Well, the very simple answer to the last question is, 'Not at all.' So, basically it's a joint committee like any other, except that it's a body corporate in its own right. The reason that that's important is because it means it can directly employ staff and have its own budget, and it's a legal entity in its own right. So, when an authority delegates its functions to a joint committee that is enabled in that way, it means that the citizen knows that that is the body that's responsible for delivering it and if, for example, you wanted to sue that authority for not delivering your individual rights, that would be the body corporate that you had the rights enforced against. So, it's a much simpler landscape than we have already.

I share Mike Hedges's feelings about local government. I too am a big fan of local government. He and I worked together in one local authority for a very long time. Local government is very good at making the best out of poor structures and processes and continuing to deliver its services in the face of what can be unnecessary hurdles. The whole purpose of this working group has to be to remove those unnecessary hurdles. It's clear that authorities across Wales have an economic impact, one on the other. In education terms, for example, the boundary of the local authority would appear to be an impenetrable forcefield for some schools' catchment areas, and that makes absolutely no sense at all in terms of what the local school might look like and so on. We've had lots of conversations with people. Kirsty Williams and I have had several conversations with people about having a more sensible approach to infrastructure planning around new housing developments and so on for exactly that reason.

One thing I don't agree with Mike Hedges on is the single footprint issue. We will be talking to the authorities about the three areas that we want to form a statutory joint committee in and, as I said, those are the joint transport arrangements, the strategic plan arrangements and economic development/building of social housing—the pooling of land, effectively, for the building of social housing. But, otherwise, this is permissive. So, the local authorities can make whatever arrangement they want, but because we're doing it through the working group, the working group has done a map of what exists and what doesn't exist, and it makes no sense to overlap them. So, local authorities themselves will be the masters of their own fortune in that regard. They will be the ones who either enter or don't enter into an arrangement of different overlapping or otherwise committees. But it doesn't seem sensible to me that you would make five where one would do. So, we think that they will have that conversation amongst themselves and come to that conclusion.

So, it goes alongside the new performance regime, which will drive regional working. We will expect a local authority to consider regional working in planning its services, why that isn't a strategic necessity and what it might get in efficiency and effectiveness in doing so, and then we will require them to consider how they might best deliver that. But there will be no requirement to set up a particular vehicle; it is entirely permissive.