Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:18 pm on 21 June 2023.
Alun Davies
Labour
5:18,
21 June 2023
I very much welcome the contribution of the new leader of Plaid Cymru, and I should congratulate him on his election last week and wish him best wishes for the future in that role.
The devolution of policing and criminal justice is something we've discussed here on a number of occasions, and it is possible to find that elusive cigarette paper of difference between the Plaid Cymru benches and the Labour benches on this matter. But my advice would be not to try to do that, but to seek unity and to seek agreement on these matters, rather than to seek Division, because this is an emergency. This is an ongoing emergency in our country. It's not an academic or abstract concept, something for lawyers to talk about late at night, something for constitutional anoraks to converse over when they've run out of every other abstract concept to converse over. This is an emergency that affects people in this country today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and it is women, I believe, that suffer the worst excesses of the failure of this system.
The administration of criminal justice and policing in Wales is broken. It's broken—structurally broken—by a system that was never designed to work in the context of democratic self-government in Wales. We should recognise that. What I would seek to do, and—. I've heard this debate, and quite often we have some very sterile arguments, I'm afraid, on a Wednesday afternoon over this matter. I've absolutely no doubt at all that Mark Isherwood will join the debate in a few minutes and will quote us a speech that he made in 2018 or 2017 and will quote his speech again from 2020 where he lists the crimes that were committed by people from Merseyside or elsewhere in north Wales. It is right and proper that we discuss these matters, Mark, but we have to have a more intelligent conversation as well.
If you look at policing, for example, across the United Kingdom, it's devolved in every single administration in the United Kingdom, and it's devolved in cities of England, such as Manchester and London. Nobody is suggesting that these places are oases of crime with no relationship to places elsewhere. Nobody is suggesting that police forces in Wales have no relationship with police forces across the border or elsewhere. Nobody is suggesting that we don't speak to each other, we don't work together. Nobody is suggesting that we create some sort of iron curtain across our borders and prevent police officers here speaking to colleagues elsewhere. Nobody is suggesting those things. Those straw men that are put up to argue the case against devolution need to be recognised for what they are.
I think here the Conservatives and, frankly, some people within the Labour Party, are making a fundamental error of judgment when it comes to what this means. I want to see a strong United Kingdom and I want to see a stable United Kingdom, and the asymmetrical form of devolution we had in the United Kingdom back in the 1990s probably fairly reflected the wishes of the people of Wales in 1999, and I think it is important to recognise that. But what reflected our views 25 years ago doesn't reflect our views on the structure of government today, and government needs to move and the constitution needs to move to recognise that. What that means is that symmetrical devolution, certainly on the island of Great Britain between Wales, Scotland and the rest of the UK—and England—is important in terms of the structure of the United Kingdom and enabling the United Kingdom to have the governance that we all require.
This is a point I want to make to our Conservative colleagues: it is a mistake to confuse unionism with centralism. If you had listened to a debate in the House of Commons some time ago, you had some of the fiercest Northern Irish unionists arguing for the devolution of policing and justice to Wales because they recognise that a strong union is a union where each constituent part of that union has similar structures and similar powers available to it, because that creates a stability within the union. If you've got the MP for Strangford or wherever arguing for devolution of justice and policing, you can be pretty sure they're not doing it because it's also supported by Sinn Fein. You can be pretty sure as well that they understand the importance of the devolution of these matters for the union in the future.
What I hope we'll be able to do—and I would like to hear the Counsel General's response to this—as the Victims and Prisoners Bill is currently in front of the Houses of Parliament in London: what is the view of the Welsh Government in terms of a legislative consent motion here? It appears to me that much of the content of that Bill should be enacted here and should reflect the priorities of this place and the Welsh Government, and not simply a Government in London that doesn't recognise the importance of these matters to people here in Wales and the structures that exist in Wales in order to deliver policy—
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