Thank you, Presiding Officer, and I thank everyone who’s taken part. I think if we can try and come to at least one thing we’re all decided upon and agree upon, which is that it is an imperfect market and it is not delivering the efficiencies that you would expect a good market to do—that’s why it needs such heavy regulation. I think I could test that by asking Members to raise their hands if they still remain with the original energy company that they were with before privatisation, and I think there’d be quite a few who are already just slightly indicating that they are, indeed, still with those originals—Swalec or British Gas or whatever it was. I think that just shows that the market is very difficult for the average consumer to do battle in. That’s why we do need consumer champions, and that can be a regulator or it could be a company that’s set up to intervene in a particular way.

I’m very pleased that the Welsh Government has undertaken its consultation events, and I look forward to hearing more detail from them—I certainly was very pleased to attend the one in Aberystwyth, and I think it’s fair to say there was enthusiasm in that event for a development like this, though I accept that purpose and focus will be very important. What would the main purpose or focus be? There are a wide range of things that an energy company could be. It could be fuel poverty, it could be renewable energy, it could be investment, and it has to specialise—well, not specialise; it has to lead with some of these to really be effective. That’s a decision that I’d like to engage with the Welsh Government on, but not one that simply says, ‘Well, let’s carry on the way we are’, because I think there’s so much wrong with the market at the moment that we’d be letting the people of Wales down if we don’t have a more substantial intervention.

Llyr Gruffydd described the ideal scenario as more of a spider’s web kind of approach to maintaining or catching the flies or whatever it might be, but maintaining our energy. I would like to think that a Wales energy company would be just one of the threads—it wouldn’t be the whole spider’s web, but it would be one of the main threads that held that web together, and the stickiest one, of course; that’s very important.

We heard—I think the substantial part of Neil Hamilton’s argument was around costs and around investment. I think it’s important to note that the proposal we have—and it’s just a discussion document, but one of the proposals in that document is that you could float such a company, but that we’d want the Welsh Government to retain a controlling stake. But there’s no reason why private markets can’t get involved here. But I think there is a fundamental mistake in trying to argue that the world is not changing. China is investing £300 billion in renewable energy just by 2020. India has a target of getting 60 per cent from renewable energy by 2027. We’re actually old-fashioned in this regard; it’s the new economies that are moving ahead.

And it’s fair to say that there are, of course, carbon taxes, if you wanted to call them that, but there’s £6 billion a year of subsidy going into the current fossil fuel industry—£6 billion; twice that which is going into renewables—twice that—and that’s mainly in tax breaks in North Sea oil and gas, of course. There are also substantial subsidies through the strike price into nuclear, and I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that there’s an ongoing subsidy to the way we live today, and that the demand to have new subsidies for a change to meet the challenges of the future is not unreasonable in that context. I think—though Neil Hamilton wouldn’t agree with this, I think, and I accept what David Melding said—we have to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. That’s good for us environmentally, but it’s good for us as a nation as well because it makes us more reliant—self-reliant, I should say. We have the energy here, with our coastline and our mountains and our rivers, to become more self-reliant in energy. Who wouldn’t want to become more self-reliant in energy?