Thank you to Mike Hedges for those remarks. Will we give the same powers to all town and community councils? Not as they currently stand, because they are so very variable. We propose a general power of competence for some town and community councils, but there will be thresholds that they would have to pass. We’ll see what the report of the review group produces. If they are able to propose a more uniform pattern, both of powers and of geography, so that town and community councils are available everywhere, then the case for treating them all the same will be strengthened.

I believe, Llywydd, that there will be a majority on the floor of this Assembly for extending the franchise to 16 and 17-year-olds, and I’m grateful for Mike Hedges’s support for that.

He adds another category to people who are currently prevented from standing for election to local authorities, and I think probably adds another component to our question as to whether or not we are currently over-restrictive in the way that we interpret that rule.

What is the case against remote voting? Well, I think people who are not yet persuaded of it sometimes say that the act of voting is a very serious act and that reducing it to being able to click a button on your phone may undermine the seriousness of the contribution that taking part in a democracy ought to be. Some people—I suppose I’m old-fashioned enough that I would agree with this—like the collective act of walking to a polling station and like to see other people doing the same thing. I like queueing up in a line with other people doing the same thing. For me, it brings our collective sense of democracy alive, but that’s because I’ve been doing it for such a very long time. Maybe the more significant objection is the security objection. Are we yet sure that the systems are sufficiently certain that people would believe that nobody could interfere with their democratic vote—you couldn’t be hacked into, you couldn’t find it distorted in a way that you’d be able to find out?

He’s absolutely right that regional working is not new. What our proposals do is to make regional working systematic and mandatory.

Why mid and west Wales? We’ve taken the WLGA’s own region; that’s how the WLGA organises itself. But, as I said in my statement, Llywydd, we will have sufficient flexibility within that regional footprint for the Swansea city region four councils to be able to work together, and the Growing Mid Wales councils—Ceredigion and Powys—to continue to work together in a distinctive way, but where they will then have to plan together, so that there are no artificial boundaries and there’s no sense that Ceredigion and Powys aren’t able, for example, to gain access to some of the debates and some of the possibilities that that wider regional footprint would bring.