Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. Cabinet Secretary, thank you for your statement. I’d like to put on record my appreciation and congratulations to all the sporting men and women who have performed on various pitches in various cities in various sports, across the globe in fact, throughout a summer of sporting excellence and brilliance that I think we all thoroughly enjoyed. And that really is the point, that the sporting dynamic behind all these major events has radically changed over the last 20 years with the advent of satellite tv and cable tv, which does demand these multi-venue destinations to obviously portray that platform for which tv dollars or tv pounds—call it what you will—pays into the coffers of those respective sports.

It is disappointing that, regrettably, we will not be bidding for the Commonwealth Games. I’ve heard what the Secretary has had to say this afternoon. I would ask if perhaps the Secretary could make available a briefing session for Assembly Members with the consultants who provided the report so that Assembly Members can question them in some depth over some of the conclusions that came forward. I would say to the Cabinet Secretary that, in my conversations with Ministers and Secretaries of State up at the other end of the M4, there was support for a bid coming from Wales and that support would have materialised in financial backing as well. They did have to have some idea of what the finances were that you were going to be seeking and, as I understood it, no requests or no detailed responses were put before Secretaries of State or Ministers at the other end of the M4 for them to consider. So I would ask the Cabinet Secretary to give it some consideration, because, as I understand it, it is not too late to submit a bid for the Commonwealth Games. That window is still open, and I do believe that there is an opportunity for this decision to be revisited—albeit that I do hear what you say about the impact on grass-roots sports, and that is a consideration that does have to be taken by Government, because my next point that I was going to make about the statement you’ve made today is, highlighting on grass-roots sports, which you mention in the statement, that many councils across Wales have taken double- or triple-digit increases in the sporting fees that they levy on amateur clubs to play on a weekly basis, and this, in many instances, has made those clubs either have to amalgamate or shut their doors. So, I would be grateful for an indication of what discussions you have across Government as to how the Government can work with local authorities to make the fees affordable to many voluntary clubs the length and breadth of Wales. This isn’t one specific area, this is happening across all local authorities for obvious reasons—financial constraints on their budget.

I do note that you do, in your statement, list a series of events that have gone on around Wales. One of the jewels in the crown, I would suggest, of facilities that we have in Wales, which isn’t naturally considered as a sporting venue in the first instance, is the Royal Welsh showground in mid Wales. That has increasingly been used as either a stopover or a start or a finish point for many of the rallying type of events. I noticed last week that the chief executive of the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society was talking about trying to attract more of this type of event to mid Wales. I’d be grateful if the Cabinet Secretary could give an indication: are the Government engaged with stakeholders like the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society in developing what wouldn’t traditionally be seen as a sporting venue to add to the armoury of destinations that we do have to offer international and domestic organisers of these events?

I would also ask the Cabinet Secretary to try and inform us, as regards the horizon scanning he talks about in his statement, as to what type of events he believes, going forward, in the next 18 months to two years, we might reasonably expect Wales to be in a position to bid for and, indeed, secure the rights to host those events.

Importantly, my final point is around infrastructure more generally. I had a conversation with the FAW recently, at the last international, and they were talking excitedly about the Champions League final that’s coming next May, but obviously they were highlighting the real issues around simple things like hotel beds, for example, and the availability of the local infrastructure to accommodate such big-ticket events. Many people will be leaving straight after that event because the local infrastructure will not be able to accommodate the mass of people who are coming, and in fact they’ll be pushed back over the Severn bridge to Swindon, to Reading, to Bristol, because those cities have a bigger infrastructure to support provision for travelling fans. So, it is important that, from a Government point of view, you work with operators, you work with providers to provide that infrastructure just on transport as well as hotel accommodation and sporting promotion. Thank you.