Now, prisoner voting is, I think, an important issue. I do have slight concerns about us bringing this debate today, because, as John Griffiths has just explained, there is an ongoing inquiry into this issue being carried out by the ELGC committee, of which I am a member. I think, in general, it isn't good practice to pre-empt the outcome of an inquiry, but, to be fair, we had a debate on various criminal justice issues in the Chamber a couple of weeks ago, which wasn't brought by us, in which both Labour and Plaid Cymru certainly sent out strong signals on this issue. So, I think that debate has already pre-empted the inquiry to some extent. 

To recap what was said a fortnight ago, Labour's Jane Hutt stated that the Welsh Government was awaiting the outcome of our inquiry but at the same time was preparing a Government Bill on this issue. Well, a Bill is a major undertaking and you don't prepare a Bill if you're not seriously intending to bring legislation in. So, I think this tells us that the Welsh Government has already decided that it will extend prisoner voting, although they are not explicitly stating that, despite the fact that we haven't finished the committee inquiry yet.

For their part, Plaid Cymru, who brought the debate, were keen to include prisoner voting in the wording of their motion. This gave us, I think, a strong indication that they wished to extend the prisoner voting franchise in Wales. So, again, I think this pre-empts the inquiry, certainly in spirit if not in precise wording. So, I think we are justified in bringing this debate today. Of course, I will endeavour to continue to listen to the evidence of the committee inquiry.

Now, my colleague Neil Hamilton has raised some of the major moral objections to allowing prisoner voting at all, which is basically the UKIP position—that far from wanting to extend the prisoner vote, we would rather ignore the absurd ruling of the European Court of Human Rights on this and allow no prisoner voting at all. If the major objection to this is that we need to comply with ECHR, then our position is this: we are leaving the EU and ECJ in order to have control over our own laws, after all that is what the majority of the people of the UK voted for. So, why don't we simply leave the ECHR as well and have our own British bill of rights? So, this is the political context in which we oppose the principle of prisoners having the right to vote.

Now, what our inquiry has already thrown up so far are the many logistical and technical difficulties that are likely to arise if you do go down the path of trying to extend the prisoner franchise. There are major difficulties, for example, over the registered address of prisoners. There are prisoners with Welsh addresses who are imprisoned in English prisons. So, some prisoners held in English prisons could be allowed the vote in a Welsh Assembly election. That will be difficult to organise. Even if they have that vote in theory, will they actually be able to cast their vote in practice? Conversely, there are English prisoners in Welsh prisons who won't be allowed to vote in an Assembly election.