It’s been an interesting discussion so far, and it’s been good to hear so many people speak and have passionate views on this subject. Here in the UKIP group, we certainly recognise that local government has a major role to play in people’s everyday lives. So, it is important that, if we are going to have yet another major local government shake-up, which, as was pointed out earlier by R.T. Davies, we seem to have every 20 years, pretty punctually, then we need to make sure this time that we do get it right and, also, that we do not systematically take services further and further away from the people they are supposed to serve.

We do support some reorganisation of local government in Wales, but the massive reduction to nine councils proposed by the previous Minister—we believe that that was too big a reduction and would represent a major degradation in council services. In general, we support bottom-up reorganisation, rather than a top-down model, the kind of model that Leighton Andrews wanted to impose on the Welsh councils. We note with dismay that, when Vale of Glamorgan Council did come to a voluntary agreement with their neighbouring authority of Bridgend, the ambitions of those councils were rather casually rejected by the relevant Minister, who has, perhaps thankfully, now departed, although, of course, I’m sure he did good things here as well.

What people in the Vale do not want is to be submerged by Cardiff council and then swamped by huge housing developments on their green fields. This is a problem we already have facing us on the outskirts of Cardiff, as the new Plaid regional Member has repeatedly, and rightly, alluded to. We certainly don’t want that problem extended to the Vale of Glamorgan as well by a forced merger with Cardiff. I can tell you that Cardiff’s Labour-run authority would love to get its hands on those lovely fields in the Vale of Glamorgan.

Similarly, Rhondda Cynon Taf council should not be railroaded into a forced merger with Merthyr. RCT is already one of the biggest councils in Wales in terms of its population, and it’s quite capable, we believe, of standing on its own two feet.

Now, referring to other points that were made during the debate, Janet mentioned the number of uncontested seats, which is an obvious cause for concern. We believe that if you have these forced mergers, leading to super councils, they will be too large. This will lead to increasing lack of interest from the electorate in these elections, and you’ll probably have a lower turnout as a result. The Localism Act is interesting; that’s an interesting point. We tend to agree that we need to think about adopting more articles from that Act here in Wales, and there may be a debate here soon on a portion of that Act.

We also have the issue of the term of the next council, raised by R.T. Davies. I remember, in 1993, we had elections; they took place regardless of a local government reorganisation that was imminent at that time. We had county council elections in 1993; two years later, we had to have the unitary authority elections—really, a considerable waste of expense. In these times of local authority cuts, we need to make sure that we avoid that kind of duplication and that kind of waste of money this time around.

Oscar Asghar raised the issue of the call centres. I heard murmurs from that side that these council numbers cost nothing for the consumer to pay for when he’s ringing up, but I think the problem is, essentially, one of inaccessibility, because it takes a long time for people to get hold of the council. They are put through to a call centre. They’re not on a direct line to any council switchboard—. Well, it is essentially a switchboard. Sometimes also, these call centres serve more than one council; so, you might find that you ring a call centre enquiring about services in Cardiff and you’re speaking to someone in a call centre in Wrexham who knows nothing about what you’re talking about. So, we need to look at that, and we need to look at whether we need to have some statutory provision that we have to have locally-manned call centres, at least, so you don’t have people ringing up these lines and finding that they’re talking to people who have no local knowledge.

On the question of the Plaid Cymru amendment regarding voting reform, this is a very important issue. We believe that to encourage a higher turnout in the elections in Wales we do need to support the introduction of the single transferable vote in Welsh council elections. [Interruption.] Indeed, that may be the case, but we certainly do support that, and we are willing to collaborate with whoever else supports it. So, Sian, if you want to have a chat, then by all means do so, but of course it would mean collaborating with us here in UKIP, which may be an awful prospect for you. Thank you.