I thank the Minister for today's statement. We're talking today about plans and planning and, as the Minister just outlined a moment ago, we seem to be heading towards broadly three types of plan: local development plans at the bottom, a national development framework at the top, and strategic development plans in the middle.

We have had issues of public contention over LDPs in recent years, with councils feeling that, in some cases, their hands were tied in having to proceed with LDPs that were not always universally popular with some, or large portions, of their electorate. So, I think one of the problems, or one of the issues, or, to use a popular phrase in Government, one of the challenges that you're going to have going forward is: how do you retain democratic consent for a major overhaul of planning, involving decisions taken at regional and even national levels? That may be the main challenge that you have, going forward, because if we've had a problem at a fairly localised level with LDPs, how do we ensure that we don't actually magnify these problems, going forward, with larger-scale planning like the SDPs and the NDF as a whole? So, I suppose my first question is: broadly, how will you ensure that you retain a large measure of democratic consent to these kinds of proposals? It's going to come down a lot to the structure of what you set up.

David Melding, who spoke first, gave us what I found a very interesting historical look at what was attempted in the first Assembly term with the spatial plan, which, I must confess, I wasn't much aware of. I don't remember it being a matter of massive newspaper talk at the time, but perhaps my memory fails me. But, obviously, it was a major development of the Government in the first term, which didn't really work. So, now we are where we are with a new scheme. So, how will you learn from the lessons of the spatial plan? I wonder what lessons you take yourself, Minister, from the relative failure of the spatial plan and how we can ensure that this plan will not replicate those failures. 

I think there are problems, and I'm hopeful that this will be broadly a success, but I can see issues, going forward, because you also have a local government reorganisation, which is still in the mix, which your colleague sat two doors down from you is in charge of. Obviously, there's a separation between you as the planning Minister and him as the local government Minister, and that can sometimes cause problems. You're obviously going to have to work closely together on this to ensure this is a success. I wonder how these things are going to dovetail. At the same time, we've also got the city deals coming in, the growth deals, so I hope this all doesn't become very messy and I hope that you can retain between the two of you, and the housing Minister as well, a broad measure of control over this. So, I wonder broadly what your thoughts are on those points.

One issue that I did particularly want to ask about was the SDPs. I know you stated that these are going to be statutory—sorry, the NDF will be statutory. So, this will influence, is bound to influence, decisions taken at the lower tiers. I'm just slightly puzzled as to who actually takes the decisions with the SDPs. It seems to be the local authorities together. You said you were trying to get them to work together at a strategic level. How does that work with your statutory powers? How will that actually work in practice? Will they be working at the same level as the city deals? Will it be the city regions that actually take the decisions over the SDPs, or will it be some other conglomeration of different local authorities? Diolch yn fawr.