Thank you, Llywydd. The Equality and Human Rights Commission continues to do important work in the challenging political climate facing us, and I too would like to thank them for their work. Sunday was Human Rights Day—equality, justice and freedom from violence are some of the major themes. The remit of the commission's work is broad, and therefore today I have decided to focus on one specific aspect of equality and human rights, namely freedom from violence, and, specifically, the freedom of women and girls to live without fearing violence and domestic abuse.

According to Byw Heb Ofn/Live Fear Free, which campaigns to put an end to violence against women, 7.7 per cent of women have reported that they have experienced some sort of domestic violence—around 1.2 million throughout England and Wales. That figure is likely to be much higher, bearing in mind the hidden nature of this kind of violence.

I'm not going to apologise for using this afternoon's debate to focus on this single aspect. Violence against women is on the increase and is a sign of a lack of equality that is systemic within society today. Our amendment regrets the lack of progress in implementing the Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act 2015. The amendment is similar to a Conservative amendment; the difference is that that amendment notes that action needs to be taken, whilst our amendment regrets that that action hasn’t been sufficient to date. A matter of semantics, perhaps, but there is a significant difference.

Last week, in questioning the Minister for equality, I outlined a list of issues with the implementation of this important legislation, and I was pleased to hear the Minister for equality recognising and acknowledging these projects, and showing a desire to move forward in this area. This is what has emerged: there is still no action plan for implementing the violence against women strategy, over a year since its publication. The strategy itself was weak, and was published hastily in order to comply with the timetables listed in the legislation. It appears that guidance wasn’t published in relation to local strategies, and the expert group on education and healthy relationships hasn’t published its recommendations on the new curriculum. They were to be issued in the autumn. Last week, we heard that these will now be published in the new year. I won’t expand on this—there is more, and I did list them in full last week.

It is apparent, therefore, that there has been some dragging of feet in this area. Unfortunately, some within Government still believe that everything is fine and praised the legislation. Earlier today, we heard a statement from the Cabinet Secretary for Local Government and Public Services, who claimed, once again, that the Act broke new ground. It’s one thing to break new ground through legislation, it’s another thing to actually implement that legislation. It’s not enough just to drive legislation through this Chamber and to sit back expecting everything to fall into place. Indeed, once Royal Assent has been given, that is the time to actually take action in order to deliver the change that we want to see.

I won’t accept that this Act is innovative and groundbreaking until I see that the statistics on domestic abuse start to fall. I won’t accept that this Act is innovative until I start to see a change in behaviour from our institutions and within wider society. The freedom of women to live free of violence and to live without the fear of violence is a basic human right. I very much hope that we will see early action from the Government in order to progress this agenda, after the dragging of feet that we have seen. I will be scrutinising that very carefully, and I do very much hope that we will have a far more positive story to tell as we discuss the next Equality and Human Rights Commission annual review next year. I’m happy to work with the Minister for equality on this issue. Thank you.