Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and I’m very much aware that Members will want to vote on the financial resolution and also vote on the Bill on the basis of policy and the widespread support there is for the aims of the Bill, but I think it is appropriate that I talk to the report that the Finance Committee’s produced on the Bill, and for some Members who are not involved in this process to understand how we came by a situation where a Bill that could and should have been introduced before the summer recess is now being discussed at this stage, and we have a curious situation in that if the financial resolution was not to be approved tonight, then we couldn’t be discussing it in committee tomorrow. I suspect that won’t happen, but that’s the sort of philosophical position that we are in.

When the Bill was first introduced, and the Finance Committee, back on 7 February, I think it was, first looked at the RIA with the Bill, it was predicted to make savings of some £4.8 million, and in the context of the announcement of the Minister at that stage of a £20 million fund to fund the Bill and the implementation and programme coming out of that Bill, then that certainly looked like a very attractive financial situation. However, several amendments to the RIA, some of which have been referred to by the Minister in his opening remarks, have resulted in the current RIA before this Assembly talking not of savings of £4.8 million, but of costs of £7.9 million. That means that we have before us an RIA that has ongoing savings of some £3.7 million, but transition costs of £11.5 million. Now, clearly, these costs are still covered by the £20 million announcement that the Minister made, though I think it needs putting on the record that that £20 million, from the Finance Committee’s point of view, is actually £10 million commitment and £10 million indication of ongoing commitment in further financial and budget decisions.

Now, you would usually think that a situation where a Minister has introduced a Bill that initially had savings and then turned out to have significant costs is because the Minister didn’t take into account the actual costs of the Bill. In fact, something much more curious happened in this instance. The real issue here was that the initial savings envisaged in the RIA did not take into account that the savings could not, in fact, be cost allocated. They were arising from the savings that an organisation would make by not engaging its volunteers in working with families who were facing additional learning needs tribunals and disputes. In effect, the Welsh Government couldn’t allocate those savings as actual financial savings. This arose, as I think it was told to the Finance Committee last week, from a misunderstanding or a lack of understanding between the organisation concerned and the Welsh Government—SNAP Cymru, which the Minister has already mentioned. I can confirm that SNAP Cymru did confirm to the Finance Committee in our public session, where we also had the Minister in, that they now have that understanding and joint sharing of information with the Welsh Government. So, they are both talking about the same figures; that’s the important thing to say here. So, what you see in the RIA before you today are certainly figures that have been agreed between the Government and the main organisation that undertakes this work with families.

It’s very much for the Assembly and for the policy side now to understand whether this is a Bill that, on the basis of the announcement of the £20 million implementation fund and on the costs that are now set out in the Bill, is one that the Assembly wishes to go forward. There are, however, as the Minister also indicated, wider lessons for how we prepare RIAs. The Finance Committee is concluding its report on such RIAs, which I hope we’ll have an opportunity at a future date to debate. When we do that, we might want to reflect on the lessons learned from this process as well.

The final thing to say is that there was a reference, and there is a reference in our report, to the external evaluation commissioned by the Minister. I welcome the fact that he did commission an external evaluation of his RIA. At that stage, that evaluation, conducted by Aldaba Limited, said that the version of the RIA was not reliable for the purpose of making decisions on the Bill. That’s quite a damning conclusion for an external evaluator to come to. However, I want to assure the Plenary that that is not the version of the RIA that you are discussing here tonight. The Finance Committee’s report sets out, in a factual way, how we have arrived at this situation, and, of course, I’m sure Members will want to reflect on that when they weigh and judge the policy implementations of this Bill against the allocation of resources towards it.