I now call on the Llywydd to address the Assembly.

The Llywydd took the Chair.

I think I'll start this evening by asking all Members to refrain from waving at people in the public gallery. [Laughter.] Hefin David, I caught you out. [Laughter.]

May I begin formally this item by welcoming everyone here to the Senedd this evening? It's a pleasure to have your company in the public gallery and those of you joining us in this building for such a momentous week for our national Parliament, Senedd, as we celebrate our twentieth anniversary.

Many of us were there at the beginning, in May 1999, in another Chamber, in another century. On that first day, we were excited and nervous in equal measure, and responsibility weighed heavy on us, as we elected our first Llywydd and first First Secretary. It's fair to say that the period since the first Assembly Members were elected in 1999 has not been without its challenges. Indeed, we were, to all intents and purposes, starting from scratch.

But that new dawn also provided us with the opportunity to plough our own furrow. From the beginning, this was a fully bilingual Parliament, and an inclusive one, with equality characterising us from the very first day. Twenty-four of the 60 Members elected to that first Assembly were women. Overnight, 24 women were introduced to Wales's representative political landscape, bearing in mind that only seven women Members of Parliament from Wales had been elected to Westminster in the previous 80 years. There have now been 62 women elected as Assembly Members and 80 men: 142 of us rare creatures, as Assembly Members, past and present.

The pinnacle of our attainment of equality, of course, was in 2003, when 30 women and 30 men were elected as Assembly Members, making us the first legislature in the world to achieve gender balance. Around me today, 47 per cent of our Assembly Members are women—the highest proportion across all UK Parliaments, and our achievement, as regards inclusion and equality, extends beyond our elected representatives. The Assembly is among the top five UK employers for LGBT staff for the fifth year running, and has won a gold award for our diversity and inclusion scheme amongst our workforce. 

The year 2006 was another remarkable year on our journey—a year that saw the official opening of Richard Rogers's magnificent building, this Senedd, and a year when the Government of Wales Act 2006 was passed, which gave Assembly Members the right to make primary legislation for the first time through the dear old legislative consent Order regime.

The painful, laborious legislative journey of the red meat LCO is forever seared on my memory. And Ann Jones remains of the view that the worst punishment ever imposed on her by the Labour Whip was to put her on the red meat LCO committee. [Laughter.] But we were released from the oppressive regime of the LCO by the people of Wales in the 2011 referendum, when 63.5 per cent voted in favour of full law-making powers—an historic milestone that marked the creation of a genuine Parliament for Wales. Our powers were enhanced in April with Wales, for the first time in modern times, having the ability to raise a proportion of the money the Government spends in the form of taxation powers.

Piece by piece, a Parliament has been constructed and a nation built, and today we stand on the solid foundations of the early architects of devolution. But let us not rest on our laurels. There is much more to do, and one fact remains unchanged, despite the step change in our responsibilities. On that very first day, we were 60 Assembly Members and today, 7,301 days later, there are still only 60 of us.

If we are to realise any ambition to increase the powers of this Parliament, or to inject more creativity and originality into the use of our existing powers, we need to increase our capacity. There are no more hours in the day, it's not possible to be in two places, or in two committees, at the same time, so to be able to represent the people of Wales as best we can, it is imperative now that more Members are elected.

This is not about politicians voting for more politicians, but recognition that the people of Wales need fair and proportionate representation in their national Senedd. And we, as the politicians of this generation, have a duty not to fetter the ability and aspirations of future politicians to deliver on the behalf of Wales.

Yes, there is much to do, but there is plenty to celebrate also. In the fifth Assembly, we have already broken new ground by electing Wales's first ever Youth Parliament. Sitting in this seat and chairing the first full meeting of the Youth Parliament in the presence of some of our nation's bravest, most passionate and most eloquent young people was an experience that I will never forget. This is testament to the fact that young people are interested in our democracy and that they, as much as anyone else, deserve a voice in the debate that will shape their future.

And as we celebrate our twentieth year, it is important that we look to the future, and that's why we will convene the Citizen's Assembly, Cynulliad y Bobl, this summer. We will give the people of Wales the right and the opportunity to voice their aspirations for the next 20 years in Wales. They will be a source of original ideas to inform our future work and priorities.

And then, in September, we will hold our first ever democracy festival. This will be a festival that will be a wealth of debate of issues of relevance to the people of Wales, from sport to technology to the arts, with the aim of attracting new audiences to the Senedd in the Bay. But although our Parliament is in our capital city, our Senedd belongs to and represents every community in Wales. Over 20 years, our committees have travelled all over Wales, and Senedd@ has been a touring initiative taking the Assembly’s work to the people. But the greatest initiative of all would be holding Plenary meetings in north Wales, in west Wales or in the Valleys—a caravan of an Assembly reaching out in our entirety to the communities of Wales. It wouldn't be changing location every other week, but possibly every two years.

