I absolutely agree with you that compulsory mergers are unlikely to produce good local government, because people will be focusing on that rather than on the services they need to deliver. So, I welcome very much your proposal to go ahead with voluntary mergers where local authorities feel comfortable about merging, but we obviously have some considerable challenges ahead, as you say, not least that there's no more money coming from the UK Government. Indeed, the risk is that Mrs May's promise of more money for the NHS will be paid for by withdrawing money from local government. But, even if that were not to be the case, I'd like to hear from the Cabinet Secretary as to the impact of the UK Government's proposal to eliminate all centrally funded rate support grant from English local authorities and what impact that will have on the block grant that the Welsh Government receives for the population of Wales. Clearly, their proposal to allow local authorities to sink or swim based on inequitable council taxes and inequitable business rates is very worrying for people in England, but our focus has to be on Wales.

I think there are several ways in which we are going to need to encourage local authorities that don't yet feel ready to merge to, obviously, focus on the way in which they are going to collaborate to reduce the cost of services they need to provide, as well as reshaping them to better meet people's needs. I struggle to understand why payroll could not be shared across all 22 local authorities without any loss of democratic accountability, and I wonder whether that's something that you think that local government colleagues might be prepared to consider.

Other than that, I've spoken before about the really important collaborative work going on through public services boards, and I hope that that will give local authorities the appetite for collaboration and partnership across public services and in future, hopefully, across current local authority boundaries.