Well, Dirprwy Lywydd, let me begin by just saying something on the points that Steffan Lewis started with. Because what seemed to me to be a basic mistake in the way that the UK Government went about this part of the negotiations was: instead of describing their paper as a starting point, something for further discussion, a way into some quite complex areas, they insisted on describing it from the beginning as some incredibly generous offer that people were bound to flock to want to sign up to. It inevitably ended, as Steffan Lewis said, in just disappointing people, having had their expectations raised. It’s an utterly curious start for the UK Government not to refer even to the EU paper that had been published in advance of theirs in the document that they published, again offending people with whom you need to be able to come to a sensible agreement. So, my reading of the paper is that it was a sensible enough start, and had it been pitched in that way, and described in that way, I think it would have been easier to get engagement around it.

It leaves, as Steffan Lewis said, a series of ambiguities about the status of EU citizens. Will they be able to support dependent parents? What rules will future spouses apply under, for example? And the issue of the cut-off date is fundamental here. I really do think that those UK politicians that I hear arguing that a cut-off date in the future would result in a mass influx of people to the United Kingdom trying to establish settled status—that is so far from the contemporary realities of migration, where what we have seen is actually a collapse in the number of people coming to the United Kingdom. When I spoke to the CBI last week, what their members wanted to say to me was how difficult they are now finding it to recruit people that they need to work in their businesses. So, the dangers of a cut-off date are much exaggerated at the UK level, and that ought to be resolved too.

Did we publish a position paper? Well, as the Member knows, we didn’t, but I can tell him that that did not mean for a moment that we were unable to unambiguously put our point of view to the UK Government on this matter. We’re told by the UK Government that this will not be part of the repeal Bill mechanism, but will be part of a separate Bill, and there will be things that we will want to say, and want to say publicly, in advance of any such Bill being published.

Steffan Lewis’s final point is, in some ways, the most depressing, isn’t it? If this was the easiest part, if this was an issue on which everybody agreed we needed to get rapid agreement on, then the failure to be able to make rapid progress in the way that we feel was eminently possible is a pretty bleak signal of the difficulties that lie ahead when far more tricky territory has to be negotiated.