The process of producing the documents, the series of documents, is one in which we do our best to include the views and perspectives of a wide range of people who have a particular interest in this field. This document is particularly influenced by views from employers, from trade unions and from the university sector. It was discussed at the European advisory group that I chair. I know that the programme monitoring committee that Julie Morgan chairs has also contributed to the development of the suite of documents that we are producing, and I was very grateful for the chance to be able to speak at the Eisteddfod at an event chaired by Llyr Huws Gruffydd to an audience of young people and young people’s organisations about Brexit, and Carl Sargeant, my colleague, has committed to fund a series of events, with the help of Children in Wales, at which the views and perspectives of young people can be more directly fed into the process of the Welsh Government’s thinking on Brexit as a whole.

I’ll end just by echoing what Julie Morgan said: it’s just not good enough for the Government, as we were told by Mark Isherwood, to be saying now that we’re not very far off concluding an agreement on the status of people from the European Union in the future. We’re well over a year after the referendum. It would have been possible—. I was told by David Davis, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, many, many months ago that this was one of the easiest things to agree with the European Union, and here we are, all those months later, and still no agreement on the ground. That means that people who are living in families, trying to shape their lives, trying to find a future for themselves, have lived with that uncertainty, and it is no surprise that people who have skills that are highly sought after and are very mobile are deciding that they’d rather go somewhere else where the ground is firmer under their feet and they know that the welcome is properly there for them. The UK Government could and should have made sure that we were not in that position here in the United Kingdom.

Professor Jonathan Portes, the leading expert in this field in the whole of the United Kingdom, said on the day that our report was published that

‘Welsh govt immigration paper everything Home Office paper wasn't: positive, constructive, evidence-based’, and that’s why we hope that it will have an impact on the debate here in Wales, but more widely in the United Kingdom.