I would like to give a warm welcome to this report as well, and the general approach that the Minister has brought to this. This is a series of measured and practical steps, I think, to go towards achieving the ultimate ambition of 1 million Welsh speakers by 2050, but I’d also like to commend him on the eloquence with which he concluded his statement about the reasons for supporting the Welsh language and embedding it in the culture of the people of Wales, even in those areas where it has long since disappeared as the everyday language of the people. I think that’s exactly the right approach to bring to this, and it’s useful, I think, to have somebody doing this job who didn’t grow up to speak Welsh at home and has learnt the language. It will be the great challenge of the future to convince the English monoglot section of the population, which is by far the greater at the moment, that this is an adventure in which we must all take part.

So, I agree with what the document says, in particular that the Government strategy can’t force individuals to use the language, and for the language to truly flourish, we’re counting on each and every one of us to embrace the idea of a bilingual Wales. So, we have to carry the people with us and go with the grain of public opinion, but also to lead it as well. I would, in this context, also like to commend Plaid Cymru’s contribution, which we debated last week, in this document, ‘Reaching the Million’, and the importance, initially at any rate, of ensuring that we retain a robust social heartland for the Welsh language in the west and in the north. But it is important for us also to have a strategy for breaking out of the traditional areas that are still largely Welsh speaking, because we don’t want to see the Welsh language largely confined to what we might call a ‘laager’ within our own country.

If we are to succeed in our ultimate objective, then we do have to convince people who don’t hear the Welsh language spoken on a daily basis at home or in their communities that this is worth making an effort to engage in. The great challenge now will come of course in WESPs, in areas that pose these greater challenges, and we must certainly do our best to avoid the kind of confrontation that we saw, sadly, in Llangennech in the last year. We must work harder in those circumstances to convince people that it’s not going to set children back to learn through the medium of Welsh.

What Simon Thomas said the other day about the value of learning another language, whether it be Welsh or any other language, is absolutely true. At school, I learned three languages—German, French and Russian—as well as Welsh, although I had to give up Welsh in order to do one of the others. We don’t do that today. I don’t know whether that has made me a more intelligent person as a result, or a more eloquent person, but it has certainly added several dimensions to my life, which I’m pleased to have. And so, there is a value in this beyond the nuts-and-bolts arguments of economics we’ve heard about, which are important, but to be honest, given that English is the lingua franca of the world generally, it’s going to be a problem for all other languages, in a sense, to compete with it in international commerce and the world of the internet. We’ve got to bring reassurance to parents that this is something that is of value to children.

We’ve seen a collapse in the teaching of modern languages generally in the United Kingdom, not just in Wales, in recent years. The British Council did a survey only two years ago that found that only 22 per cent of pupils take GCSEs in languages other than English or Welsh. That, I think, is deplorable, because languages are seen to be difficult. Well, amongst the languages that I’ve studied, Welsh is a rather less complex language to learn. Vocabulary is smaller; words are made to do more things in Welsh than in other languages; we don’t have problems of cases and conjugations and so on; and it should, with a bit of effort, be an easier language to absorb and learn than, say, a language like Russian, which I mentioned earlier on.

So, this is an important step, but what has also been said about the importance of the earliest years can’t be overestimated, and I would like to commend the work done by Mudiad Meithrin in this respect, and the ambition to see 150 new ‘cylchoedd’ for three to four-year-olds is the beacon of hope, I think, for the language, because the other interesting thing that I discovered from the Plaid Cymru report was that 18.8 per cent of three to four-year-olds were Welsh speaking in 2001. That had risen by 5 per cent to 23.3 per cent in 2011. It would be interesting to know, if we could, what the figure is now, and to what extent we’re making progress along this road. The ambition in this document of having 35 per cent is an important intermediate step, I think, and so I commend the approach that the Minister has to that.

If we are to succeed in this objective, it is in embedding the language in the earliest years when we are the most absorbent. I can tell you from my own experience that at the age of 68 it’s much more difficult to recover vocabulary, let alone learn new words, than it used to be. I think it’s important for us to realise that there is an overwhelming consensus in the Assembly behind this approach, but that consensus is not reflected to the same extent outside, and therefore we all have to play our part in bringing people on board this exercise. Certainly on behalf of my own party, I’ll say we will hope to play our part in this as well, because I think we can be useful to the Government in this respect, representing part of the community that isn’t normally associated with the adventure on which we are all now embarked.