While this may be a week of celebration, let us also pause, as we did earlier this afternoon, to remember those of our colleagues who are no longer with us: Val Feld, Brynle Williams, Phil Williams, Peter Law, and our former First Minister, Rhodri Morgan. All a huge loss to their families, to their colleagues and to this country. And, of course, our most recent losses, Carl Sargeant and Steffan Lewis—two Assembly Members devoted to their parties and constituents and possessing a sincerity that saw them passionately pursue issues close to their hearts. Who can forget some of Steffan's brave and poignant contributions in this Chamber, when he told us that

'life is far too short not to say what you believe and to believe what you say', coupled with the words of Jack Sargeant, Carl’s son, who has succeeded his father in this Chamber with such dignity, whose call for a kinder politics should guide us all? Two of our youngest ever voices, with the wisest of words.

Little more than 40 years have passed since the very notion of a National Assembly was roundly rejected by the Welsh electorate. In sharp contrast, by 1999, the architects of progress to whom we are all indebted had won hearts and minds, laying the first building blocks of the new Wales. We, elected AMs and staff, have overseen the building of our new democracy over this last 20 years and it will be the youth parliamentarians of today and others who will be here to continue our work. They have never lived in a Wales without its own Parliament. For them, devolution will one day be a distant memory belonging to a time before governing our own affairs was the natural state of being for our nation, just as it is for all nations.

I’ll conclude by recalling that morning, that good morning, that very good morning in Wales. Well, it’s not even lunchtime yet, and the day still holds much more in store for us to do. Diolch yn fawr iawn. [Applause.]

Thank you very much to you. And I now call on the First Minister.

Thank you, Llywydd. It is a privilege to mark 20 years since this Assembly was established. Today we celebrate all that's been achieved, whilst also acknowledging the scale of the scale of the challenges ahead. Perhaps now, more than ever, we appreciate the value of the assets that we have here in Wales, and how great our responsibility is in protecting and improving Wales for future generations.

Llywydd, I've been trying, in preparing for something to say today, to think myself back to 1999, and, as I look around the gallery, it seems an even more daunting task to try to recall the things that were important to us then. And 20 years into devolution, this is inevitably a moment for reflection on our shared history. What I'm intending to do is, by reflecting on matters from the perspective of 1999, to try and identify some of those things that I think we would have been pleasantly surprised at if we'd known then what was to happen over those 20 years. But I'll think as well about those things that we would have been disappointed at over the 20-year history and, finally, to look ahead to some new challenges, and especially challenges that I think we might not have anticipated 20 years ago having to face in the Wales of today. And, Llywydd, because some of us are 20 years older as well, I am going to offer five reflections in each of those three categories, mostly because it helps me to remember them, but partly because I hope it's easier to follow some of this as well.

I'm going to begin, if I could, with just one personal observation. I arrived here at the National Assembly before the first year of devolution was at an end, and it's easy to forget just how rocky that start had been—the closeness of the referendum result and the election in 1999 of an uncertain minority administration. By the time I arrived here, three of the four party leaders who had started that first year of devolution had already been replaced. One had been defeated on the floor of the Assembly, one had been deposed in a palace coup and one was appearing before Kingston Crown Court—[Laughter.]—in a trial involving, as I recall, a pizza and for allegedly wanting to spend more time with other people's families than his own.

Llywydd, I think it's strange how often, in fact, pizza has played a part in the history of the National Assembly for Wales. Any time now, an earnest PhD student will be looking to interview Members here on the significance of pepperoni in the history of devolution. But they'll do so because, in that very earliest period, my recollection, coming here in the spring of the year 2000, was that the survival of the institution was by no means guaranteed, that it seemed a place on a knife edge. Everything that I say about the 20-year history that has followed is based on my view that the fact that this institution is now a taken-for-granted part of the political landscape here in Wales is in and of itself an achievement, which, this time 20 years ago, nobody could have felt so confident about.

So, I want to begin with five points that I think those who were involved in those earlier days—. If you'd told them then that this was going to happen over 20 years, they'd have thought that all of these things were a pleasant surprise. I think if you'd said to people 20 years ago that, at this point in our history, the National Assembly for Wales would be a Parliament with full law-making powers, that those law-making powers had been endorsed in a second referendum and that that referendum had been absolutely conclusively won, those people who famously spent their time debating the smaller Egyptian potato Order would, I think, have been very pleasantly surprised to know about the range and depth of responsibilities that within that 20-year period had coalesced around this National Assembly.

