Yes, absolutely, and if any Members have any suggestions or examples of best practice that can then be rolled out across councils, across the community or on a nationwide scale, then I'm sure both I and the Minister would be very happy to hear about that. Like you said, even if some people decide it isn't for them, we've also increased awareness of the role of the council in the community anyway. And also, likewise, we need to consider how we better support people who perhaps weren't successful in elections, and they've already shown that interest in wanting to get involved in local politics and the local community. And we've actually seen through the work we've done and through the committee's evidence that perhaps some people have then gone on to use those transferrable skills, perhaps as school governors and in other roles in the community. So, it's actually how we continue that support, perhaps, in the future, so people want to put themselves forward again. And it's really important that we make sure people don't become disinterested through that lack of success—most people don't get elected at the first attempt—so actually making sure we are there to support people and take them through that process.

This report also focuses on a number of important issues, including remote attendance, job-share arrangements and support to assist people with disabilities to run for elected office. These are areas where work is already under way, but we can always build on this work. So, in the forthcoming local government elections (Wales) Bill, we intend to amend the remote attendance sections of the Local Government (Wales) Measure 2011 to include provisions to facilitate job-sharing arrangements for members of council executives and leaders. We'll obviously look to things where it's happened—in Swansea—and actually where we can learn from other initiatives as well, as I think Helen Mary said as well. It will include a duty on political group leaders to promote appropriate standards of behaviour, and require local authorities to publish the official address of its elected members, rather than their home address. So, local authorities would need to provide an official office address for members to use on publicity. Members raised the challenge of the rise in online abuse that politicians across the piece unfortunately experience—I know many of us in the Chamber have experienced that ourselves—and I understand that the Minister for Housing and Local Government has just today been in touch with the UK Government, actually, on how we can work to tackle online abuse with social media companies, because I think we're all aware this is something that really needs to be tackled head on and dealt with, because nobody deserves to have that. People make many personal sacrifices by putting themselves forward to serve their community and, actually, we need to respect each other as fellow human beings for what we do as well. In line with this, we will also legislate to remove the need to publish a candidate's address on the ballot paper. Lots of people will know where their local councillor lives, but I think that's extra security in making sure it's not then publicly available online as well, to give people that peace of mind where we can.

We will also write to the UK Government about enacting section 106 of the Equality Act 2010, as proposed in the report, and officials have contacted the Information Commissioner's Office to seek a view on the proposed approach to the publication of reimbursement if costs occur. We are committed to working on delivering an access to an elected office fund for Wales, and that work is ongoing with officials across Government and also with my colleague, the Deputy Minister here.

We should also acknowledge that measures have already been taken to support diversity. Wales was the first in the UK to make legislative provision for family absence for elected members to address some of the barriers to participation in local government for councillors who may have family responsibilities. We do intend to update these arrangements in the local government elections Bill to extend the provisions to those adopting, and we also intend to make it easier to update the absence arrangements as the policy in this area develops.   

Dirprwy Lywydd, in closing I just want to reiterate again how we welcome this important work of the committee and all involved, and look forward to working together to take this forward in the future. I think we can all agree that we have taken steps in the right direction, but it's time to step up our work in this area for all of our people, our community and our democracy. Diolch yn fawr.