Shadow Counsel General and North Wales MS Mark Isherwood has asked the Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution, Mick Antoniw MS, to respond to the proposal for the Welsh Tribunals unit to become a non-ministerial department.
The Law Commission issued a consultation paper on “Devolved Tribunals in Wales” last December to help shape the Tribunals Bill for Wales, designed to regulate a single system for tribunals in Wales. This is now at policy development stage.
Questioning the Counsel General during Wednesday’s meeting of the Welsh Parliament, Mr Isherwood said:
“Given your responsibility for Tribunals, what is your initial response to the consultation paper's proposals to, in particular, ‘reform the Welsh Tribunals Unit, the part of the Welsh Government which currently administers most devolved tribunals, into a non-ministerial department’, but also to ‘standardise the processes for appointing and dismissing members of the tribunals, and introducing a greater role for the President of Welsh Tribunals’, to ‘standardise procedural rules across the tribunals, and introduce a new Tribunal Procedure Committee to ensure that rules are kept up-to-date’, to ‘replace the existing separate tribunals with a single unified first-tier tribunal, broken down into chambers catering for similar claims’, and, finally, to ‘bring the Valuation Tribunal for Wales and school exclusion appeal panels within the new unified first-tier tribunal’?”
Responding, the Counsel General said:
“it is very timely now in terms of all the developments taking place around the development of the Welsh jurisdiction, that we now look at the tribunals, we look at how they can be more effective, how they can be streamlined, how they can deliver justice more effectively, more accessibly. And I look forward to the recommendations of the Commission and also with a view to the possible introduction of legislation on the reform of the Tribunal system.”