In contributing to this debate, can I just begin by thanking Dafydd and his working group for the work that they have done? This is not an easy pathway to follow, and to bring forward different interests, sometimes competing interests, but to get them onto the same page—and I think the Minister has said in her opening remarks that this is part of a journey, going forward. There will need to be further dialogue and consultation, and I welcome that. But I do want to thank Dafydd for the work he and his group have done, also the predecessor report, the so-called Marsden report as well, which was different, but covered some of the same ground. By the way, there is—people haven’t mentioned it today, but there is some welcome stuff within this report that Dafydd and his working group have produced, and I’ll turn to that in a moment. But I do want to thank this Assembly and the Government for having the courage to actually look at this.

Before I remind people of why we need to look at this issue of governance and how we take this forward within Wales, eight years ago, I stood on a platform in the South Downs and we announced the opening of a national park, the South Downs National Park, the great unfinished business of the 1946 national parks Act. It was the one closest to the big urban population of London and Brighton and so on, and we never quite got round to it, but we did it. I spoke there as the mechanic behind the scenes about how we were doing the governance of it and the difficulties of bringing together local authorities and competing groups, and we’d managed to do it. I did all of this, and there was polite applause, and then Hilary Benn, the Secretary of State, got up and he spoke with joy and poetry about what the national parks were all about, and he wowed everybody.

So, in beginning this, I’m just going to say—and it’s interesting, this. This is from Iolo Morganwg, one of the great Glamorgan poets, in his ‘Hymn to Health’, when he was recovering from a serious and possibly terminal illness. It was his ode, if you like, the ‘Hymn to Health’, and he says, in a little extract:

‘Through dewy dales and waving groves, / The vernal breeze unruffled roves.

‘Delicious Health!’—

I exclaim that, because it’s got an exclamation mark after it—

‘I range the vale, / And breathe once more thy balmy gale; / ‘Scap’d from the wrathful fangs of pain, / I view, rejoic’d, thy skies again.’

Well, he could have been anticipating the future generations and well-being Act, or the factories of well-being referred to in these reports, and the other, many, multiple public goods that we get from the natural environment and that both reports say—[Interruption.] Both reports actually say we need to do more to spread, in a social equity way, the benefits that come from these as well.

Just in passing, one of the things I welcome in Dafydd’s report, and its predecessor, is its recognition that this is not just to do with nationally designated landscapes. I get as much joy and as much health and physical well-being from standing on the Devil’s Pulpit on the Bwlch mountain in Ogmore, looking down Ogmore valley, as I do from standing on Pen y Fan or Snowdon top. I have to say it. This report deals with that, and it talks about that working beyond boundaries—the importance of these national designated authorities working beyond their boundaries, not for there to be a line drawn artificially on the map and that’s where the responsibilities lie, but how do we actually extend the benefits that come from all of our landscapes, right across all of our populations.

It talks within Dafydd’s report about innovations in resourcing. We need to be serious about this, because, despite the contribution just now, all our national parks and all our designated areas, right across the UK, have faced cuts, year after year. So, we need to have more innovations in resourcing.

It talks about improving accountability and performance, about driving well-being and about wider sustainability and green growth. In answer to the query that was set a moment ago of, ‘Why do we need to do this?’, I refer you back to Professor Marsden’s earlier report, where he says his panel had

‘found that a fresh approach to the purposes and governance of Wales’ designated landscapes is overdue…for at least three reasons’.

He addressed

‘the scale and complexity of the environmental challenges’ and he referred to climate change, as well as our loss of biodiversity, as different from what it was in the last century. He referred to how

‘the relative spatial and social inequalities in well being, health, education and access to outdoor recreation demand far more from the designated landscapes’ and others. It’s not good enough, I’m sorry, to have certain types of people going in their cars and visiting our designated—and I say this as somebody who was born on the Gower, the first-ever AONB in the whole of Great Britain. It’s not good enough to have only certain people visiting and getting the health and well-being benefits. They need to be available to everybody, and that means spreading this beyond those nationally designated areas.

He finally says that

‘these areas need to be the home of far more vibrant rural communities, where the young can be retained, trained and attracted by sustainable homes and jobs.’

But I would say to the Minister, as others have done, it is worth, in the good parts that are within the report that’s now come forward, to return and look at Marsden’s report—not least recommendation 6, where it lays out three new statutory roles that would underpin, to do with conservation, human well-being and sustainable resource management. It says this should be the ‘Sandford plus’ approach. Have a look at that as we take this forward and debate this in dialogue, get the groups involved, continuing on the work that Dafydd and others have done, and let’s get to a good place where everybody is signed up to a different way of governance within Wales.