I think, back in 1999, people would have been surprised if they had learned that within just two decades this National Assembly would be exercising entirely new fiscal responsibilities, not for the first time in 20 years, but, as we know, for the first time in 800 years here in Wales, that that 'pocket money Parliament' charge that used to be levelled at the National Assembly during the first decade—that we were a body that was given money by somebody else to spend but had no responsibility for raising that money—within 20 years, that would have come to an end and that £5 billion-worth of taxation that is raised here in Wales is raised because of decisions that are made every year here on the floor of this National Assembly.

And I certainly think, in my third point, that if you had said to people in 1999 that levels of economic inactivity in Wales within 20 years would be lower than the rest of the United Kingdom, people would find that very hard to believe, because 1999 coincided with the peak levels of economic inactivity here in Wales, and the gap between economic inactivity here and the rest of the United Kingdom was at its widest. I think if people had thought that, in 20 years, not only that gap had been eliminated, but that it had even gone into a position where we were better than the rest of United Kingdom, people would have been very pleasantly surprised.

And I think, in my fourth point, that if you had described the significant cultural shifts that had happened in only two decades, it would have been hard to persuade people in 1999 that all these things could have happened as well. If you'd told people then that smoking would have disappeared from enclosed public places everywhere in Wales—because, in 1999 people smoked everywhere. They smoked in enclosed rooms. They even smoked in restaurants. They smoked where children were present. And today that would be shocking if you saw it here in Wales, only 20 years later. 

If you'd said that Wales would have the third best recycling rates in the whole of the world within just 20 years, if we'd said that we would have changed the law fundamentally in relation to organ donation so that we had the best organ donation rates in the whole of the United Kingdom, if you'd told people that we would have passed the well-being of future generations Act and that we had committed ourselves to 1 million Welsh speakers within the lifetime of many people in this Chamber, I don't think those who were here in 1999, told that all of those things could be made to happen within just 20 years, I don't think that they would have complained about a lack of ambition here in Wales.

And lastly, in terms of the things that I think would have been a source of amazement to people back then, if you had said to people that within 20 years devolution would have developed to the extent that we have a Cabinet portfolio dedicated to international relations as part of the Welsh Government, I think that would have been a very hard thing for people back at the very start of devolution to have imagined. For all those reasons, I think the last 20 years has so many things in it to be proud of what has been achieved here across the National Assembly.

But as well as pleasant surprises, I think, from that perspective of 1999, there have been some disappointments and some shocks as well. I think we would have been disappointed, Llywydd, as you said in your contribution, that, nearly 20 years on from the Richard commission—the Richard commission that told us in that first Assembly term that the Assembly needed 80 Members to discharge the responsibilities that it has—I think people would have been disappointed to think that, 20 years on, we are still only 60 Members, dealing now with a hugely different degree of responsibility than the National Assembly of 1999. I think, Llywydd, and this is maybe just my view, that we would have been disappointed in 1999 at just how far we have departed from those earlier promises that devolution would mean a new way of conducting politics here in Wales, that traditional barriers and boundaries would matter less and that working across those divides would be easier. Llywydd, it seems to me that we have moved quite a long way from that ideal over these 20 years.

Indeed, I think it is hard to imagine the history of the mental health Measure of the third Assembly being replicated easily today. A mental health Measure passed with a Labour health Minister in a coalition Government involving Plaid Cymru, working with a Conservative Chair of the health committee to introduce a whole new primary care mental health service, to provide new rights to patients in mental hospitals, to take an early step on the co-production of care and treatment plans, and to do so in a way that was rooted in a strong consensus of purpose across the Assembly Chamber. Now, politics outside this Chamber has become more divisive and combative, and it may not be a great matter of surprise that that has had its impact here, but it's not the ambition with which this institution began its existence. I think we would be disappointed, in 1999, to have looked forward to the way in which some of those early hopes have curdled, and I think that we'd be right to be disappointed as well.

My third point is one, Llywydd, that you covered so well in your contribution, because back in that glad if not entirely confident morning of 1999, we underestimated, I think, the challenges that come from being such a new institution, where everything happens to us for the first time, where we are always making our own history. There is huge hope in handing people control over their own destinies, but it turns out that there is inevitable hurt in that process as well.

We've been reminded, as you said, Llywydd, repeatedly of that this term. Later this month, it will be two years since the death of the First Minister who guided the National Assembly through most of that first decade of devolution. It's not that much over a year since the death of our colleague Carl Sargeant, and less than a year since the loss of Steffan Lewis, one of the brightest hopes of this fifth Assembly. There is sadness and there is sorrow in our brief history. And, while I'm sure that it is part of the way that any institution matures, I'm not sure that we saw that coming at us quite that quickly at the start of the devolution journey.

Llywydd, in my fourth area of disappointment, we quite certainly had not expected in 1999 that our financial history would be quite such a game of two halves. In the first Assembly term, the Welsh Government's budget grew by 10 per cent in cash terms in every single year—every single year, 10 per cent more to spend on Welsh public services than we'd had the year before that. In the second Assembly term, our budgets grew by 5 per cent year on year on year in cash terms. Even in the third Assembly term, our budgets grew in real terms over the whole of that period.

