Could I just begin by congratulating Mike Hedges on taking over the chairmanship of this committee, and also a very good first speech here in the Senedd introducing this report? Could I also thank our former Chair as well? Contrary to any rumours, he wasn’t booted off—we were doing a good old job there, and he presided over a good piece of work in this report, and over the previous work that we’d done as well, so it is worth marking the recognition of that and the fact that we came to a consensual approach within this on some very difficult areas. I think it’s a tribute to the joint working of the committee, but also the impartial stewardship that went on in this period as well. But, Mike, congratulations, and I know you’ll do a cracking job going forward as well, as you’ve already shown.

I don’t want to go through all of the report now. In fact, I’m specifically going to stay away from the explicit issues to do with farming, dairy sector, Welsh lamb sector and so on. They’re in there. I agree with all of them; that’s patently obvious, and we hope that the Welsh Government will take them on board and respond to them well. But I want to deal with some more fundamental issues that I think are of importance.

The first one, actually, responds to the mention that Neil has just made about recommendation No. 2 on a UK-agreed position. What I would say here is: I think the thinking of the committee on this recommendation was, as we do these negotiations in exiting the EU, and how we will come out on the environment, on agriculture and a range of other things, we should now be doing what we mean to do going on from here. We shouldn’t be waiting for the next two or three years. We’ve now come to the point, quite frankly, where the old days of being on a JMC, where the agenda is set by a UK Minister—it’s not a meaningful agenda, where the discussions are fairly cursory, where there are no meaningful outcomes, and if there are any outcomes, frankly, it’s agreed by the UK Minister rather than those sitting around—are long gone. If the forward model—and I think it is; I personally strongly feel it is, and we touch on that in later recommendations, in fact—is that we need to have that, if you like, more of a council of Ministers approach, where not only is there parity, as in, ‘We all get along very well and I’m going to show you respect’, but there is genuine parity, as in, ‘We will jointly agree what the agenda is; we don’t care whether you’ve got a 3.5 million population or a 58 million population, you have equal say around this table’—. Curiously, I would say to Neil: think of this in terms of what currently goes on in Brussel when the Council of Ministers sit down. It doesn’t matter what size that country is; it doesn’t matter whatever—they all have a power to actually say ‘no’ at some points there, whether you are Malta or whether you are the United Kingdom. [Interruption.] And I used to sit next to the Maltese Minister and he had the same power we had.

Let me turn to—. So, I want to touch on those issues: recommendations 6, 7 and 8 there—those ones that talk about joint working mechanisms such as developing a UK council of Ministers. I think that is very important. We haven’t seen progress on that, despite Welsh Government making its position clear on its approach on this, and we are a few months down the line on this, but particularly in respect of agriculture and rural development and land management, as we’ve got within this report. That parity of esteem that agriculture and rural development will be developed in partnership, and there will be parity of esteem between the UK Government and devolved administrations—these may seem like simple rhetoric, but they’re not rhetorical flourishes. It is going to the essence of what we think should be, now, a changed relationship amongst the constituent parts of the UK. And it’s not diminishing the role of the UK Parliament, the UK Ministers—it’s actually saying there needs to be much more equity about the whole piece and across the nations and regions.

We note in recommendation 6 that,

‘The Welsh Government should seek urgent bilateral talks with the UK Government to develop a common understanding of the legal and constitutional position in respect of devolved and reserved powers.’

I still think, as we speak now, we still have no clarity. We are waiting for, no longer the great repeal Act, but the repeal Act, but we still have no clarity. This I find quite amazing, that as we stand here now, months on, at this stage, and as we have Ministers for Brexit, Ministers for this, that and the other out there in Brussels at the moment negotiating, we still do not have clear a common understanding of the legal and constitutional position in respect of devolved and reserved powers at this very moment.

In the brief few seconds remaining I would urge everybody to look not only at part 1, which shows the pragmatism, the issue of dealing with the here and now, the immediate challenges of land management and Brexit, but also to look at part 2, because part 2 is the pragmatic idealism of where we go in future. I say this against the background of a UK Minister who has spoken openly about the possibility of having an insurance-based scheme for farms going forward. He hasn’t spoken about them in the last couple of weeks, but he spoke about it previously. That is an open market situation where you trade your commodities against futures and so on and so forth. Well, heaven help our sole trader, upland hill farmers if they’re exposed to that, quite frankly. But there are some great ideas in here about actually explicitly rewarding, in effect, using public money to reward public goods of land management, sustainable outcomes, biodiversity et cetera, et cetera—even access. That, I think, is an exciting thing that we should grasp, going forward, from this report.