Diolch, Dirprwy Llywydd. I move the amendment in Caroline's name. I thank the Member for his speech. I thought he spoke in a very, very measured way. Others say that he may be playing politics. I think that phrase is often used either when groups are divided amongst themselves as to their position or when a Member’s own position diverges, perhaps, from those that they represent, and I think, perhaps, the leader of Plaid Cymru may have touched both those issues today.

For our group, we are clear—we’ve moved our own amendment. Firstly, we want to note the report of the expert panel on Assembly electoral reform. Even though we may not be able to support it, even at the lower end of the range of AMs that the panel gave, I’m very appreciative of the work that Professor Laura McAllister and her esteemed colleagues did, and I would like to put on record our thanks, and I’m sure I speak for others in that.

Our second point is to believe that there is no appetite amongst the voting public to increase the number of politicians in Wales at this time. We simply believe that is true. It may be that Members want to increase the number. It may be that Members come up with particular arguments, and some of them may be good arguments for doing so, but there is no appetite amongst our constituents for doing this. I'll try and explain why there's no appetite; it's that increase in the number of politicians that I think particularly jars. We bring out a bit of this in the two sub-points of point 2. We'd like to see the 2018 review of parliamentary constituencies at the Westminster level enacted. I don't know what Plaid's position on it is. At the moment, Wales is very over-represented at Westminster. Perhaps they'd like it to be even more over-represented. But I think when we have devolution it is difficult—[Interruption.] They don't want us to be there at all. They sometimes hide that, but not today—the unambiguous support for independence that the First Minister noted yesterday.

I think in population terms, Wales would have 29 seats rather than 40 in the House of Commons. That's what the parliamentary review they had said, but it doesn't seem to be being enacted. So, that would be 11 Members reduced. Then, we're meant to be leaving the European Union; that would lead to four MEPs losing their positions. So, 15 politicians in all no longer paid by the public purse. And in that scenario, Members may wish to put their arguments again and we will engage with those arguments. But at the moment, there is no appetite for expanding the size of this place, and that is partly because we've too many MPs at Westminster and we've MEPs in the European Parliament when we voted three years ago to leave.

The argument that Adam made was that we were small in size to begin and weak in powers, and as we have developed more powers, we should therefore have more people. But surely a corollary of that argument is the institutions from which we've taken power—i.e. Westminster and our representation there and also prospectively, I hope, the European Union—should see those numbers reduced. That has not happened, yet we have this urgency to do this by 2021, potentially before that happens. I think that's what makes this a very difficult motion for him to put forward and why he won't be finding the support from perhaps others in the Chamber that he would hope for. 

I also finally just draw attention to the situation with local government. I think twice, perhaps three times, Labour have sought to reduce the number of councils across Wales. There are quite strong arguments for why they should do that, but each time they have pulled back and we still have these 22 councils that are much smaller on average than councils in the other nations of the United Kingdom. We have these costs for all those 22 councils, many replicated 22 times. If you had less councils, if you had less councillors, as well as—