Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:30 pm on 8 November 2016.
I’d like to thank the Member for her questions. I think it’s absolutely essential that anybody who feels confused about the proposals reads what the options are and assesses carefully what the options are, because after assessing what those four options are, I think it will be abundantly clear to anybody that wholescale merges are not on the table. The Member asked—and I’m sorry I didn’t pick up on the question that Suzy Davies asked about what lessons have been learnt about the proposal many years ago to merge fully Cadw and the royal commission—well, the chief lesson that was learnt from that is that you don’t fully merge institutions. What you can do is encourage those institutions to work together more for mutual benefit. So, I’d invite anybody who feels confused about the future to read what those four options are and to be assured that the steering group will propose recommendations that will be consulted on as part of a public consultation where people and organisations will be able to make observations, not just in terms of the recommendations but also the four options. I wish this process to be transparent and I wish as many people as possible to be engaged in it. But when I say that as many people as possible should be engaged in it, we should be doing more to reach out to those individuals, those families, those communities who, as I’ve repeatedly said, in the past, and still to this day, feel excluded from cultural activity for one or a number of reasons—whether it be psychological or physical, it doesn’t matter, too many people still do not feel that they are part of Wales’s culture. That needs to be addressed. The relevance of our institutions must be addressed—[Interruption.]