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Welsh Ministers (Transfer of Functions) Order 2008

My Lords, I too welcome the context in which the draft order is presented and its contents. The general context is that of devolution, and it bears out the famous words of Mr Ron Davies when the Welsh Assembly was established that this was the beginning of a process rather than a single happening. Here we have the transfer of two fairly limited executive functions to Wales. The Section 86 transfer gives Welsh Ministers jurisdiction in relation to civil patients in mental hospitals and thereby removes an anomaly that has existed for quite a long time. Anybody who has had any dealings with the Home Office in relation to the Mental Health Act 1983 will appreciate that the boundary between health jurisdiction and that of the Home Office runs right through that Act. I can remember some conflict when I had the pleasure of being a Junior Minister in the Home Office. The anomaly exists because this situation was entirely at the join between the jurisdictions of those two departments. When, in 2007, that situation was resolved as far as England and Wales were concerned generally, by allocating the criminal functions to the Home Office and the health functions under Part 2 of the Act to health Ministers, clearly Wales had to follow suit and remove that anomaly. The protection for the individual remains and the rules remain basically the same for Wales as for England, save that the executive decision will now be made by Welsh Ministers. It would have been entirely absurd for the certificate on the sale of good will under Section 259 of the National Health Service Act 2006 to have been granted in relation to a Welsh situation by anybody other than a Welsh Minister or, more correctly, the body advising on behalf of the Welsh Minister. The noble Lord, Lord Livsey, has already drawn attention to the historic significance of this first order made under Section 58 of the Government of Wales Act 2006. It is surprising, bearing in mind the volume of activity in this field, that something has not come along earlier. Be that as it may, we welcome it very much. I hope it is indicative of the way in which devolution in Wales will develop along three paths: first, under Part 3 of the Act; secondly, as far as ministerial transfers are concerned; and, thirdly, the framework provision transfers which we have already been concerned with over the past few years. The canard was widely circulated in Wales when the Government of Wales Act was considered that the Welsh Assembly could be nothing more than a Glamorgan County Council on stilts. Whatever truth there was in that, we now have the division between the Executive and the National Assembly, making the Welsh Assembly much more in the outline of a Parliament than ever before. The noble Lord, Lord Livsey, mentioned a matter which I had considered while looking at these papers: whether one was taking power out of the hands of a democratic Assembly—as would have been the case before the 2006 legislation—and transferring it to the single hand of a Minister. I think that it was in 1935 that Sir Gordon Hewart wrote his book The New Despotism, describing how jurisdiction and authority moved from the Benches of the other place and this House to the hands of a single Minister. For the past 75 years, it has been one inexorable drift in that direction. Although I agree to some extent with the point of the noble Lord, Lord Livsey, we must accept that, and it has long been accepted.