Your statement refers to community councils and the need to prepare an annual report, and it states that this was a recommendation of the independent review on the future of community and town councils in Wales and key to ensuring transparency and accountability. In January, I questioned you regarding the Wales Audit Office report, stating:

'The current standard of financial management and governance remains disappointing at too many Town and Community Councils'.

You responded that you'd only been in post six weeks and said you'd not yet had a chance to read the report in depth. So, again, how, if at all, will this Bill address that? You refer to the independent review panel on community and town councils in Wales that has also called, amongst other things, for all community and town councils to be working towards meeting the criteria to be able to exercise the general powers of competence and recommended that community and town councils, all representative of them, should become statutorily invited participants on all public services boards. Again, how will this Bill address that?

You refer to enabling prisoners and young people in custody from Wales serving a custodial sentence of fewer than four years to vote in local government elections. Of course, the YouGov poll in 2017 asking people in Wales whether any prisoners should be allowed to vote: only 9 per cent stated that they should. So, there does appear to be a bit of a disconnect between the will of the people and Welsh Government here. However, the motive, we support, which is rehabilitation, providing offenders with the opportunity to reflect on and take responsibility for their crimes and prepare them for a law-abiding life when they're released. How do you respond to the evidence in the report that you referred to, the committee report, from Parc prison, where we heard that few prisoners would either use a right to vote, or see it as an incentive to rehabilitate, and where the committee report admitted that the empirical evidence to support the theory that voting age rehabilitation was limited? In fact, the right, we understand, of prisoners to vote is to be introduced at Stage 2 due to difficulties the Welsh Government has had in identifying the number of prisoners who will be included within the eligibility criteria. How does that address the deficit regarding scrutiny, where Stage 1 scrutiny in committee is essential to proper detailed scrutiny of all elements? If that information from the Welsh Government's briefing earlier today is accurate, it raises major concerns.

I've been here long enough to remember how the debate on votes at 16 started, and it started because 80 per cent of young people in Wales weren't voting for anybody and it has developed since. In your explanatory memorandum, you refer to the figures in Scotland, and you say that 89 per cent of those eligible 16 and 17-year-olds in Scotland registered, against 97 per cent for the general population, and I believe 75 per cent are estimated to have voted, against 85 per cent for the general population. But the real comparator, is it not, is the Scottish Parliament election in 2016, when overall turnout was back down to 55.6 per cent for the constituency and 55.8 per cent for the regional vote—even lower in Wales at 45.4 per cent? So, what evidence have we got to indicate that a parliamentary election would see that referendum result being repeated in terms of engagement?

You talk about reforms to improving electoral arrangements for local government, including extending the franchise to foreign citizens legally resident in Wales. However, the explanatory memorandum provides no examples of any other country or nation that gives non-citizens the vote in local elections and the impact that this has had. So, what discussions have you had with other national Governments about the impact of allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections? And what case studies has the Welsh Government used to assess the impact of allowing non-citizens to vote? I'm told that at its briefing earlier, the Welsh Government did not know of any research that had been carried out on the effect of the introduction of the right to vote for non-citizens and where the principle of representative democracy has always been based upon a citizen's right to vote requiring the stake that citizenship brings.

I believe I'll be coming to the end of my time shortly, so I'll conclude—