Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)

My Lords, when my noble friend was the First Minister, and slightly before that, when I was the Secretary of State, I was less of a campaigner for this issue than he was. But I recognise that times have changed over the last few years. I am told that devolution is a process rather than an event—something that I have witnessed myself over the last 20-odd years that I have been involved in Welsh politics at a ministerial level. But two or three things have occurred literally within the last year or so that mean we have to bend our minds to something that I was not all that keen on all those years ago. First, as my noble friend said, the Labour Party manifesto indicated that youth justice and probation were now to be matters for the Welsh Government and the Welsh Senedd. Like my noble friend, I was a member of Gordon Brown’s commission, and that was something we all agreed on. I look forward to my noble friend the Minister’s response on those specific issues, which we must not forget. On the issue of policing generally and its devolution, the view over a number of years was that it was quite hard to devolve policing without devolving criminal justice. The noble Baroness referred to Scotland and Northern Ireland. Scotland historically has had both over many centuries. Northern Ireland has not—it did and then it did not after the collapse of the first Stormont arrangement. Indeed, when I was Northern Ireland Secretary, I held responsibility for criminal justice and for policing until the Good Friday agreement made the difference by recommending that both those issues should eventually be devolved to Northern Ireland, which they have been, and very successfully too. Two things have occurred over the last few weeks. First, my noble friend the Minister came to the Chamber and told us that police and crime commissioners were to be abolished. I do not think that that was in the manifesto, but I entirely concur with it. However, if we are to abolish police and crime commissioners, the responsibility for accountability has to lie with somebody. In England, there are mayors and the new organisations which will follow the devolution Bill, but in Wales there are no such institutions. There are no mayors and no local authorities which currently have a responsibility for policing. We have to find out what happens in Wales when that Bill goes through. That makes us think more about general police devolution. Secondly, my right honourable friend the Home Secretary has now decided in the White Paper on policing that there will be far fewer police authorities and police boards in England. What happens then? Will the current four police forces in Wales be abolished? Will we have two or one for the whole of Wales? I do not know but obviously there will be a change if the White Paper affects Wales as much as England. Those two issues mean that we have to bend our minds to what we do about policing in the months ahead. Those months ahead will inevitably be complicated by the fact that in 60 days’ time there will be an election in Wales, the outcome of which none of us knows but it will undoubtedly be something we have to deal with in a rather different way from how we have over the past 100 years.