length relationship with the Minister who also has a different policy hierarchy.

MS JAMES: Yes. That comes back to the point I was asked about is there someone running the country, is there clear government policy developed. It is very interesting to identify. We have an online data base we have produced in the company and there is a section which is on Assembly policy. It is very interesting to identify when a policy becomes official and when it is endorsed by the full Assembly, or whether it is Welsh Assembly government policy. There are not two bodies of policies, as is sometimes made out, one that is endorsed by the Assembly and one that is actually government policy. What I am trying to say about the subject committees is that even if it is not something like the Welsh language review which went through the committees and then came out and went through the process of plenary, even if it is something like the health service reorganisation, it requires an involvement of the committees in a way that the production of policy in Westminster, and the split between the executive and the legislature in Westminster, I do not think happens in the same way. I favour the view that it is a good thing to encourage politicians to work together. There may be disadvantages but from the outside of the government system I think it is a good thing.

LORD RICHARD: Who scrutinises the Minister?

MS JAMES: If I can come on to my points about the plenary.

LORD RICHARD: In committee?

MS JAMES: In the committee, I think, as I said before, the requirements of the system of the subject committees meaning that the Ministers have to take the committees along with them.

LORD RICHARD: Do they have an obligation to take any policy to the appropriate committee?

MS JAMES: That is a moot point because arguably there have been occasions when Ministers have tried to ignore the Assembly or ignore the committees and technically, of course, in constitutional terms they do not have to have the support but politically it would be very difficult to push a policy through and why do it. There is opposition. This is one reason why I hesitated when you said that I was talking about a happy consensus in the Assembly, there is opposition, there is not total 100 per cent support, what I was talking about is not producing that. There are oppositions, of course, there are votes against policy, but nevertheless there is an involvement in the process of developing official policy and what becomes of an executive act which certainly did not exist before in Wales. I do not think it exists so far.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Would it be possible to see your study or the study you referred to?

MS JAMES: Sorry, which study?

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: You said you had looked at development of various policies within the Assembly system.

MS JAMES: Yes. It is not so much a study. I can produce a list of what we have identified as being Welsh Assembly government policy and being Assembly policy. We can produce that list. We do it for the sake of clarification so that we are able to advise people whether something which has been discussed in the Assembly is actually policy or whether it is something that has been discussed in the Assembly. I can happily produce that list, it is in the public realm. Shall I carry on?

PETER PRICE: If I can just follow through on this numbers issue that we were raising a moment ago vis a vis committees. The nature of committees at the moment is that parties typically may have just one or two members on the committee. Suppose that we were looking at enhanced powers for the Assembly, and they had responsibilities also on primary legislation, what impact would that have on work volume? Would you expect, for example, that it would create more demand for different members of the same party to take on separate responsibilities in order to cover the territory, that some of the things which are dealt with currently in the main committee might need to fall back into a sub-committee so that the main committee could spend time on primary legislation? What impact would this have at the end of the day on the numbers or the numbers which are desirable for the Assembly to man the committees if they had that greater role?

MS JAMES: I think it is a logical link to say if the Assembly had more functions, more powers, it would need to have more people to carry that out. I think that is a bit too simplistic because it depends what the more functions and more powers are. One can argue that various functions have transferred to the Assembly during its life already because of informal arrangements with Whitehall. It depends also on the experience of the members there. Again, in simplistic terms, just to have more people around the table at a committee would not make any difference if none of them felt able to make an impact into secondary legislation, let alone primary legislation. The third point I was going to make about the support structures comes in there as well which is why it is not just a numbers game. I do not know if that helps.

VIVIENNE SUGAR: Going back to the business about effective scrutiny, does the party whip apply to subject committee members when they are actually into the scrutiny mode?

MS JAMES: There are votes very rarely in the subject committees. I cannot think of an instance of a vote. Presumably there has been in the three years but, again, that is not the nature of the subject committees. The culture of them is to build some form of agreement, even if it is not from all the members, so I do not know if the whip works because of course there is not always a majority for the majority party.

LORD RICHARD: It seems to me that one possibility is that if, for example, the powers of the Assembly were increased to give them power over primary legislation, you would get then a much greater development of the executive and the legislature. I think then you would get a deepening of the party divide - this is one argument - and therefore you change the whole nature of the Assembly. Do you accept that?

MS JAMES: I think that is arguable. I think that the discussion about increased legislative powers for the Assembly must go alongside the changes in the way in which Westminster legislation is now being introduced, especially with things like draft Bills. The whole process now of there being a wider involvement in the putting together of the primary legislation, or at least the discussion on it, I think there are some very interesting examples, for instance on the way in which the Health Bill has been discussed in the Assembly and legitimately and formally in the subject committee by the Minister. Then taking it back to Westminster I think another model, but an equally helpful one was the way in which the Learning Bill in the last session, essentially the clauses in that for Wales, came out of the subject committee of the Assembly. I think there is movement going forward, the whole process of modernising the parliamentary system is one we must look at while thinking of the way in which legislation could be introduced in Wales.

