---

Legislative Programme and Budget Statement (Wales)

My right hon. Friend said that she will remain entirely neutral to ensure fairness. As the Chairman of the Welsh Affairs Committee, I will remain neutral as well, but if I am asked how I will vote —I will have a vote in Wales—I will not hide the answer. I will not try to pretend that the past 11 years have not happened. I will say quite honestly what my view is and at the same time try to ensure fairness. I do not think that those two things are incompatible. From the perspective of 11 years in Parliament and the Assembly, I got some things wrong about the Assembly. I sneered at the family-friendly hours when they were set up. I thought it was a bit of shirker’s charter. I am not sure whether I put it in those terms but I was certainly dismissive. I look around here after five years and this place is a breaker of families. We have all gone through the mill in the past year. We could learn a lot from some of the Welsh Assembly’s working practices and it behoves people like me who have been negative about it to accept that and to admit that it got some things right. The whole thing was set up from scratch in 1999. We are still running this place like an 18th century London gentleman’s club, coming in at 2.30 in the afternoon and finishing at 10 or 11 o’clock at night. Why do we have to do that? I do not know. Again, that is veering a long way from Welsh affairs. Suffice it to say, the Welsh Assembly has got some things right. It could learn from our Select Committee system, which, from what I have seen, works far better in Westminster than in the Welsh Assembly, possibly because of the numbers of people there. One of the roles of the Welsh Affairs Committee can be to offer constructive criticism and solutions to the Welsh Assembly and the Secretary of State for Wales, remembering at all times that, if we can do it unanimously with opinions as diverse as mine and—I could say those of my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire, but perhaps I should look at Plaid Cymru Members, it is likely that those reports will carry some weight. Many of us in the past year must have asked ourselves what we are doing here when we get so much antipathy, hatred and lack of understanding from the press and many in the outside world. Yet we all won our seats. People wanted us to come here and represent them. If it is not too trite and clichéd, although it probably will sound it, I think we all know that we can make a difference in ways big and small. The Welsh Assembly can play a role in making a difference, and I hope that we can all work together to achieve that.