Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Local Government and Public Services – in the Senedd at 1:39 pm on 28 February 2018.
Llywydd, I'm very pleased that my blog has pleased at least one Member here, and I'm very pleased that she's read it, at least. May I say that what I was trying to say last week when I wrote the blog was to try and establish, and re-establish, a more mature relationship between various governmental parts of Wales, and I don't think that that has been the case over the past decade at all times.
It's not true that I have made any kind of decision, as the Member suggested. Local government itself said that it didn't want to progress with the kind of proposals that my predecessor made as regards regional collaboration. That was not my decision; that was local government's decision, and members from local government did discuss that at their seminar in Cardiff last November. So, in writing the blog, I was responding to the stance taken by local government and not saying what my view was.