Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Good afternoon from Wales, where the Senedd has been continuing to meet virtually since we had the lockdown here in the U.K.
I'd like to talk briefly about how we've made changes. I'll structure my talking under four headings: the political will that was required to have the Senedd continue to meet during these times, the procedural ability to do so in terms of the changes that we made and those changes that we did not need to make, how we got it up and running, and how we will keep it up. A lot of the points that Matthew raised are also pertinent to our experiences here in Wales.
First, where there's a political will, there's a way. Our Llywydd or Speaker and the First Minister of Wales were determined that the Senedd would continue to meet during the COVID-19 emergency. They decided that we would suspend our planned Easter recess and that the Senedd would continue to meet. That was for two reasons.
The nature of the devolution settlement in Wales is such that, at times like these, the assembly in Wales and the legislatures in the U.K. had agreed that certain powers would be taken up to the United Kingdom level for coordination across the United Kingdom. That led to an unprecedented situation where the U.K. Parliament was legislating for Welsh ministers to have powers to make subordinate legislation that would not necessarily require the approval of the assembly. The First Minister and the Llywydd were very keen that the Senedd could continue to meet to look into how that was going to happen in operation.
There was cross-party support for a continuation, so no members objected to this on the grounds of public health. By political agreement there was a smaller, emergency Senedd, a smaller number of members to come together to meet to continue business. This was all premised on physical meeting prior to the lockdown in the United Kingdom.
We indeed had a meeting of the Senedd in a smaller form, and at that time we agreed to a raft of emergency standing orders to enable the continuity of the business of the Senedd going forward. They included new recall provisions where the Llywydd could recall the assembly—hitherto it had been the First Minister who could recall the assembly—and a reduced quorum. The quorum for 60 members usually is 10, and we reduced the quorum to four, enabling business continuity in an extreme scenario.