Adam Evans

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Honorary Research Fellow at Cardiff University

In January 2025, the Standards of Conduct Committee of the Senedd Cymru (Welsh Parliament) published a series of proposals for a system of recall to be established for Members of the Senedd (MSs). The Committee’s work in this area followed directly from the “Senedd reform” process which has been underway during the Sixth Senedd (2021-26) and the re...

The New Labour Government of 1997 to 2010 oversaw considerable constitutional reforms, particularly in relation to the United Kingdom’s territorial constitution. While devolution to Scotland and Wales, and the peace process that saw the re-establishment of devolved institutions to Northern Ireland (notwithstanding their subsequent instability), wil...

In May 2024, the Senedd Cymru (Members and Elections) Bill completed its legislative journey through the Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament. The bill marks the latest chapter in the Senedd's evolution from an assembly established with no formally separated executive branch and no primary legislative powers into a lawmaking and tax-raising parliament. It...

This analysis paper explores the post-2022 collapse in power sharing and ponders whether indirect rule has now supplanted direct rule as the default alternative to a functioning Executive at Stormont.

Devolution to Scotland and Wales was a central pillar of the legislative agenda of the Labour government elected in 1997, yet despite the constitutional significance of this programme it was undertaken without particular enthusiasm by the then prime minister, Tony Blair. Nowhere was this blend of significant change, yet pervasive lack of passion (o...

2024 marks twenty five years since the first elections to, and meeting of, the National Assembly for Wales. The Assembly had been established by the narrowest of margins at a referendum in 1997. However, supporters of devolution would have no form of honeymoon period. Instead, the period of Autumn 1998 to February 2000 marked what might almost be s...

New Labour’s Devolution programme represented a major reform to the working of the UK’s constitution. While devolution has a longer pre-history than is sometimes appreciated, including in the form of the 1921-72 Stormont model of devolved governance in Northern Ireland, the post-1997 reforms were nonetheless a remarkable constitutional moment. Howe...

Introduction On 13 July 2021, the House of Commons voted to rescind the English Votes for English Laws (EVEL) standing orders. This result, a victory of Gove (the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and allegedly a strong proponent in recent months for repealing the offending standing orders) over EVEL brought to end the most recent attempt to use...

This article explores the background to, and development of, the office of the Minister for Welsh Affairs, established by Churchill's Government in October 1951.

Examines the main features of Northern Ireland's model of indirect rule between 2017 and 2020. Reviews the operation of direct rule between 1972 and 2007, the emergence of indirect rule, and its key characteristics, including governance by civil servants. Discusses the end of indirect rule, why direct rule did not replace it, the constitutional pro...

The story of devolution in the United Kingdom is a long and chequered one which long predates the establishment of devolved legislatures in Scotland and Wales after referendums in 1997. The devolution programme of Tony Blair’s Labour Government came eighteen years after the failure of the 1974–79 Labour Government’s attempts at establishing Scottis...

The question of whether devolved assemblies should be established for Scotland and Wales dominated considerable parliamentary time in the 1970s and became a key pillar of the Labour government's legislative agenda after the two 1974 general elections. The main building blocks of the government's devolution proposals for Scotland and Wales were in p...

Since the Treaty and Acts of Union in 1707, Scotland has returned MPs to Westminster. Whilst dwarfed, at least demographically by its partner in that Union, England, Scotland has, on a number of occasions, punched above its weight at the Centre—most notably at either end of the twentieth century when Liberalism and then Labour dominated Scottish po...

The legislative consent convention forms one of a number of conventions that underpin the UK’s uncodified constitution and has been an important facet of the UK’s territorial governance post‐devolution. It provides that the UK government will not normally seek to legislate on devolved matters, and the devolution settlements, without the consent of...

Interparliamentary relations do not attract much in the way of public or even academic attention. However, they are an aspect of parliamentary life in which there has been a series of experiments by select committees in the House of Commons. While one of the more prominent examples of such experimentation was the international grand committee on Bi...

The territorial departmental select committees have largely escaped academic scrutiny since their establishment in 1979 (for Scotland and Wales) and 1994 (Northern Ireland). This article charts the history of territorial representation in Westminster, including the creation of grand committees for Scotland and Wales and a Northern Ireland Standing...

Since 1997, the United Kingdom’s territorial constitution has undergone an immense process of change and has resulted in the establishment of separate legislatures and governments for the peoples of Scotland, Wales and, when Stormont is operational, Northern Ireland. These changes have spawned a whole series of relationships between the institution...

For as long as devolution has been debated in the UK, there has been fierce discussion as to the representation of the would‐be affected areas at Westminster. That this has been the case is a consequence of Westminster's dual remit as both a state‐wide and a sub‐state legislature. While this dual remit was relatively straightforward when applied to...

Both during and since the 2016 referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union, concerns were raised as to the absence of contingency planning within Whitehall. This situation was in direct contrast with 1975, when extensive planning took place for the possibility of a vote to leave the European Community. However, there has been little in...

The Conference on Devolution, 1919–1920 has been a little studied event in Britain’s constitutional history. However, recent analysis has shed new light on this little studied moment in British constitutional history. Building on Evans (2015), this article focuses on the Conference’s deliberations on the units that would be represented by devolutio...

This article looks at one of the more obscure moments in British constitutional history, the rise of federal devolution in the United Kingdom in the early 20th century and, in particular, the context to the Conference on Devolution that sat between October 1919 and April 1920. The conference, as this article will briefly discuss, has been relegated...

The Conference on Devolution, which sat between October 1919 and April 1920, has been largely relegated to footnote status, a curiosity attracting only minimal attention in the academic literature. In the admittedly sparse literature on the conference, the Judiciary sub-committee has attracted scant attention and yet it is one of the most fascinati...

In the wake of the repeated electoral losses suffered by the Scottish and Welsh Liberal Democrats in 2011 and 2012, it is perhaps unsurprising that recent analysis has focused on the ‘toxic impact of the federal party's coalition with the Conservative party’ on the devolved state parties electoral fortunes. Certainly this significant electoral coll...

Amid the fallout from the Scottish independence referendum, a UK constitutional convention has been proposed as a mechanism to take stock not only of the referendum, but also of the past fifteen years of devolution. However, despite longstanding conceptions of British constitutional development, a constitutional convention would not herald a brave...

In the decades since the Conference on Devolution's proceedings concluded in stalemate in April 1920, the Conference has been consigned to the margins of political and constitutional history. However, within this limited literature, one interpretation of the Conference's proceedings has been universally held: that the subject of the powers the devo...

Of the main UK political parties, the Liberal Democrats have been unique in their commitment to federalism. This federalism stretches to the Liberal Democrats’ organisational structure and constitution and to their vision for the structure of the United Kingdom as a whole. A decade after devolution, and with proposals for further reform of the cons...

This paper contributes to the growing literature on intra-party politics within state-wide political parties in multi-level systems of governance. Specifically it focuses on the respective positions of the Scottish and Welsh Liberal Democrats within the party federally up to the autumn of 2012. Whilst there has been a longstanding perception that t...