Diolch, Llywydd. So, the Conservative party here tells us that they are all in favour of facility time—they’re just simple seekers after truth; it’s simply a matter of wanting to record how much facility time is being taken and the costs of it. But what they fail to tell you completely, Llywydd, is that they are not interested at all in reporting to the public what the benefits of facility time are. All they want is a one-sided account in which everything is articulated as a cost, and all the things that those employers who turned up to the committee set out as the advantages for employers from facility time, all of that goes unreported altogether. This is not just a simple wish to put information into the public domain. It is a deliberate attempt to provide a biased, one-sided account of what is a bargain, a bargain in which facility time is provided in order that employers are able to make sure that their businesses run effectively, and that trade unions are able to carry out their legitimate work. The committee of the Assembly said:

‘we are in no doubt that facility time is a prudent investment in public services and we believe it should be viewed as such.’

And if you make a prudent investment then not only will you want to account for the costs of that investment, but you will want to account for the return on that investment as well. This amendment entirely ignores that. UK Ministers, when they were putting their Trade Union Bill through, were at least candid enough to say that the reason for wanting to report on facility time was so that it could be borne down on in the future, and that it could be reduced. That’s what all this is about. It’s that attack on the work that trade unions do, disguised as simply a seeking for information. The amendment doesn’t deserve to be supported, and I hope Members here will vote against it this afternoon.