Well, Dirprwy Lywydd, I am keen to learn from all local authorities in Wales, of all political persuasions. I enjoyed my visit to Monmouth. I’m grateful for an invitation to return there, which I intend to take up over the coming months, and I’m sure that there’ll be an opportunity to discuss those views with the leader there.

The Government amendment is intended to clarify our position on a number of important points. We leave the second element of the original motion intact. We amend the first element to broaden the reference to electoral reform to a reform of electoral arrangements in the round. Unlike Gareth Bennett, we, on this side, support the reduction of the voting age to 16. I listened with interest to his argument: that it was unwise to provide the vote to people who are prone to brawling, and that a difficulty in sustaining a rational argument was another reason for confining the franchise. He may have been reading a pamphlet provided by his own party. Certainly, I remind him of the advice of Hayek, the famous Austrian economist, who was Mrs Thatcher’s favourite author, who argued that the voting age should be raised to 45 on many of the arguments that Mr Bennett put forward this afternoon. For us, we support the voting age at 16. I said as much to the Government Minister for the Constitution, Chris Skidmore, when he was here in the Assembly last week. I told him that I wanted to move to a system where electoral registration becomes much more of an automatic process, and that that could apply particularly to school students, so that we could make sure that 16 and 17-year-olds were on the register to vote. I want to look at ways in which people’s voting can be made easier: electronic voting, holding elections on different days of the week. We must make voting as accessible as possible, better align it to the way that people live their lives today, and our amendment is there to draw attention to that wider range of electoral reform possibilities.