TED ROWLANDS: Driving down this morning I was listening to a leaked memo from a senior official in health, it sounded remarkably good old fashioned stuff to me in the sense that you had a senior official no longer reporting his concerns to the Assembly as a whole or to the committee but reporting entirely to the Minister that he had seven serious worries about the way the NHS restructuring was going. That sounds to me like good old fashioned Westminster politics including the leaked rather than the Assembly having open, transparent arrangements.

MS JAMES: I would never claim that the old politics is dead and I would never claim that to a former MP for Merthyr Tydfil. There is still a lot of it about. What I am interested in is the fact that devolution in Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland has enabled innovations and modernisations in the way in which we do parliamentary systems of various kinds in the UK to be looked at and to move forward. That is happening in Westminster as well. This is a moving feast that we are dealing with, not just a stable "we have a system here, shall we move some of the Westminster system here". There is still politics. The new politics is still politics.

TED ROWLANDS: The original idea of the body corporate was in a sense that there was going to be openness and transparency, there was not going to be a cabinet where senior officials would only express their concerns to a Minister in private moments, that there would be this openness. It looks to me, following the Chairman’s point, that the more you develop this division between legislature and Assembly you are going to have more of the leaked memos and more of the closing down of policy thinking rather than opening it up.

MS JAMES: I do not think it is incompatible to say that the current Assembly system is much more open and more transparent than the system was before. It is not incompatible to say that and that there must be more transparency and that is a good thing. I am saying that we must have an effective executive and cabinet meetings that are allowed to get on with their work and often need to do that in private without having public discussions because that is effective government. To me, one of the things that has happened with the Assembly system is that the books in Wales have been opened. A lot of information that previously was not in the public realm is now in the public realm. Most people in the policy communities and in other parts of government, as you know, are struggling to say "It is open, but what do we do with that information now we have got it? How can we work with it?"

I was going to say one of the things we do not do enough of, but we must not always look back, is compare what is happening now with what the Welsh system was like six or seven years ago, which is not that long ago in constitutional terms, because there is so much more transparency now and so much more openness and we just accept it. The large public bodies go and give evidence to the Assembly, are questioned in public, on television, and we just take it for granted, nobody turns up, the Western Mail does not cover it, the BBC do not cover it, it is my staff and a few other public affairs people there. We accept that whereas that was seen as being quite revolutionary five years in Wales.

TOM JONES: You will obviously provide a service for customers and clients on the work and detailed workings of the Assembly. How is the relationship with the Members of Parliament developing? Do you find it very complex to try and find out who is responsible for what? You mentioned the Department of Environment and the Department of Transport earlier consulting before realising that it was not their responsibility to consult. Are there any other departments in Westminster that actually cause you problems when you are trying to provide information for your clients, the Home Office perhaps and the media?

MS JAMES: I never quite know whose home the Home Office is. The Home Secretary is in Wales today. The role of MPs has obviously changed, some of the functions have moved. One of the things that people ask us today is just to explain their role. On a particular issue in the past they might just have been talking to their local MP but "Do I carry on talking to the local MP? Am I also talking to an Assembly Member? Where do the officials fit in?" That is not necessarily a problem. There are additional politicians who have responsibility and there are additional officials. As far as I can tell the working relationships between officials in the Assembly and officials in Whitehall are developing. Sometimes in one particular area they could be very good because they have worked together over particular issues and there has been joint working but in another area there might not be that relationship because there has not needed to be. I do not think there is an unhelpful culture in any of the departments of which I am aware, but that is not to say that there is not. What does happen is that when any of the departments have to deal with Wales they get on with it and it happens, so it is developing through precedent and through practice rather than through rules. Again, it is people coming and working together and getting on with it within the new system.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Whitehall is notoriously secretive, for example. The culture is inward looking. If you are being so open here, is there not going to be a tendency, for example, for Home Office officials to close up and refuse to pass things down to Cardiff on issues which they are still considering policy possibilities? How do you get round that?

MS JAMES: I think that is an area where the cultures are very different. We had an example about two years ago of correspondence that was actually going on on an official consultation process, it was a DTI decision and the Assembly were official consultees and it was the First Minister who was the official consultee and had consulted with the Assembly and with two subject committees working together. There was correspondence, there was a formal letter from the committee chairs to the First Minister and then from the First Minister to the DTI, all of which were in the committee papers, were on the Assembly web, were in the public realm in Wales because that is our system now and were covered in the Guardian newspaper, I think, which caused absolute horror in the DTI because they said "The Welsh have leaked this again", but it was not, it was in the public realm and the Guardian had taken it from a website. There was absolutely no understanding that this kind of correspondence could be in the public realm. Yes, that was different.

