Thank you for this important report. I was pleased to see that the Assembly Commission was providing bilingual papers to committees on the whole, but, as Suzy and Bethan have mentioned, I was concerned to see that the Government has presented information in English only 174 times. The report also states that 25 per cent of documents laid—as we’ve just been discussing, the explanatory memoranda and subordinate legislation—were not laid bilingually, and these are documents that the Government itself produces. So, we do need to convey a clear message to the Government today to ensure that the Government does comply with the language standards that have been imposed upon them in their dealings with the Assembly. I call on the Government to collaborate with the Commission to ensure that they do improve their performance and don’t hamper the will of this Assembly.

This year’s report includes data, but it is initial data, and the report also states that reports in ensuing years will include data in a way that will enable the comparison of the situation over a number of years, and this is very important, of course. It would also be beneficial, I think, to have a full audit of the Assembly staff for us to know how many people have bilingual skills, in which departments, and so on and so forth. This is crucial in order to plan the workforce of the future and also to use our current workforce more effectively. I’m pleased to see that there is a note that there is an intention to do that.

I’m also very pleased to see these language domains developing within the Assembly, which are teams of people who work mainly through the medium of Welsh, and I hope to see these develop. The teams include a combination of fluent speakers and Welsh learners, and language planners do note, generally speaking, that creating language domains within the workplace where the minority language is used for administration and internal communication is crucially important in safeguarding and developing a language. Creating a language skills audit would encourage the creation of further Welsh language domains, and I look forward to see that developed.

Just one thing in conclusion: as you know, I choose to use my first language, the Welsh language, on virtually all occasions in the Assembly and I’m very pleased that I’m able to do that. One barrier to that is the fact that research briefings for committee work are prepared in English and that occasionally means a delay of a day or two before the Welsh language version is available. One way of starting to overcome that problem would be to encourage those who do have bilingual skills within the Research Service to draft their briefings in Welsh initially. I’m sure they would be translated to English very swiftly if that were the case. For me, this is one sign of real bilingualism, namely that documents are drafted in Welsh and very little of that seems to be happening at the moment, from my experience, at least. In addition to moving in that direction, perhaps including a specific indicator to show progress in that area may be important.

So, I do look forward to seeing the fruit of this labour developing and to seeing further general improvements by next year’s report. Thank you.