Diolch yn fawr, Dirprwy Lywydd. Less than five months ago, in this Chamber, we debated the power to create new taxes here in Wales. The Assembly voted unanimously in favour of a motion that recognised the need to test the new machinery that has been created for developing a new tax and welcomed a wide range of potential ideas for using this power. Indeed, in his contribution to that debate, Neil Hamilton commented how he would certainly support the Government motion. He remarked how he was in favour of maintaining the link between Government decisions and accountability for them through the system of raising taxes. He even agreed that devolution of taxation does give us opportunities.

Well, less than five months later, those opportunities have now turned into complaints that experiments could risk reputational damage to this institution—the sort of experiments that we've seen during the whole period of devolution: the experiment that was extending free travel on buses to older people and disabled people; the experiment that was banning smoking in enclosed public places and extending that to cars where children are carried only a year or so ago; the experiment that was the plastic bag levy; the experiment that was organ donation. This place is based on experimentation. It's what devolution was always meant to be: a living laboratory in which different parts of the United Kingdom are able to try out new ideas, to learn from one another, to see what is effective. And to think that experimentation is something that leads to reputational damage I think is to fly in the facts of the way in which devolution has embedded itself in the minds and in the places that we live in. And we intend to go on doing that. We certainly intend to go on doing it as far as minimum unit pricing is concerned—not a tax measure, of course, but another way in which, by using new and innovative policy approaches, we can make a difference in the lives of people here in Wales.