Again coming back to the moving feast, that we are not completely out of kilter, that was also during a time of transition on the freedom of information legislation because when the Assembly and the Scottish Parliament were set up some of the rules of the freedom of information legislation that were due then to be introduced in the Commons were actually incorporated into the rules of the Assembly and the Scottish Parliament in effect before they were introduced in Whitehall and Westminster. In that way we were moving at a slightly different speed than Whitehall and Westminster.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: I think you have reflected more the Labour Party manifesto on the freedom of information than the eventual Act of Parliament, because if you remember it was watered down.

MS JAMES: Yes. On the National Assembly Advisory Group the secretariat advised us as to what was going to be in the legislation and that was, I think, about three drafts, if not more, prior to the actual legislation that was introduced. It may be that our rules are still further ahead like that. That culture is a gap but there are arguments that transparency in government is moving forward everywhere and that Whitehall is much more transparent than it used to be. Sometimes this is just because of the technology, because it is easier to put things into the public realm on the internet than it is issuing them in hard copy. Whether people can find them always on the internet is a different matter.

LORD RICHARD: You were going to say something about plenary and the support structure.

TED ROWLANDS: Just before that could I ask one question. Your account of the whole of this committee and the feel of it is extremely important to us. In preparing for this I took one 12 months’ minutes of a subject committee and just went through them. Aside from the fact that the record is poor ----

MS JAMES: Pathetic.

TED ROWLANDS: We really do need a decent Hansard if nothing else.

MS JAMES: Of committees?

TED ROWLANDS: Yes. You said that you scrutinised the public bodies. The scrutiny of one of the largest quangos over the last 12 months, ELWA, by the Education Committee was lamentable. That is a personal opinion. I looked at it because I was interested. Do you not think that what it means is that they flitted from subject to subject, or that is what the record appears to show? The picture you presented was a very different picture from the one that I got reading that one 12 months’ account.

MS JAMES: I absolutely agree with you that the record of committees is very thin. I think the minutes of the Bank of England Monetary Committee are in more detail than those of the subject committees of the Assembly. They are very thin. I think that is a shame. I think also that there are occasions on which the Standing Orders allow for verbatim reports of committees which are not used, especially when there are outside bodies giving evidence and it is important with that evidence that more of it should be verbatim. There is an allowance in Standing Orders - it was one of the things we were very concerned with in the National Assembly Advisory Group - that those should be verbatim as often as possible, and those opportunities are not taken up, I think. There are quite a lot of opportunities in the Assembly which are not taken up. My attitude tends to be not there are things which are done wrong but there are opportunities not taken up and I think that is one.

On how good is the scrutiny, one of the areas that I have not touched on is the Audit Committee which again I think is not given enough consideration. I think that is again something which if you look back to the Welsh Government six or seven years ago, having a public Audit Committee like that is revolutionary. I think in scrutiny of public bodies one should not leave out the role of scrutiny of that Audit Committee. It is like having the weight of the PAC here all the time which is completely different in terms of the attitude towards public spending in Wales. I am sure there are issues on which the public bodies could be held to account at subject committees and on which they are not. The fact that they are held to account in public I think is helpful for the culture of compliance within public bodies but I would always include the Audit Committee in that for public bodies.

TED ROWLANDS: I will read the Audit Committee minutes for the next 12 months.

MS JAMES: Yes. I do not know that their reports are any more detailed. The Audit Committee is covered by the press and the media even less than any of the other committees because it is seen as probably being dull and financial and of little interest but as any one of the government it is probably the most important committee that there is. It is like having the powerful PAC of the House of Commons here all the time and it is an area of the Assembly that is vastly overlooked.

LORD RICHARD: Does it work like the PAC in that they are big on certain activities?

MS JAMES: Yes, and the Welsh Office brings papers to it and brings inquiries to it and it can do its own inquiries.

LORD RICHARD: Would you like to move on to the plenary structure.

MS JAMES: I will not spend so long on the plenary. The point I want to make about plenary really is that to the extent that I think subject committees have succeeded in various ways plenary has not quite found its role yet. While it is the main auditorium of the drama of the National Assembly, once one gets beyond that it is not always very productive in the process of the Assembly. The television will cover plenary often when something really interesting has been going on in committees, and the committees are often good politics but bad television, whereas the plenary is often the other way round in that it may be good television in the same way as a knockabout in Prime Minister’s Question Time can be good television but it is not necessarily a good political system. There have been some very good big debates, set piece debates in plenary often - and you would expect me to say this - coming out of policy papers which have come through the committee system but it will not just be the people from that committee who will contribute, there will be a round of views. There have been some very good set piece debates. It is also I think very interesting to see the way in which the whole national budget is debated in the Assembly and the way in which plenary handles that I think is innovative and gives the executive control. It is clearly a Welsh Assembly government budget that is under discussion but is under discussion in the larger plenary in that there is discussion and not just some of the very thin questions which can come out in the commons system. I think that question time has developed into occasionally very effective scrutiny of Ministers which comes back to the point about scrutiny of Ministers.

