Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. I'm pleased to rise to move the motion in the name of my party and, indeed, to build upon the previous debate's discussion of where we've come from, how we've developed as a Parliament, and how we could develop further. I think, in thinking about this arc of Welsh democracy, if you like, one way of seeing it is that we started as a Parliament that was small in size and also weak in power, and we've now become a small, powerful Parliament.

I think, though, that there is a flaw in that description. A different way of summarising the predicament that we are now in is to say, 'Yes, we have more levers at our disposal, which is welcome, but we've got the same number of hands'. And there is a problem there, isn't there? Because powers that are held but cannot be effectively used can, in some ways, be the worst of all worlds, because they create expectations of wide-ranging transformative change, for example, which cannot then be fully delivered, risking alienating citizens and ultimately undermining faith in the institution itself. In that sense, we are a Parliament with new powers, but without the power to use them to the fullest effect. We are an under-powered Parliament, if you like, with a gaping capacity gap between what we're able to do in legal terms now, and what we're able to do in practice, directly or indirectly, in holding the Executive to account.

Now, the question of the size of parliaments sounds like it's a peripheral issue, it's the preserve of constitutional geeks. It's anything but. It's so fundamental in the development of democracy itself that James Madison and Alexander Hamilton wrote a Federalist Paper about it. And fast forward to today, and the New York Times recently did an editorial on it, making the case for more Members of the House of Representatives elected—as we suggest in this motion—on the basis of single transferable votes in multi-Member constituencies. Now, it's a long way from Capitol Hill to Cardiff Bay, but the essential argument is the same. Our Parliament is too small, and that represents a big danger to the health of our democracy.

Now, over the past 15 years, we've had three major independent inquiries, all coming to the same conclusion—that, if this place is to work effectively, it needs more Members. We had the Richard commission in 2004, the Silk commission in 2012, and finally the McAllister expert panel last year. The fourth Assembly Commission said that we are underpowered and overstretched, and the current Assembly Commission agreed, and that's why they commissioned the expert panel.

How could you not come to this conclusion? As the powers and workload of this place have steadily increased, the case, I think, for more Members has become increasingly incontrovertible. We have a Welsh Treasury, but do we really have a Treasury committee? That's no disrespect to the Finance Committee, but a Finance Committee with six people isn't enough to scrutinise the recently devolved taxation powers and to oversee the £2 billion plus worth of taxation powers. As the McAllister panel put it, quoting the Silk commission,

'good scrutiny means good legislation, and good legislation pays for itself.' 

Now, leaving aside Ministers and other office holders, for example, there are only 44 Members in this place, in this Parliament, that are able to hold the Welsh Government to account and scrutinise legislation as backbench Members, effectively. That compares with 113 in the Scottish Parliament in that position, and 522 at Westminster. The McAllister panel concluded that as a point of principle, Chairs of policy and legislation committees, or other significant committees, should sit only on their own committee, and other Members should sit on no more than two committees. But they said that, with only 60 Members, this is not achievable within the current committee system. As Members, we all know; we're constantly moving from one meeting or one issue to another, and much of the time we don't even have the opportunity to read, let alone reflect properly on, the documents at the heart of those meetings. The monuments to multitasking that are these dreaded computer terminals are testament to the fact that we have too few Members with too little time. We don't even have the time to listen to each other, let alone to think.

Between them, Richard, Silk and McAllister undertook an exhaustive trawl of equivalent small country legislatures around the world. They found that 60 Members was extremely small for a legislative Assembly that also provides an executive. We're way at the end of a long tail. The Electoral Reform Society found that even for devolved legislatures with executive functions like ours, around 100 representatives is the norm internationally. We are the only nation in the world that I've been able to find where the council chamber of the capital city has more members than the national Parliament itself. The average size of national Parliaments for countries like ours, with between 1 million and 6 million citizens, is around 140 Members. Indeed, if you applied the famous cube root rule—now I am fully in constitutional geek territory—the finding by the Estonian political scientist Rein Taagepera that the largest legislative body of a national legislature tends to be the cube root of the population, a number that, when multiplied by itself twice, yields the voting age population, then the Senedd would have around 140 Members.

Now, the McAllister report, of course, advocated the far more modest and reasonable proposal of between 80 and 90 Members, but surely we must accept that 60 is far too few for us to be able to do the job that we've been assigned. We need to do something about that, and we need to do it now. I know that some people today have accused me of playing politics with this, so let me quote someone who is avowedly apolitical, the former Auditor General for Wales, Huw Vaughan Thomas, who said this in his valedictory letter to us:

'ever since my membership of the Richard Commission in 2002-04, it has been clear to me that an increase in the number of Assembly Members is necessary in order for the Assembly itself to continue to be able to scrutinise the executive effectively. With the ever-increasing range of powers being devolved to Wales under the 2015 Act, most notably in tax-raising, innovative finance mechanisms and transport, I consider that the need for additional Assembly Members is now becoming acute'.

Now, I think many Members in the Chamber know the truth that I speak. I think that's why the First Minister and his party, to be fair, have come out in favour of more Members in principle. The essence of the Labour Party's current position as I understand it is a bit in the spirit of St Augustine: 'Make us more effective, but just not yet'. And I fear that we're falling into a very familiar trap here. So many times over the last 20 years we've had maximum ambition but zero urgency, and there are dangers there for all of us.