I'll just regain my confidence before I speak. To be fair to Andrew R.T. Davies, he never was rounding up this debate, so when he did try to intervene, it probably was his last word, but, there we are, I'll do my best to round up. 

Can I thank everyone who has contributed to this afternoon's discussion? It's only been a couple of weeks, as the Minister has just said, since I spoke here as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee on our scrutiny of Natural Resources Wales’s annual report and accounts, accounts that have, as we know, been qualified for the third year running due to irregularities, most recently with timber contracts.

Can I make clear that this is not a criticism of the very many hard-working staff at NRW, despite what some Members may have said. And as David Melding so eloquently and simply pointed out, if it was a criticism of those hard-working staff, then point 2 of our motion wouldn’t be saying that we support those hard-working staff. And, of course, it was those hard-working staff who were contributing to the staff surveys that suggested that there was a problem at the very early days of NRW. Perhaps if those hard-working staff had been listened to at an earlier point in this process, then we wouldn’t be standing here now constantly talking about the problems that have been confronted in NRW. I think all of us need to recognise that they are hardworking and this is a higher level problem. It may well be a systemic problem. There’s not a problem in saying there’s a problem with the system, because something has clearly gone wrong with the structure of NRW.

As Andrew R.T. Davies said at the start of the debate, there may well be issues stemming from the way that NRW was put together at the start, and that came across, actually, in the Public Accounts Committee’s inquiry that we conducted: the merger of three large organisations. Okay, there was potential that that would produce efficiencies, there was potential that that would make a more competent organisation, but, sadly, as witnesses to the Public Accounts Committee told us, it did look, from outside at least, as though there was a top layer put on the three organisations, but there was never a proper bringing together of cultures. There was a cultural gap, I suppose you would call it, a cultural void within that organisation that was never really filled, and that needs to happen.

It’s not just the Welsh Conservatives who are making these points, it’s not just the Public Accounts Committee—the Grant Thornton review itself, as the Minister rightly said, left no stones unturned. That was welcomed by everyone on the committee. It’s been welcomed by this Chamber, it was welcomed when I brought that debate to the Chamber a couple of weeks ago. The Grant Thornton review conducted, in a forensic fashion, a review of NRW, exposing a number of fundamental flaws in its ways of working. And there’s wide recognition that the timber contracts that NRW entered into were, and I quote, 'novel, contentious and repercussive', and, as such, should certainly have been referred to the Welsh Government, in line with the correct procedures, which NRW was aware of and Welsh Government was aware of. But there was a lack of clarity. There was a fuzziness around the correct procedures in NRW, and if nothing else comes out of this debate, and we’re all wanting to this afternoon, after a long afternoon of having rows with each other—let’s at least make sure that, in the future, that fuzziness is dealt with and NRW knows exactly what it’s responsibilities are, and the Welsh Government assists in delivering on that.

It is time to look now to the future; there is a new team in place, and that is to be welcomed. I welcomed that a couple of weeks ago in the debate that we had. There is definitely a mood within the organisation to move forward, there's a mood here to look forward, but at the very time that the Welsh Government is removing and reducing call-in procedures for arm’s-length body organisations, those procedures are needed now more than ever. So, we call in this debate this afternoon for the Welsh Government to make sure that NRW is fit for purpose as we move forward. Welsh Government does need to work with the team that has been put in place. That team does need to work with and listen to the hard-working staff at NRW to make sure that the sorts of errors that we’ve seen in the past won’t be made in the future.

As things stand at the moment, there cannot be a guarantee that those accounts of NRW will not be qualified again, and possibly again, because, as things stand at the moment, things are not as they should be. There is a mood, there is a decisiveness to put things right, but as was said by many speakers earlier, until that actually happens, then we will not move forward. I really hope we do, and that’s why I urge the Chamber this afternoon to support this motion.