Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I'd like to thank the Presiding Officer, and I welcome very much this debate today. I would also like to place on record the formal thanks of the Welsh Conservatives to Laura McAllister and her team. We're very grateful for the engagement that has occurred with political representatives, and the Welsh Conservatives will be supporting the motion before us today, because it is now essential, we believe, that we ask the people of Wales for their views and that we do not pre-empt their opinion. The key responsibility for the Assembly Commission, as we see it, is to ensure that the people of Wales have a clear understanding of the additional responsibilities the Wales Act 2017 will bring. We believe that the Assembly Commission has a very clear responsibility to ensure that the people of Wales have a good understanding of the proposals made by the expert panel. These proposals are quite complicated in detail. Some of them are very technical, particularly recommendations 6 and 7, which talk about how we may be enfranchised, or how the people of Wales may be enfranchised, to vote Assembly Members in. I think there needs to be real clarity about any consultation going forward so people can understand very clearly what the various options are. It is a very, very complex system.

We also believe very strongly that the Assembly Commission now has a very deep responsibility to ensure that as wide a suffrage as possible is enabled to take part in this consultation. It cannot be just the usual stakeholders. We must get out to all of the people. So, we will encourage you to look to innovative and different ways of getting out to people, whether they're in the north, the south, the east or the west of this land, to ensure that everybody, but everybody, has a chance.

We are no longer an Assembly but we are a Parliament, and it is vital that Assembly Members in this place have the ability, the time and the tools at their disposal to be able to scrutinise effectively the Welsh Government. As I sat here listening to the Presiding Officer's opening gambit, I think that, in my years of being an Assembly Member, I've always been in the main opposition party, bar a very, very minor blip, and I do know how important it is to be able to scrutinise, when you're in that role, to be able to hold the Welsh Government to account, and the governing party to account, because every society must have check and balance, and we must be the check and balance for whoever is in Government in Wales. In order to do that we need to be effective, fair, impartial and a lot less tribal when it comes to committees, and we must also enable a governing party to have a robust back bench, because that is the way a really good democracy works. So, we can see that the call to action, the call to review how we run our Assembly, the call to review the tools we have at our disposal, is of great, great importance now. But it's a difficult one to explain to people, and we've got to make very, very clear—or the Assembly Commission have an obligation to make very, very clear—that the people of Wales understand that, and then, once they've made their decision, we must absolutely listen to it and abide by it, because, after all, this is nothing if not their Parliament.