Can I thank Mike Hedges for what he said in opening? He will know that some of my thinking has been much influenced by discussions with him, and some of his views and in-depth experience of the way that local government works on the ground. In relation to his point about back-office services, a number of Members have made this point—Gareth Bennett made it as well—about the way in which jobs are affected when services are consolidated. The White Paper suggests a gradualist approach to this, but a determined sense that we are on that journey together. In the health service, it took 10 years to go from every health body providing everything for itself to a single national shared service, and sensitivity was needed along the way when it was people’s jobs that were being affected by those decisions. I would hope that I would be very determined that if highly paid jobs were to be affected by back-office consolidation, those jobs would be located in a way that is consistent with the Welsh Government’s economic approach—in other words, those jobs would be deliberately located in those places where the jobs would make the greatest difference. So, I think there are ways in which we can address the issue that the Member very properly raises.

In relation to his three specific questions, there will be different views—we’ve heard them already—on the way in which we can approach a permissive system of choosing electoral arrangements, and where people have ideas to add to the pool that we have laid out in the White Paper, then I’ll be very keen to hear those in the consultation. I do hope, Llywydd, that Members of all political parties here, and the political parties themselves, will want to be interested in the wider set of reforms that the White Paper sets out, using the new powers that we will have to change the way in which we conduct elections in order to make them more accessible and available to people who we want to see participating in them.

Mike Hedges asks me about the size of regional committees. There is a section in the White Paper, in part 2, from memory, that provides some flexibility over the membership of the regional governance committees. I think the only principle it sets down as one that we are currently committed to is that, if there is flexibility, it still means that the flexibility is equally available to all local authorities who are members of the committee. In other words, if you have three members from one council, you’ve got to have three members from them all, and so on.

Finally, in relation to moving all Welsh Government activity into these footprints, we discussed this White Paper, of course, at the Cabinet. I know that my colleagues are committed to that same wish to try and simplify the pattern of regional footprints in Wales, to try and consolidate the work we do on fewer footprints, but to do that in a way that allows time to migrate from things that we have working today to the arrangements we will have in the future, and to do that in a way that is sensitive to those arrangements that are currently working and that we wouldn’t want to disrupt.