I'm pleased to support this motion and to support the general principles of the public services ombudsman Bill. As we've heard, the ombudsman plays a vital role in ensuring that any member of the public who believes they have suffered injustice is able to make a complaint, and is also able to make that complaint with confidence that it'll be dealt with fairly. Many speakers have covered most of the areas that I was going to. It seems that it's easier to count the number of committees that haven't been involved in the ombudsman's Bill than to say those that have. All I will say is it's been a pleasure working on the Finance Committee with the Chair, Simon Thomas, in developing this.

We didn't take the decision lightly to progress with this Bill. We had a great deal of conversation and debate about it, because we did realise that you don't want to legislate lightly, you don't want to over-regulate, you don't want to make law that isn't necessary, if the ombudsman, we felt, had the powers to fulfil his tasks within the current legislation that was there. But we did decide that, on balance, since the introduction of the 2005 Act, best practice and international standards have moved on and we felt that it was important that Welsh legislation reflected this.

I concur with the words of my colleague from the Finance Committee Mike Hedges, who said that if a complaint involved tracking a complaint through the process, from the public sector to the private sector and back, even if it's a small amount of time that's in the private sector, as in the case of a medical complaint, then it seemed to us crazy that there should be a restriction on that complaint being progressed. 

I also agree with the members of the equality committee that if there is an issue of someone's literacy and they only feel comfortable making an oral complaint, as is often the case, then it isn't right that that complaint should be rejected just because of the form that it's been made in. And there should be a futureproofing of the process, so that if there is a new way of presenting complaints in the future, that should be recognised as well. At the same time, as the ombudsman himself told us, you also have to guard against vexatious complaints, and in any complaints system you will get a proportion, a minority, but sometimes a significant minority, of complaints that are either deliberately vexatious or that will peter out during the process of that complaint, and that has to be allowed for as well. 

This is a different type of Bill, as the Counsel General has said, because it's not being progressed by the Welsh Government, it's being progressed by a committee, and then the Government has its role to play, of course. But as I said at the start, I fully recognise the workload on the Chair of the Finance Committee, so we didn't push him over the edge to develop this in a complete vacuum of debate, thinking, 'Let's just have another piece of law in Wales.' We did believe that it was necessary, but at the same time, I think that some of the amendments that have been put forward are well worth considering, and I look forward to returning to the Finance Committee and following through now with the rest of this process, and hoping that the legislation that falls on the Government—I say it falls on the Government's doormat; it's not a Bill, is it—whatever process it is that the legislation takes to get to the Welsh Government, that that, then, is legislation that can be approved by this Assembly.