LORD RICHARD: Is there a daily question time?

MS JAMES: When the Assembly is sitting, yes.

LORD RICHARD: Of course.

MS JAMES: There is a First Minister’s question time once a week. I had occasion to watch Prime Minister’s question time in the House of Commons earlier this week and I do not know if that was because of the two personalities involved but the Prime Minister was not on the ropes at all there. Often in the Assembly, maybe because there are fewer numbers, maybe because it is more personal, maybe because physically it is more in the round and they are closer, the Ministers have to defend themselves a lot more and that does seem to be more effective scrutiny. Having said that about what works in plenary there is a lot of other time in plenary that the timetabling certainly just looks as if the government is really struggling to find fillers to put in the debates. Plenary often finishes early which is sometimes really surprising. We will know often that there is a lot of work to be done but it has not come to plenary. Whether this is an issue for business management of the place and whether there is a decision not to have discussions, I do not know, but there does seem to be a lot of time that is not filled in plenary which could be.

Also I think - the last point I want to make about plenary - there is not enough consideration given to legislation there. Secondary legislation for the most part goes through on the nod. Secondary legislation is treated as "Oh, this is when I can get up and go and get a cup of tea. This is when I can pop out for a few minutes". Ministers will read out some very long titles of secondary legislation, there will be a few nods and on it will go. There was an occasion on which we were involved commercially in a piece of secondary legislation and we knew there was going to be a debate on it because there was some controversy about it and when an Assembly Member wanted to say something on it a point of order was raised by other Assembly Members saying "No, you are not allowed to speak on this, you cannot use this occasion for a speech. This is turning this into politics." The Presiding Officer ruled it out of order and said "No, of course, he is allowed to" but nobody ever does. I think there are lost opportunities in the plenary session for debating secondary legislation. That is not to say that all the tiny little rogue orders that come to it need to go through but there are lost opportunities there.

LORD RICHARD: What is plenary seen as though: the opportunity for expressing views?

MS JAMES: Yes, that is what the Assembly is to most people in Wales, I would think. It is the public front of it, it is the shop front.

LORD RICHARD: It is more than that.

MS JAMES: It is more than that, yes, and it can be even more than that. My point is that the engine room, the working place, is very much the committees and not enough the plenary and there is more of a role for the plenary. There are lost opportunities.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Do you have an explanation for these criticisms of plenary? I have heard that the business committee is supposed to work well, now the business committee is responsible for organising business in plenary I suppose. Why is the situation such as you describe it?

MS JAMES: I do not know, genuinely I do not know. I do not know why on some days plenary finishes early when there are things they could be discussing. I do not know why sometimes the agenda looks extremely thin, maybe this is an agreement between business managers.

LORD RICHARD: I do not believe it is as formalised as that. People run out of steam or they do not speak or they have a constituent they need to see. People do not speak in parliamentary chambers for all sorts of reasons. They do speak for all sorts of reasons too actually.

MS JAMES: Yes.

LORD RICHARD: I do not think you can draw any great truths from this.

MS JAMES: Perhaps one of the points is the point made over here earlier that you had heard from other witnesses that there was not enough time or there were not enough resources in subject committees for some of the work and enough people to service sub-committees and things like that. Some of that work can be done in plenary and yet it is not done there now, I do not know why. LAURA McALLISTER: To what extent was that discussed in the internal review of proceedings? We have seen the final report but we are not privy to some of the discussions that went on in the actual meetings. You may or may not be. Was this issue of the relationship between time in the subject committees and the plenary agendas of each actually discussed? That may be a critical thing about the proceedings.

MS JAMES: It was something that came up as I remember. I did not follow all of that in detail but it was something that came up. I think the point about the debate on secondary legislation came up in the review of procedure a lot and how secondary legislation could be handled more and there are recommendations on different ways in which that can be done after the next election.

LAURA McALLISTER: So after the review of proceedings is the issue of points of order being raised still a feature? You said that other members were raising points of order.

MS JAMES: No. I think there is now an acceptance that secondary legislation can be debated. Occasionally we will notice on a particular issue that one of the short debates, for instance, has been on an issue that will be treated as a rhetorical political point, whereas actually there has been secondary legislation going through on it that the member that is interested could have been doing something on, positively or negatively, and has completely ignored it and probably not been aware of its relevance to a simple political issue. Whether that is a communication point within the Assembly I genuinely do not know.

TOM JONES: Where you have been critical of the political process, have you got any models from elsewhere in the world that you think could be adopted?

