May I thank the Llywydd for her statement? Clearly, we warmly welcome the fact that this youth parliament is about to come into existence and we will do everything we can to support the efforts to facilitate that and to ensure that it does happen, because this does need to be a tool to empower young people in Wales, as I’m sure it will, and many of us have argued that we do need to empower the voice of young people within democracy.

We as a party have been arguing for bringing down of the voting age to 16. We’ve also argued for strengthening citizenship education in schools through the new curriculum, and this will be another opportunity, I believe, to help raise awareness and provide opportunities for young people to participate. But I’m not happy to stop there. I not only want to see this parliament discussing and developing ideas and proposing policy; I want the influence of this youth parliament to be felt beyond the benches of that parliament—on these benches and elsewhere.

Therefore, I will ask my first question: how do you believe that the youth parliament will be able to feed formally into the proceedings of committees and debates here in this Parliament? Will we see reports produced? Will there be an opportunity for members of the youth parliament to address this Parliament or Assembly committees? I do think we need to formalise these processes in order to truly empower young people in this context.

And the second question that I have is: we are talking about a broad age range, from 11 to 18, and there is a risk, of course, that the voices of the older cohort within that group might drown out the younger voices, so what processes will be in place to ensure fairness and equality, if you like, for the younger children on that spectrum? Thank you.