I welcome this statement. I think it does represent great progress. I particularly welcome the proposals that will ensure councils work together over issues like regional planning and transport. Of course, we’ve got a very good example already happening in the Cardiff capital region, with 10 local authorities already working closely together to deliver the city deal and, of course, the metro. I’ve also been very pleased to work with my colleague Hefin David on supporting a green belt between Cardiff and Caerphilly, and, last year, we worked together to press for a regional approach to the development of housing on the Caerphilly side of the mountain, which, of course, impacts on the Cardiff North side in terms of traffic. Does he agree that these proposals will make it much easier to tackle these sorts of issues in a regional way and in a way that takes the local authorities’ views—surrounding views—into account?

I also am very pleased about the proposal for the votes for 16 and 17 year olds. I think this is a great opportunity to include young people in our decision making. Does he think that we will have 16 and 17 year olds standing as councillors? Would he welcome that, and would he perhaps agree that we do need a much greater diversification of councillors in any case, and, if we have a lot of young people, that will help towards that? But, of course, there are other groups as well, and some of my concerns about joint governance committees are, if, for example, there’s a joint governance committee of the leaders of the local authorities, as things stand at the moment, most of those would be almost totally male, and we have very few women council leaders—one or two, perhaps. I don’t know whether there’s any way that that can be tackled through this legislation, but, obviously, it could be a consequence of this legislation that the governance committees are not representative of the people as a whole. But, overall, I think this is a great step forward.