MS JAMES: I do not think that there is a blueprint of "This is the best way to run an Assembly" or "This is the best way to run a Parliament". We wasted a bit of time on the National Assembly Advisory Group looking for the blueprint and there is not one. It also depends on what works for Wales. Looking at Scotland and also the Northern Ireland Assembly there are things to be learned from both in some cases but I do not think there is necessarily a blueprint to be picked up from elsewhere, although it would be nice.

PETER PRICE: If I may pick up briefly the issue of matters not dealt with that might have been on the plenary agenda, it would be interesting to try and tease out whether these fall into any particular categories. You speculated as to whether this was accident or design and that I think is relative in terms of the scrutiny by the plenary which way round those things are and, indeed, what lies behind in either case. What sort of examples can you think of maybe in recent days where the Assembly seems to have run out of steam and you had in your mind "Gosh, they could have dealt with that" and what was it?

MS JAMES: I do not have a particular example in this recent session but I think, for instance, the budget debate could have been given more time. That was something of such importance. This is something that has moved to Wales in recent years with the new system and that debate could probably have been given more time. There are other issues coming out from subject committees and maybe an example, to answer your question, would be some of the aspects of the energy report, the energy inquiry, that is being handled by the Economic Development Committee because one of the ways, I understand it, that they are doing that is rather than waiting completely to the end they are producing interim reports so that policy development in other areas does not have to be held up and postponed until the whole of the process is completed. I do not think that there have been debates on aspects of those reports or any of those interim findings in plenary as a whole to use plenary as more of a sounding board.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Have there been examples of plenary forcing some reallocation of money from one area to another?

MS JAMES: I cannot think of an example of that as such but that budget reallocation, as I understand it, tends to happen more within cabinet and also as a result of the iterative discussions that go into the budgetary process, so that the Finance Minister will have discussed with the members of the Assembly balances between budgets and there may well be pressure to move monies from one budget head to another but it is not visibly obvious that that happens in plenary, I would say.

VIVIENNE SUGAR: Was there to your knowledge any discussion in a subject committee or in plenary about the recent decision to release some reserves?

MS JAMES: Not that I am aware of but I could not put my hand on my heart and say there was not. There is not a Finance Committee as such.

LORD RICHARD: How would that be decided?

MS JAMES: Within a cabinet committee.

LORD RICHARD: It is an executive act which there is no accountability for.

MS JAMES: I think so.

TED ROWLANDS: When you have been advising your clients or clients have come to you on areas where there are either concurrent powers with Whitehall or confusion over respective responsibility of powers, could you identify any of these areas, because these are areas that we are concerned about, these so-called jagged edges of the devolution settlement?

MS JAMES: I think it is all pretty jagged in many ways. The nature of the Transfer Orders is such that in theory it is very specific what the powers are. It is not always logical because it is historic of what happened to have been transferred to Orders in Council or into secondary legislation and then was transferred to the Assembly. One of the things that we would do, if required, is to look back at the Transfer Orders for that guidance and then also to look at the Memorandums of Understanding with particular departments. Some will shed light and some will not. Some refer to bodies that do not seem to exist as liaison bodies, to be honest. What I think we have found as well is that it is much more a case of completely silent areas, for instance on competition policy, which are clearly in the remit of Whitehall and Westminster, but on which if there is a Welsh company that is heavily affected the Assembly has had an interest and then sometimes has had an influence as well. I think that the way in which we have seen the new structures develop where the Assembly has an interest and how it has used its influence has been as important on developing the relationship between the Assembly and Whitehall as the actual constitutional relationships between the two.

TED ROWLANDS: Can you give us an illustration of this grey area in Parliament?

MS JAMES: In some ways I go back to competition policy again. The prime example there was the proposed takeover of Hyder which was clearly a DTI policy and yet the interest and the influence was in Wales. The way in which that was taken through was that there were two subject committees that had an interest, Economic Development and Environment, a slightly different mixture of portfolios than at the moment, and they discussed it. That was the example I referred to earlier where there was formal correspondence that was then in the public realm in Wales and they could not understand that in London. There was a full discussion in plenary with, as it were, the protagonists, with the companies that were involved coming and giving evidence to the two committees meeting together in plenary. That was completely innovative and the Assembly worked out a way of dealing with that area in which the powers were clearly in Whitehall and Westminster but the interest was clearly in Wales and worked out a way of having influence. Equally on some of the investment decisions by the Ministry of Defence in Wales which is clearly a Whitehall and Westminster function but where there are investments being made in Wales there is an economic interest in Wales and there are different ways of doing that. It is not as simple as just where the Transfer Orders may be jagged but where there are softer interests that can be used. Again, it is a matter of the different levels of government working out effective ways of getting on. I was going to be rude about the Western Mail again.

TED ROWLANDS: From that experience have you anything to recommend to us in the areas that you have dealing with in relation to how we might smooth out the jagged areas or are there areas that you have identified which you think ought to be prime subjects for transfer?

