Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:12 pm on 25 September 2019.
Thanks to the committee chairman for bringing today's debate, and also thanks to all the people who took part, including the prisoners that we spoke to. Now, I'm not now a member of the committee, although I was at the outset of this inquiry. I did participate in the two prison visits and I was on the committee when we started to debate the contents of the report.
I think John Griffiths is right when he says that this is an emotive issue, and people's views are bound to differ, as has been demonstrated by this debate. To be fair to the Chair, he did allow us all to have our say on this when we began to discuss what would go into the report, but of course we were never all going to agree. Now, we may have political differences here as to whether or not there should be any extension of prisoner voting, but can I also point out that, even if we all agreed on the issue of extending it, which we don't, there would still be major logistical and practical problems in applying that extension? For instance, there is the problem that we have Welsh prisoners in prisons in Wales and also many Welsh prisoners in prisons in England, and we also have English prisoners in prison in Wales. This means that, if we have an election in Wales such as an Assembly election or local government elections, then some prisoners can vote—if this idea goes through, this extension, some prisoners will be able to vote and some will not, and there will be some difficulties in distinguishing between these different categories of prisoner. I'm not saying that—