I’m grateful for that answer. Whilst it’s always a pleasure to see the Cabinet Secretary for finance, I tabled this question for the First Minister, because he’s insisted repeatedly that he is the Cabinet Secretary responsible for external affairs. And perhaps his inability to be here today reflects the need for Welsh Government to look again at the need for an external affairs Cabinet Secretary for Wales during these very important couple of years that are upon us.

Last week, the paper, as the Cabinet Secretary has said, fell far short of the expectations that were set by the UK Government originally. They insisted that they would look at an arrangement that would be reciprocal, and when we contrast the UK Government’s paper to that of the European Union, it’s fair to say that that has not been achieved. And, of course, that has had a huge effect on the 80,000 EU nationals in Wales and the 3 million EU nationals across the UK.

The proposals include conferring settled status, which would not be automatically conferred on EU nationals, even those who achieve permanent residence. EU students would be allowed to remain for the duration of their course, but there’s ambiguity around whether they would be allowed to remain after the course has completed. One area of great concern is the ambiguity around the cut-off date, because there is a prospect for EU nationals—in particular those with children—that the parents would have a different immigration status to their children. And actually, from my reading of the UK Government’s position paper, it appears to me that EU nationals will be stripped of family reunification rights, which the EU was not proposing, in its position paper, to be the case for UK nationals on the continent. And on that issue of UK nationals on the continent, perversely, the UK paper says less about the rights of UK nationals on the continent than the European Union paper does on British nationals on the continent. You mentioned bargaining chips. I think it’s very sad to see that it looks like, in the position paper published, EU nationals are being used as a bargaining chip. I’d like to ask the Cabinet Secretary: did the Welsh Government submit its own position paper as part of the UK Government’s process of drawing up its own? If not, does he believe that it’s worthwhile the Welsh Government publishing a position paper now to bring political pressure to bear on the UK Government, so that we can uphold the rights of the 80,000 EU nationals in this country? And is it the Welsh Government’s position that the current EU frameworks relating to citizens’ rights should be transposed into UK law, under the provisions of the repeal Bill, rather than through the method being proposed by the UK Government, which is to start from scratch with UK law, which, as I’ve mentioned, strips EU citizens of the rights that they enjoy?

And finally, we were all told that this was meant to be the easiest part of the European UK negotiations. That’s what the UK Government told us repeatedly. And the fact that we cannot come to a position of reciprocal arrangements on this fundamental issue of the rights of citizens who have contributed to our country—what does this tell us about the next two years when we get to issues that were deemed to be even more difficult than this one?