MS JAMES: It is a very peculiar way to have the settlement, the Transfer of Functions Order, although one can understand that it was the simplest way also of doing it. I think that what is important is that when the Assembly comes across an area where it is not sure and it is a grey area where its powers lie, the important thing is for it to think about what it would want to do, what it wants to achieve and then to go about the most effective way of achieving that, which is I think what happened on that Hyder takeover. This is what makes sense for us, this is how we will communicate to Whitehall. Presumably they went through that with the relevant part of Whitehall and then got on with it. I do not think the Assembly on these occasions or the Welsh Assembly government should sit back and say "We do not know what the rules are". They should say "This is what we need to do. What is going to be the most effective way for us? Is there some reason why we cannot do it like that in which case we will get on and do it", so it is setting the precedent all the time. We have already got three years of precedent.

PETER PRICE: Just to follow that through in terms of the external impact of this jagged edge. You are there as the expert intermediary able to take the client through the question of who has got the power and how you get round the system but to what extent is this system transparent to the clients who arrive on your doorstep who are themselves probably a great deal more sophisticated than those who never arrive on your doorstep?

MS JAMES: First of all I do not claim to be an expert on this. I and my colleagues in the company just probably spend more time on it than most other people and the difference between us and our clients who specialise in making widgets or whatever is that we specialise in trying to understand the Assembly and knowing about it. We only ever deal with what is in the public realm. We are members of the Association of Professional Political Consultants. We are only allowed to deal with what is in the public realm. We have learnt how to find it in the public realm more than companies whose job is not to do that. When a company will arrive on our doorstep who say "It turns out things are being done differently in Wales now, can you explain to us, can you take us through it", it is often very easy to do that because it does not take long to explain subject committees or the powers or what the Minister is doing and, yes, the Minister has got power to do this separately in Wales. As soon as you have done that they say "We had no idea, we thought the Assembly was just a talking shop". That is what is very common, people come to us saying "We thought it was a talking shop. It is not a parliament so how come it has got the power to do anything virtually?" We see public organisations and private organisations going through this thought process. "Scotland has got a parliament, we understand they can make rules differently, we did not understand Wales could. How come this is allowed?" Often we just point them towards the relevant official or Assembly member or Minister, whoever it would be. Signposting is what we do a lot of the time. I do not know if that answers the question.

TED ROWLANDS: Are your clients more interested in divergence or convergence?

MS JAMES: Sorry, of what?

TED ROWLANDS: Of policy. Are they mostly preoccupied because there is a divergence of policy or are they seeking a divergence of policy?

MS JAMES: There is not really a common thread to that. Lobbying is not nearly as glamorous as it is made out to be sometimes and most of the people who come to us want to follow what is going on. They do not view necessarily that they want a particular thing to happen. For instance, in the health care area they just want to know there are some different interests in Wales. Sometimes by default things will happen differently in Wales because something will be introduced into England that will not be introduced into Wales. It is just knowing what is happening and being aware of what is happening rather than looking for divergence or convergence.

The third point that I want to make - actually some of it has come up in what I have been saying already - is really about - I am not quite sure what the right nomenclature is here - support structures of the Assembly. I never believe that a legislature exists in a vacuum, that its effectiveness is very much dependent on the civic society around it and on some of the democratic feedback mechanisms that it has. I think that for the Assembly system to be effective these other support mechanisms around it have to be effective. Some I think are working well in Wales, some are weaker. Some of the ones I think are working well, and as far as I know are quite innovative, are the partnership councils and the statutory obligation to consult with the voluntary sector and local government and the business community. I think of those three partnership councils again there are differences between them but I think those are a helpful way of building those three areas into the Assembly system and providing support mechanisms there.

I do not know if he has gone, but I would happily say this with Clive Betts present, I think the press, the broadcasting and print media in Wales does not provide the democratic feedback loops that it could do. My main recent example of this is that I have several times referred to the Budget debate, there was not one word in the Western Mail, the self-styled national newspaper of Wales, of the Assembly Budget debate. This was the £11 billion that the Assembly has complete control over and was debating in public and on television. The Western Mail did not cover one word of it. If one was only taking what happened in Wales from the Western Mail you would not have known that was happening. I think that some of the scrutiny that we have been talking about, which can come from a culture of scrutiny and a comment and a knowledge as well, the Welsh press just does not provide that. Whether that is a size issue, because there are not the number of newspapers in Wales, there is not the size of the market that there is for instance in Scotland, whether it is because the Welsh press tends to be an adjunct to the press that comes out of collectively Fleet Street so that people in Wales tend to read the Western Mail and a broadsheet whereas in Scotland it is more self-sustaining or what it is, I do not have a solution on that. What I do think is that it is the broadcast media that provides what one would expect some of the print press to provide. The programme that I think gets it right is a programme called Manifesto which treats its coverage of the Assembly both as on the record factual coverage of what happened that week and a current affairs input to commentary on it. I think that is a weakness.