Now, since then, the financial skies have darkened dramatically. I met no-one in those earliest days who had any inkling that, by the end of our second decade, we would have experienced the longest and deepest period of public expenditure restraint not for 20 years, but for 200 years. And, as we said earlier in this afternoon's proceedings, in the first decade of devolution, child poverty in Wales fell steadily—not fast enough, not far enough for many of us, but it fell year on year on year. At the end of this Assembly term, 50,000 more children will live in poverty in Wales than in 2010. It's hard, I think, to find a stronger contrast between the first and second decades of this Assembly term.

In 1999, Llywydd, I don't think we'd heard the term 'food bank'. We certainly would have been horrified to have seen people begging on our streets for food, or street homelessness so rapidly on the rise. We could not have anticipated the impact that a decade of austerity would have had on the fabric of our public services and our society, but I think we would have been shocked to think that we would have had to face it before we were 20 years old.

Finally, Llywydd, those of us who campaigned for devolution in those long years after 1979 cannot but be shocked that we moved in just two decades from a position in which 'a stronger voice in Europe' was a slogan that united political parties in Wales to a position where Wales has voted to leave the European Union. I think that if you'd said that to somebody in 1999, they would have thought that that would be a very unlikely eventuality indeed.

So, Llywydd, I wanted to end by looking ahead to thinking of the sorts of challenges that we still face and will face over the next 20 years, some of which I don't think that we could ever have anticipated at the beginning. I hope that, over the next 20 years, we will have done more to embrace the kinder sort of politics that you mentioned in your introduction; that we will have accepted the challenge to demonstrate in this Assembly that it is possible still to treat each other with respect while still tackling the genuine differences that lie between us—the right and proper differences that lie between us in any democracy—about the priorities that we see for Wales.

I hope that, in the next 20 years, we will be able to say that progressive politics will have been preserved here in Wales, that it is still a place where collective solutions are crafted to collective problems, and where systems are changed to reach into the lives of those with the least, not just those with the most, and that we can demonstrate, as we are in this Assembly term, that that progressive trend in Welsh politics is by no means at an end.

Last month, we abolished imprisonment for non-payment of council tax. This month, we have introduced a Bill to remove the defence of reasonable punishment of children into its Stage 1 consideration. Next month, we will introduce a Bill to extend the franchise to 16 and 17-year-olds and make the democratic process more accessible all to Wales.

That sense of a progressive social justice agenda for Wales has been the hallmark of our first 20 years, and I hope it will be there through the next 20 years as well, just as I hope that we will demonstrate that the devolution journey is not yet over, that the things that we have added to the repertoire of our responsibilities in the first 20 years are not the end of devolution. We have the Thomas commission on criminal justice. We have a greater interest in this fifth Assembly than at any other time in thinking about what parts of the benefit system might allow us to do if they were in the hands of this Assembly.

It is right and proper, I think, that devolution will continue to be the journey that it has been into the next 20 years, and, at the same time, that we will use our efforts to tackle an issue that is more urgent today than we ever recognised 20 years ago. Our awareness of the climate emergency, the impact on our environment, that has grown beyond anything we could have imagined 20 years ago, both across the world and here in Wales as well. We have led the way in some ways, through our plastic bag levy, through our recycling rates, but there is so much that we have to do to create environmental justice here in Wales, reversing the decline in biodiversity, exploiting the huge advantages that Wales possesses to deploy the renewable energy technologies of the future.

And, finally, and maybe greatest of all, it seems to me, that the next 20 years will have to face the equality challenge, the challenge that lies there at the heart of the well-being of future generations Act, to make Wales a more equal place in the future. In 1976, Llywydd, the United Kingdom was the most equal society in Europe. Today, we are amongst the most unequal. And with that comes all those corrosive effects that go with inequality on that scale. A more equal society does better economically, enjoys better health, and has a greater sense of community cohesion. That’s the prize that there is in a Wales that is dedicated to equality between and across the generations, and it’s a challenge for the next 20 years even more significantly than it has been in our first history.

Llywydd, to conclude, devolution has given us in Wales the opportunity to take responsibility for our own future, working in partnership with others, of course, but able to act according to our own priorities. Looking ahead to the next 20 years, I’m confident that Wales will continue to light the way towards a more prosperous, a more equal, and a greener society, and a society that is fair to all. Thank you, Llywydd. [Applause.]

I thank the First Minister for his contribution, and that brings today’s session to note our twentieth anniversary to a close. Thank you to everyone for their contribution hitherto and the message of the day is that there’s more to come. Thank you very much.

The meeting ended at 17:49.