I suppose there was a declaration of interests of sorts there, Llywydd, and of course it isn’t for me to tell anybody anything. It would be for this National Assembly to decide, and if we do decide, that will be because this is the democratic forum where we make those decisions. That will be the basis of any decisions that flow from this consultation exercise.

I don’t have any powers over the House of Lords, but where we do have new powers over local government, I am clear in my own mind that people who have the privilege of sitting as Assembly Members ought to be able to devote the whole of their time and their energy to that job, and they ought not to find themselves in the position of voting on things that happen here that have a direct impact on other responsibilities that they discharge elsewhere.

I recognise the point about the integrity of the system. It’s partly why, when I answered my question from Mike Hedges on electronic voting, that I said that that is one of the things that we will need to think about. There is a tension between integrity on the one hand and simplicity on the other. I would like to make postal voting easier for those who choose to vote in that way. I’m slightly intrigued as to why the Member would like to make postal voting harder for people. Who is he, I might have said, to decide on the way in which people would choose to exercise their vote? So, I think we should make postal voting available to people. I think we should try and make it simpler in the way that Janet Finch-Saunders described, but I think we have to be careful on integrity, too.

I’m quite opposed to ID cards or other forms of identification at polling stations. We know that if we go down that route it will have a disproportionate effect on certain communities and certain parts of the electorate, exaggerating the current way in which some people find themselves disenfranchised. Where there are abuses, I think our system is robust enough to capture them. We need to be alert to that, but in the tension between wanting to make sure that voting is as accessible and as available as possible, and the integrity of the system, I think we ought to be prepared to be more concerned about making sure that nobody loses their chance to vote, while remaining vigilant to ensure that the system’s trustworthiness remains intact.