The civic society area and the voluntary groups and the policy communities I see as having grown in strength with the Assembly structure. I know that some of them actually feel that there is too much expected of them so they are being killed by consultation so that on the one hand it is good news that they are being involved in a process and they are being consulted but on the other hand they do not have the resources necessarily to be always commenting and getting involved in policy papers all the time. Some would prefer, I think, almost the old days when they were told what the view was going to be and they complained that they had not been involved in it and they had not been consulted. I think that civic society has been moving but that is as important a part of the Assembly structure as the internal mechanisms, although that may not be something that the Commission can effect. Those are my final points.

PETER PRICE: How have those organisations adapted to try and meet these demands? Presumably they have not adapted to be able to do a lot more than they were doing even though they may not be meeting the appetite for their views on such a wide front.

MS JAMES: The voluntary sector I think, very interestingly, has grown. A large number of people who are now the Assembly liaison officers for the voluntary sector so that voluntary groups and patient groups and other charities in England and Wales will have now often a dedicated person whose job it is to liaise with the Assembly, to work on policy papers, to select them and to do that sort of work. It has been quite interesting to see the way in which the voluntary sector got itself geared up to do that. As ever, one person is never enough.

LORD RICHARD: You say to work with the Assembly, with the Ministers?

MS JAMES: Yes, with the Assembly or with the Ministers. The remit of people will be different in different places.

LORD RICHARD: With the subject committee?

MS JAMES: Yes, sometimes they will do it within the subject committee. They will be, as it were, in-house lobbyists and activists for that association. It has been common for some time in Westminster, and it was interesting to see the voluntary sector getting itself geared up very quickly in Wales for that.

LORD RICHARD: They do not appear on a committee in Westminster.

MS JAMES: They do not appear on the committees in Westminster. Also, I think that in Westminster the system of all-party groups is often the vehicle for the approach there. Maybe that is the way to do it when there are so many more members there. Perhaps in Wales with a smaller number of members that is the way to do it. There are all-party groups but there are not nearly so many.

TED ROWLANDS: Jane Davidson and her official, Richard Davies, told us yesterday about the way in which they were innovatively learning to borrow, as it were, the outside expertise to make up for the internal deficiencies of the policy making strength. When you transfer something as fundamental as primary legislative power when you have got external support it is a huge additional burden or an additional requirement on the system itself. Do you think from your observations that the Assembly civil service could cope with the transfer of primary legislative powers?

MS JAMES: No, not at the moment. I think that one of the areas of the system that has had to go through the biggest culture shock has been the Civil Service in Wales. Some of them have responded superbly; some of them. There were not the skills there because it was not a job to be done before. There were not the parliamentary back-up skills. It was always my view, and I expressed this publicly, that there should have been more recruitment from outside or service level agreements with Westminster or whatever to bring more people in from outside of the old Welsh Office civil servant structure. For instance, the Clerk, Paul Silk, is an example of that kind of expertise coming in from outside. At the moment there is not the expertise there but is that partly because there is not the job to be done. There are two issues, the policy development but also the writing of the legislation, there are not those skills there and I would favour people being brought in with those skills from outside.

LORD RICHARD: When you say no you point in one or two directions, either you keep what you have got and do not have primary legislative powers, or alternatively you do have primary legislative powers and you change what you have got. As I understand it it is the second bit rather than the first.

MS JAMES: I was answering the question as an economist. If it was a given that a decision had been made to have primary legislation powers there is not the expertise and the wherewithal to deliver that within the current staffing.

LORD RICHARD: So you need more expertise to do it?

MS JAMES: Different expertise from what is there.

TOM JONES: In fairness it is not a point for us but in terms of debating the value of external expertise as opposed to building up and deepening the internal, there is an advantage in using external expertise because of the dynamics that external expertise brings in because people there are involved at the cutting edge of whatever the issues will be, whether it is business or the voluntary or public sector. It is not as simple to say just double or treble the strength of the internal expertise and that will solve all the problems, I think the external, the combination with internal, provides a more useful way forward. If the Assembly has developed that in recent years then I think it should be encouraged to do more of that.

