Yes, and I'm not disagreeing with that remark that you made, Jenny, and I'm not saying the difficulties are insuperable. But certainly I believe the legislation will add to the burden of prison staff, who probably have enough to do as it is, and we did hear some evidence to that effect when we had the inquiry.

There is also the issue of what happens if we have a situation similar to 2017, when we had Welsh local elections rapidly followed by a general election. If that situation were to be replicated in future, you would have some prisoners who were eligible to vote in the locals. Then a few weeks later we might have a general election, which they might be more interested in than they were in the locals, and guess what? They don't have a vote. Somebody is then going to have to explain to a group of prisoners why they don't have a vote that they thought they had—good luck with that one.

Now, there is also a logistical problem of setting a cut-off point as to which prisoners can vote, so we have the compromise, which the report proposes, of prisoners having a vote who are serving sentences of four years or less. This is better, I think, than giving the vote to all prisoners, which I think would send out a message to society that the wider public would find difficult to comprehend. However, we were told by some people in authority in the prison service during our visits that it would actually be far more difficult to operate this extension of prisoner voting if there were a cut-off point, because again, it creates different categories of prisoner, some of whom can vote, others who cannot. We would have prisoners on the same wing, many convicted for very similar offences, but having being given marginally different sentences, some of whom can vote, and others who cannot. In a closed environment like a prison, this could lead to problems. In fact, far from increasing the morale of prisoners, giving the vote to some of them, but not all of them, could actually lead to arguments and a decrease in the general morale of a prison wing during an election time.

In my view, the most practical solution would not be to extend the prisoner vote at all, but to accept the situation as it currently stands. Hardly anyone in the wider electorate supports prisoner voting at all. Most believe that prisoners have forfeited their right to vote when they forfeited a much more important right, which was the right to their own liberty. Prisoners have already been adjudged to be incapable of conforming to civil society. This was the decision taken when they were sentenced to imprisonment. It makes no sense at all in the eyes of most ordinary members of the public to give them the right to vote. There are some caveats in terms of prisoners on remand who haven’t been convicted of any offence, and in terms of those on temporary licences, but these are all covered by the existing legislation. So, why the need to extend prisoner voting at all? This report is the prelude to another bad piece of legislation in the making, I am afraid, and another that shows how out of touch the Welsh Assembly is with the general public of Wales. Thank you.