I thank you, Llŷr, for your comments and questions this afternoon and for your welcome of the establishment of the endowment. This is, indeed, a joint initiative between myself and my colleague, and the split is 50-50: 50 per cent, or £500,000, from myself, and the same from my colleague. I have to say that, at present, we have no plans to add additionally. The task and finish group, as you will be aware, recommended that there should be a feasibility study into the possibility of setting up an endowment. Work was carried out previously with regard to that, and I was very keen, as was my colleague Ken Skates, to be able to make progress on that recommendation as quickly as possible. The purpose of the Government’s funding is: (1) to enable the arts council to set up the fund—so, there is somebody needed to find that resource so that the fund could initially be set up—and then the additional money is there as an incentive and a contribution to having the initial investment into the fund, and a demonstration to others that the fund exists. Hopefully, we will be able to attract other investment from both public and private sector sources as we go forward.

Our ability to be able to make payments from the endowment will indeed be subject to how quickly we can raise the capital needed. I would love to be in a position that we can start making grants from 2020, but it is dependent on how quickly we can grow the fund into a sizable lump sum that will then allow the interest to be made. It’s too early, Llŷr, at this stage to say whether the co-operative that you talked of would be subject to funding. That is for the steering group that we anticipate the arts council will set up. So, it’s not just the mechanics of actually setting up the fund but actually setting up a steering group that will look at all these issues—identifying need and the kind of projects that we feel would be worthy of being funded. That kind of co-operative approach I think has demonstrated the commitment of people on the ground to try and overcome some of the undoubtedly—and I don’t want to shy away from this at all—real challenges that music services in schools have faced. There have been groups such as the one you mentioned—and I am familiar in my own constituency with the South Powys Youth Music organisation—which have really worked very, very hard to address the gaps and to find new ways around the very difficult financial situation to continue to provide those opportunities for young people. I would want to take this opportunity to applaud groups, like the one you mentioned and others, that are working so creatively to create these opportunities for people.

With regard to the task and finish group, as I said in my statement, this was a recommendation from the group. The majority of the recommendations from that group were for local government to take forward. Civil servants here in my department and in Ken Skates’s department continue to work very closely with the WLGA and local authorities around moving forward on those recommendations. I would be more than happy for my colleague—I’m sure he would be more than happy to provide a written update on those because that falls under his portfolio. I’m sure that that would not be a problem at all.