Can I thank Simon Thomas for what he said? I look forward to working with him and others who have ideas to contribute as to how we might achieve those ends. I’ll take his questions in reverse order, if I could. I intend town and community councils to be elected next year, on the same day as principal authorities. I’m not sure that I agree with him that we have the blueprint ready for the future of town and community councils in Wales. I want to empower them to do more in future where they do things well. I attended the annual conference of One Voice Wales at Builth Wells on Saturday. I don’t think, if you asked the audience there to give me the blueprint, they could have done it themselves. There is still an enormous variety of size, scale and ambition. I’ve seen some very good things. I was very pleased to be in Bala on Thursday of last week with Partneriaeth Penllyn, looking at the excellent work that they’ve done, and there is a possible model for rural community councils to work together there. But my impression from all the conversations I’ve had is that we are yet to be in a position where there is sufficient agreement around how we can strengthen that important tier of local democracy. I say to those who are involved in it: I use the word ‘democracy’ with some hesitation, where two thirds of seats on community councils are uncontested, and 1,000 seats were left for co-option at the last election. There is more to do, and more thinking to be done to get the very best out of that.

His first questions were about answerability in the system. There is a series of ways in which we already have regional arrangements in Wales—joint committees, combined authorities, joint authorities. I want to look at the detail of these different possibilities. They all throw up slightly different questions in terms of democratic answerability, but I think they all have solutions to them as well. Should elected mayors be part of all of that? Well, my approach so far has been to put the possibility of elected mayors there for local populations to decide and leave it for them to determine, rather than believing that, from the National Assembly, we should be directive to those local populations as to the choices that they would wish to make.