Diolch—I'm not sure if I should be saying 'Dirprwy Dirprwy Lywydd'. Can I thank all those who’ve made contributions to the debate? There are those, obviously, who have been involved in this for some period of time—both Bethan Sayed and Lynne Neagle have been very involved in these matters. Lynne Neagle mentioned the cost of appeals and the planning inspectorate flying in the face of MTAN regulations. Dr Cox pointed out that the opening words of the inspector in the Varteg appeal were, 'MTAN is only guidance, I make the law here', which sort of says that MTAN is not really as strong as it should be.

Mark Reckless spoke against making MTAN statutory on the basis that powers should be on a local basis. He also made the point that planning applications should take into account energy security for the country and its possible impact on those planning applications. Dawn Bowden mentioned, of course, Ffos-y-fran, as she would do being the Member for Merthyr, and of course she's raised that very, very important matter of restoration—that owners must restore the site after the end of operations. She mentioned there are also applications in for planning for another opencast in her area and how that was absolutely opposed by the local community.

Bethan Sayed spoke about the lack of restoration as well to former operations in her area, and that's an ongoing issue obviously in those areas. She also spoke of restoration in Wales in general. She mentioned the fact that perhaps we should rewrite the MTAN law completely. Maybe that is something we ought to look at. She called for greater expertise to be created in local authorities, thus keeping decisions at a local level, which I think is a very, very important point to make.

Gareth Bennett spoke about the delay of dealing with this petition and mentioned that there was a very large backlog in petitions, which was addressed first of all by Mike Hedges when he was the Chair of the committee, and it's an ongoing process that we're involved in. We are trying to speed up the process, but Lynne Neagle was absolutely right in saying that something that was brought to our attention as long ago as, I think, 2013 probably should have come before this Assembly some time ago.

If I turn to the points made now by the Cabinet Secretary, I think there is a general agreement from the Cabinet Secretary that we have to look very, very carefully at any new planning applications, particularly for opencast mining, and it is gratifying to hear her restate the Welsh Government's absolute commitment to a carbon-free Wales and therefore the likelihood of such developments being very unlikely in the future. 

So, today's debate concludes the committee's consideration of these two petitions. I hope that the process that has been carried out, which I acknowledge again was a lengthy one, has supported the petitioners and others to raise their concerns and proposals. It remains to be seen, of course, what will happen in the future in relation to opencast mining in Wales and whether we will see any new applications. What I can say is that the Assembly's petitions process will remain open for people to raise their concerns on national issues such as planning policy as and when required. Diolch yn fawr.