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Government of Wales Bill

The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, is right that Wales has national problems. It is important that Members of the Assembly should grasp those problems on a national scale. At the same time, those problems will not be recognised in detail unless the Members have a local attachment to a constituency or, as 20 Members currently have, to a region. That is why the old European regional constituency was adopted by the Government as the basis for the current regional membership. I agree with all the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Norton, which are extremely effective, because in an area such as Wales, which has a spread of population, it is clearly very difficult to devise a system that does not favour populous industrial areas at the expense of rural areas and that overcomes the problem of distance between the representative and his electors.