Thank you very much, Llywydd. I'm very pleased to be able to put forward this motion today in the name of Rhun ap Iorwerth. The debate gets to grips with one of the major social, economic and cultural issues of our time, namely the outward migration of young people from many of our communities, and the number of communities across Wales that are suffering because of that outward migration. Now, very often, evidence that is used to discuss this issue is anecdotal, but the Government's figures themselves give a disheartening picture of the truth of the situation in some authorities in Wales, and I'd like to look at some of those authorities—some of which I represent.

So, if you were to look at Ynys Môn, Gwynedd, Ceredigion and Carmarthen—that is, the part of Wales that we have been battling for in terms of 'Arfor', which is the concept of bringing the authorities together to take economic action—over the past decade, 117,000 young people between 15 and 29 have left those local authority areas, which corresponds to more than 55 per cent of all outward migration of all ages. So, more than half the people who have left those coastal authorities in west Wales—more than half of those who have left are young people, and that's over 100,000 of them. We can't afford to lose so many young people from our western areas, our rural areas and Welsh-speaking areas, and still have that dream of 1 million Welsh speakers. It's clear that we need to get to grips with this problem.

If we look at Ceredigion itself, Llywydd—the area that you represent, and I do on a regional basis—the situation, if anything, is even worse. It is an area or county with two universities in it, but 3,670 young people left the county in one year alone, namely 2015-16. If you look at the figure in the last census, that corresponds to 20 per cent of all the young people leaving Ceredigion. Now, that is a genuine brain drain from that county. Put simply, one in five people in Ceredigion leaves the county every year, according to that spot survey, with many of them not returning unless they retire after working somewhere outside of the county.

Now, the effect on the Welsh language is something that we can comprehend and lament, but it's also to be seen in the figures since the 1991 census. The number of Welsh speakers, on average, in the four counties that I have mentioned in the west has fallen in every one: in Anglesey, from 62 per cent to 57 per cent; in Gwynedd, from 72 per cent to 65 per cent; in Ceredigion, from 59 per cent to under half of the population—47 per cent; and in Carmarthenshire, which saw the largest fall, from 55 per cent to 44 per cent. That's where the language ceases to be the community or indigenous language.

In the report 'The Welsh Language in Carmarthenshire', which was published in 2014, the decline in the Welsh language was demonstrated, and it was shown that the outward migration of young people from Carmarthenshire, once they had left school, had led directly to a decline in the Welsh language. That report was prepared by the county council itself. In Carmarthenshire, for example, according to the 2001 census, the number of residents from 3 to 15 years of age was around 28,000. But by the 2011 census, the number had fallen by over 10,000. So, almost 1,000 people leave Carmarthenshire, in a single census period, every year.

It's clear, therefore, that a significant number of our young people are leaving these westerly counties, and that the decline that we see in the percentage of Welsh speakers has been a constant pattern over many decades, and is partly responsible for the decline in the Welsh language as a whole.