MS JAMES: It is not just a numbers game, it is not just quantitative, it is qualitative as well. One of the things we often notice in business is if we are dealing with something in Wales and in Whitehall the lines of decision making are so much shorter in Wales than in Whitehall. It takes Whitehall so long to achieve something, and we can think about the tanker slowing down and turning in the other direction, but you can do stuff quicker in Wales because the area between the coal face and the actual expertise and the Government Minister can be very short.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: On this issue of support, two points. The first is that when I came to be interviewed to be on this Commission I read the Western Mail that day and there was an advertisement for, I think, 12 posts to work for the Assembly and they were being paid medium rank full-time to help the committees. That suggested to me that there is a major effort being made to provide more staff and of course the cost is going to be considerable. The second point is in the House of Lords, which I used to work for, the select committees are made to work partly by the expertise of some of the Members of the House, scientists, employers and so on, and partly by specialist advisers brought in, of which a rather disproportionate amount are Welsh or Scottish professors from Cardiff and elsewhere and they are very good value for money. They do it because of the interest and because of the input that they can make to policy formation but they do provide most admirable help to the committees. There was a Professor Edwards on the Environmental Sub-Committee of the European Committee in the 1980s who was a particular friend of Lady White but he provided some very good papers.

MS JAMES: I think the role of special advisers in committees is now being taken up by the Assembly. On the adverts that you referred to I think the question to be asked is why they are there now and not three years ago. It took the subject committees quite some while to be able to argue for more support and for more staffing for themselves and allowances for the chairs and things like that. They are beginning to get that.

TED ROWLANDS: Was it the assumption that officials were going to do that and with the growth of an executive the officials are answerable to the executive much more than the Assembly committees and that is why now you are having to buttress the advice system to the committees?

MS JAMES: It is possible. My reading of it was much more that it was difficult at the time to make decisions so it would not have been politically helpful to make decisions to employ a large number of people who probably would have been called bureaucrats to staff the Assembly, a jobs for the boys in Cardiff sort of argument, and that was difficult. So some of the new areas like the staffing of committees were overlooked.

TED ROWLANDS: Do you think that the cost argument for devolution has gone away?

MS JAMES: No, I do not think that the Welsh Tory Party will let it go away. I do not think that costs of democracy should ever be overlooked. I tend to think that not enough money is spent on the democratic system and on the Assembly. One of the things that I think we have got right there, which is not procedural but is about support, is the facilities for members there. It is one of the things that I am proud to point out to people about the Welsh Assembly compared with what I think in some cases are sometimes dreadful facilities for members in both Houses in Westminster. The Assembly Members have proper rooms, they have proper offices. There are allowances for staff. The offices are such that there is a meeting table there, they have got a proper working environment. I remember discussions at the time that the civil servants were absolutely horrified that this was going to happen and we were being told that they did not need research assistants, why on earth should Assembly Members have research assistants because what research would they be doing. If the research that they would be doing was factual then they could get that from the Civil Service because the Civil Service could provide them with the facts, and if it was not factual then it was clearly political and therefore it could not be paid for out of the public purse. They did not need secretaries either because they were going to have full IT kits so they could do their own typing.

LORD RICHARD: It sounds exactly like the House of Lords.

TED ROWLANDS: That did not happen.

MS JAMES: And there should not be a library there because whoever heard of a library for just 60 people. Those arguments were being made at the time but when that was the debate that was the culture within which the debate was had about staffing the committees as well. It was a ratchet process, you got on one and moved forward one.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: But with the plenary not everybody can see the chair, there is a column.

MS JAMES: Yes, it is a difficult building. I think the worst part of Crickhowell House unfortunately is the plenary room, the actual chamber. The columns there are a great shame. I think the rest of Crickhowell House in terms of facilities provided for members is good. I think there should be a new chamber.

PETER PRICE: On this committee staffing, what impact has the low staffing or almost totally inadequate staffing, because they have people just to run the very basics of pulling the meeting together, what impact has that had in terms of the selection of items from the agenda? Normally a secretariat which is able to ferret around can help the chairman as to what issues need to be put on the agenda and what priority they have. That is one of the key functions. Have you seen an impact in terms of the very uneven planning of what committees tackle and to what extent has the advertisement that Sir Michael was referring to earlier, and the staff now coming on stream, remedied completely this staffing issue?

MS JAMES: I think there are two or three questions there. The clerks to the subject committees, that is an interesting cohort of people who are in my experience of them very professional and do provide good support in the way you are talking about, the provision of agendas and forward planning. They have all got too much work to do and I think some of the adverts that you saw probably some of the support needs to be there. In some of them now there are deputy clerks and they have support for themselves.

The other issue is what Sir Michael was referring to which is the policy support. The clerking of the committees and the organisation of subject areas is one issue and then the policy support and expertise is another. Special advisers are used on some inquiries but for the most part there are not full-time, as it were, special advisers for committees. In Westminster one is aware of special advisers for select committees who will be subject specialists in that area and who will be distinct from the people who work in the ministry, the relevant department. There is not that particular cohort in the Assembly.

LORD RICHARD: Can I thank you very much indeed for coming. When you started off you said - I noted it down - what was happening was a new and Welsh way of delivering the new governance. Splendid phrase. What we have to do in this Commission I think is examine the validity of that. Thank you very much indeed for all your help. It has been extremely helpful.

MS JAMES: Thank you for asking me.