I thank the Chair of the Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee for his statement, and also welcome the way ahead. I also thank my fellow committee member, David Melding, for his kind words. Naturally, we are celebrating today St David’s Day and doing the little things, and we do do some little things such as scrutinising subordinate legislation—quite often that’s quite small. But, as David said, there are big things that can happen as well, and I’m thinking about all the debates that we had around the Wales Act—the Wales Bill as was.

Of course, we not only have the history of St David, but some 300 years afterwards we had Hywel Dda—King Hywel Dda; I’ve mentioned him previously in the context of this committee—and his laws of 1,000 years ago that gave women rights for the first time in the history of humanity. It’s important to note that, that we in Wales can create laws that are entirely innovative, and we have the opportunity once again, under the recent constitutional settlement, to create innovative laws.

Of course, a number of things have changed since Hywel Dda’s days, and I’m pleased that the Chair has set out the three main aims of the committee at present, and mentioned, as it states here, producing best practice principles for inter-institutional working for constitutional legislation’ and also reflecting and building on the work of other legislatures in these islands on inter-institutional working as it relates to broader policy areas’.

It’s very sensible, and we genuinely need to improve collaboration between the different parliaments on these islands. We can all talk about past events, when this place and committees in this place tended to be ignored quite often, and there is evidence that that is still happening, when we tried as a committee to obtain evidence when the Wales Bill was going through. So, I do support strongly the intention that has been outlined here by the Chair.

But would the Chair in his response agree with me that, in this question of co-ordination between parliaments in these islands, there’s a lot of work still to be done? Yes, we’ve established this inquiry, but we are starting from a very fragile place in terms of this Assembly in terms of the ways these islands are controlled or managed. So, there is a job of work to be done, and I would look for more comments from the Chair on that subject.

He also mentioned the way that we are going to engage with citizens, and that’s happened already. I’m looking forward to more meetings of that sort, because, at the end of the day—and I would hope that the Chair would be able to agree with me that there is work to be done here as well to explain, in an easy way, because in this committee we often deal with things that can appear to be difficult and dry. But, at the end of the day, we also need to simplify things so that citizens, and some of us, can understand what’s going on. That is, there are different policies in Wales compared with England and Scotland and so forth. We need to explain clearly to our citizens what has been devolved and what hasn’t been devolved, and the implications of the Wales Act, which is coming into force, and, of course, the basic difference between the Welsh Government and the Assembly. Now, evidently, for us here, we know the difference. But it’s not obvious out there, and very often it’s not obvious to those who write newspaper headlines either—the difference between the Government in this place and the Assembly itself as an institution.

To close, having mentioned two figures in history, namely St David and Hywel Dda, I was going to talk about Henry VIII as well, because, before anyone says that I talk about people who aren’t relevant to our legislation, unfortunately, Henry VIII still has a relevance that shouldn’t be there, I would argue, to our laws today through the overuse, I would say, of Henry VIII powers, which is still happening 500 years after that king left this planet. So, I would also like to see the Chair extend the debate about the use of Henry VIII powers in this place, and the way ahead in order to reduce the use of those powers. Thank you very much.