Thank you for those questions. A number of them, I think, are best directed towards the city region. This, after all, is a local project. This is not a project the Welsh Government has sponsored. This is a project that's come from the region, and the Welsh Government and the UK Government, jointly, are funding this, and they've put in place a series of assurances that the money is going to be well spent and the strategy is going to be adhered to. So, many of the detailed questions you ask about appointing the strategy board and the financial plan and so on are ones that I'm not in a position to answer; those are the questions that the city deal themselves are to answer. Because, if we want genuinely place-based decision making, then the responsibility and the accountability must remain locally. Although, until now, it's been very different, I think our role does need to change, as I indicated earlier, into more of a partnership and less of a policeman role. But the city deal as currently constituted, as designed by the UK Government, does not give us that role explicitly.

In terms of the timeline, it's our very clear hope that we can get these projects over the line. But, as I've said, this has to come from the city region themselves. Alun Cairns and I have both expressed our hope to the council leaders—and we met them last week—that we would like a pipeline of projects, with momentum. So, if we can get the first two over the line no later than the end of April, we'd like to get more before the summer and before the end of the year. However, it is worth noting that the independent review that the Welsh Government and the UK Government jointly commissioned put all the projects at red risk. Now, this is a very significant finding, placed right at the end of the annex of the report, but it certainly took my eye. So, I don't think we can responsibly put into stone any firm deadlines until we can be assured that the lessons can be learned by the joint board and that the cases are going to be robust enough to meet the tests that we have in place.

You asked about the role of the director and who will appoint that, and the role of the Welsh Government. And you're quite right—this is a local appointment; this is not a role for the Welsh Government to be involved in. I'd expect and hope that they will be advertising that role, and I think the person they get into that role is crucially important. The independent review makes it clear that this should be somebody of equal status and standing to a chief executive in order to provide a challenge and scrutiny. And, to be fair, of the three reports that have now been published—the Wales Audit Office report, the Welsh Government-UK Government report, and then the independent report, jointly commissioned by the four local authorities and carried out by their own internal auditors—that I think is the most rigorous of the reports and the most unsparing in its criticism. And I think some credit needs to go to the city region that they themselves have commissioned that—it's the public sector who have carried out that, not some private sector consultants—and they've published it. So, they've been completely open in the criticisms they've made of themselves, and it's not a comfortable read, but I think, to give them due credit, they have done that and it's now for them to fully absorb the lessons from that report and to implement them. So, I hope I've answered the questions that the Member has raised.