There's much in this statement that I generally welcome. I realise that we've got a few months ahead of us before the legislation is brought into the Assembly, so I do hope the Cabinet Secretary is in listening mode. And, myself, I think extending the franchise to 16 and 17-year-olds will allow us to spend more time on discussing education, particularly for the under-18s. I don't think we do discuss education enough. I have always thought it crazy that Britain remains, I think, the only modern, industrialised state that has the divide between elementary and secondary school education at 11. I mean, nearly every other nation I know of does it much later, and we may discuss some of these fundamentals more.

However, I do have some reservations, and I'm just raising these now because, as I said, I do agree with a lot of what the Cabinet Secretary has said. I think breaking the link between citizenship and the right to vote is troublesome, and we do need to consider this in much more detail; it needs very, very careful thought. Unless we propose the same reform for Assembly elections, then we risk degrading the value of the vote for local authority elections, by allowing non-citizens to vote in their elections. So, I think we need to be very, very careful. If we allow non-citizens to vote, should they also have the right to stand for election? And this again, I think, would be a troubling precedent. I know we've allowed European Union citizens to vote, but that's because we subscribe to—well, at the time—a common EU citizenship, and for very similar historical reasons, Commonwealth citizens have also been allowed to vote, and our citizens have had reciprocal rights elsewhere, for instance, in the Republic of Ireland.

Secondly, and I know why this has been proposed, and it is difficult to co-ordinate the electoral cycle, but I think five-year terms are simply too long. They're too long here. By the fifth year, we're all exhausted and we need a new influx of talent and ideas. And the other thing is that the legislative cycle is also affected. If you give people five years it can take them a long time to get ahead and do essential reforms. We're still waiting for a real flow of the most important legislation that will come before the fifth Assembly and it was exactly the same in the fourth Assembly. Five-year terms are too long.

Finally, disqualifying councillors from being Assembly Members, I think, again, is troubling. You should allow the local electorate to decide. Being a member of more than one legislature, I think, is something you could say is a profound conflict of interest. But, being a councillor is no more of a conflict of interest than holding a job. We have our Standing Orders that allow for that to be managed through declarations of interest. In the Westminster model we have the mother, not of all Parliaments, but of all contradictions and conflicts of interest, in having members of the Government—pretty much a full-time job, I would say—in the legislature. So, I simply don't think there are very convincing theoretical arguments to say that councillors cannot sit in this Chamber.