Yes, but I’m here in the Senedd, and I’m on about what the Welsh Labour Government and Plaid Cymru—how you have failed in this.

In 2015, the chief executive of Gwynedd county council was paid £306,000, and my colleague Neil McEvoy there raised the differential between local chief executives and the Prime Minister. Yet £306,000 was paid here and, to the director of environment at Blaenau Gwent—eye-watering or what—£295,000. Yes, definitely, you were right to compare that with the salary of our hard-working UK Prime Minister. There is no correlation whatsoever. You were very right earlier to make the point about how, in addition to this, some chief executives, including my own in Conwy, actually receive a salary of over £20,000 for being the electoral returning officer. That actually needs to be addressed, I believe, by the Minister.

Performance management and the chief executive appraisal procedures must be better implemented and monitored appropriately. Evidence taken by the Public Accounts Committee, ahead of their report into senior management pay last term, demonstrated cross-stakeholder calls—many of them—for this, alongside the acknowledgement that local authorities need to do much better in terms of performance management. How often have we seen what I call the revolving-door process where a head of service will actually leave an organisation with a really fine redundancy amount and then actually enter the same local authority again under another guise in another role? It’s quite wrong.

In 2014-15, Welsh councils spent over £100 million on redundancy pay-outs for staff. That was up 46 per cent on the previous year. The Westminster Committee on Standards in Public Life recently recommended that policies and procedures should be in place to manage revolving-door situations where individuals come from or go to the regulated sector, and that these should apply to all individuals at any level of any organisation. Regulators should be transparent about post-employment destinations and restrictions on departing board members and senior executives in the public sector. The reason I’m smiling is that we see so much Labour cronyism in Wales with many of the jobs that go to many within our public bodies, and it’s wrong.

In light of moving towards local government reform, and with the potential for voluntary mergers on the table once more, it is pertinent to note that the society of local chief execs and senior managers have highlighted local authorities in England that have started to share chief executives. Cabinet Secretary, now, with local reform on the table, where there seems to be an intention for you to retain all 22 local authorities, is it going to be 22 chief executives and 22 heads of service on extortionate eye-watering salaries? If you could address those, I think many people outside the Senedd will actually be very grateful. Thank you.