Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. Can I say that I'm very disappointed indeed not to be able to vote for the Bill, and indeed to be voting against it actively? And the reason for that is there are very welcome things in the Bill, which the Presiding Officer has outlined. Although we have a free vote on the issue of extending the franchise to 16 and 17-year-olds, it's something I've been very keen to support for many years, and I do believe it's an idea that its time has come, and it would reshape a lot of our political discourse if we did have 16 and 17-year-olds on the electoral register. And it really is quite devastating to me that I'm not going to get the opportunity, for reasons I will outline in a moment, to vote for that really powerful extension of the franchise.

I think it's also important that we recognise this institution as a Senedd, and in English as a Parliament. I think this is a great step forward. Devolution—as, well, lots of people claim to have said it; it may have been Ron Davies—is a process not an event. But we've had a sort of nearly 20-year constitutional convention working out what sort of form of devolution we really wanted. And we started as a sort of county council on stilts—although I have to say our Presiding Officer then made sure that we acted always much more like a proper Assembly. But we have become what I would say is a classic Westminster-model institution, and the name Parliament, or Senedd, is appropriate recognition of that.

I also welcome the Bill because it clarifies and streamlines the rules on disqualification. And Members may recall that I did chair the Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee in the fourth Assembly, when that report was drafted.

However, in introducing the right for foreign nationals to vote, this Bill, in our view, becomes unsupportable. It's a major change to a Commission Bill that the Commission did not want. And I do remind people that this novel idea is not common practice anywhere else, as far I'm aware, and it also brings with it the right to stand for this institution, and presumably hold office in it. It's been completely unscrutinised, introduced by the Government without scrutiny, introduced at Stage 2. It's really quite a shocking thing to do on a constitutional Bill that requires, as the Presiding Officer said, a supermajority. It's quite insulting, frankly, to those who have genuine concerns about the lack of scrutiny.

So, the Conservative group, in voting against this Bill, will not be voting against a former Commission Bill, but a Bill that, unfortunately, has been hijacked by the Welsh Government. And I have to say, Presiding Officer, I think you've been singularly badly served by the Government on this occasion.