Thank you to the committee Chair for setting out the committee’s concerns in a very clear manner. You will have noted that there are many concerns raised by the committee. I’m going to focus on two aspects of the equality committee’s report and the Welsh Government’s response to that report: I want to look at the delivery plan and the role of education.

In recommendation 8, our committee called for clarity on the legal status of the delivery plan, and for dates for the publication of that plan. This was because we are determined that the delivery plan must be one that is legally enforceable or its value, without that, is severely reduced. Without a publication date, there could be inconsistency as local strategies are developed and as local services are commissioned. In responding to the committee, the Welsh Government accepts the recommendations, but then contradicts itself, in a way, saying that the legal status and timetable for publication will be considered by the task and finish group, which met for the first time this month. Now, that doesn’t sound like an issue that has been given urgent attention. Once again, we see the Welsh Government far too slow in delivering in this area. There’s no mention of our concerns about the timetables, the inconsistencies, or whether the plan can be implemented and delivered once those services have been commissioned.

I’m also concerned about the development of healthy relationship education in our schools. This is a preventative measure that is crucial in order to ensure that our young people grow up confident in how to deal with situations of abuse and to identify abuse in the very first place. The original White Paper for the legislation included healthy relationship education on a mandatory basis, and there is very robust evidence for delivering this as part of the curriculum. I accept that it may be part of the curriculum for the future, as the Cabinet Secretary for Education has mentioned, but what about the here and now? What about next September? We know that very young students do suffer gender inequality and stereotyping in school, which can have an effect on the quality of their education and their relationships with fellow pupils and students. Identifying unhealthy relationships is crucial. There’s been some debate in this place on this issue and, ultimately, the Government included new duties for local authorities, namely that they would have to report on how they were dealing with the issue in education.

But, our committee heard that there was no timetable for delivering this duty. So, we made a recommendation that the Welsh Government should implement regulations in terms of the publication of information by local authorities on the purposes of the Act. Our recommendation was that local authorities should start to introduce their reports and that the Welsh Government should ask them to do that at the beginning of the 2017-18 academic year, which is next September. Unfortunately, the response is utterly inadequate. What the Government say is that there may be an opportunity to gather data about what’s happening in terms of healthy relationships in our schools, which is a long way from what the committee recommended. That’s to say, in some specific schools, it may be possible to look at what’s happening through the medium of the work that Women’s Aid and others are carrying out in those schools, but that will be very limited indeed—it’ll be patchy rather than providing the consistency that we need.

There is a broader point here. The committee report notes serious problems with delivery and the pace of delivery. Indeed, sluggishness is the adjective that comes to mind in terms of that delivery, and, once again, we do need to move with pace before people start to see that this is an Act that, in reality, doesn’t have teeth in terms of implementation and making the real difference that we need to see.