As a member of the Economy, Infrastructure and Skills Committee I'd like to thank all those who contributed to our inquiry as well as the Chair and the clerking team for their excellent work on this vitally important topic. The list of stakeholders who contributed is lengthy and extremely diverse and I think that's not surprising, really, because we all know how important access to banking is, and how strongly people feel about the withdrawal of major banks from our high streets up and down Wales.

As a backbencher, a lot of your time is taken up with committee work and quite often you can find yourself immersed in what are very important and worthy inquiries, scrutinising existing policy or looking to the future, and think to yourself, 'As important as I think this is, I'm not quite sure my constituents would really be that interested in what I'm doing here.' But that was never the case with this inquiry into access to banking. I knew this was one inquiry where, if I was to explain to people in the Cynon Valley what we were looking at and why, they would be engaged, full of opinions, keen to know the outcome and where this Assembly and Welsh Government might be able to make a difference.

By way of an example, I, like many other Members of this Senedd, have a Facebook page through which I communicate with my constituents, and of all the posts that I've put up since I was elected in 2016, the one post, sadly, which gathered more attention than any other by a mile was a post that I wrote to inform constituents about the closure of the Co-operative Bank in Aberdare. This wasn't the first bank in the town to close and, indeed, I have to say, the town, quite rarely, does have a good representation of banks and building societies, but what that post did was to tap into the public psyche and the general feeling that people have that our banks have a social duty to retain a presence on the high street, and shouldn't just be driven by excessive profit margins and the move to online banking. One of the major gripes people have about bank closures is the lack of community consultation prior to branches closing, and the repeated and blinkered defence by the banking sector, who always say that it was purely a commercial decision.

So the process around bank closures was one area that we were keen to investigate as a committee. We examined the access to banking standard, which banks and building societies can, but don't have to sign up to, and which sets out how customers should receive timely and improved notification and support once a decision has been made to close a bank branch. The latest reports suggest that there's been good compliance with the standard from the banking industry, which leads me, in the light of the problems that we are all too aware of, to question whether or not the standard itself is strong enough. This was reflected in recommendation 6 of our report, where we called for the UK Government and JACS group to review whether the access to banking standard is sufficiently robust to address the impact of bank closures, or whether regulatory or other action is required. Understandably, the Welsh Government wasn't able to accept our recommendation because it has no devolved powers in this area, and this shows the complexities faced by Welsh Government in trying to hold banks to account for their behaviour in Wales. Is there a way around this? Is there a made-in-Wales solution? Well, quite possibly, a community bank of Wales, and that's something I'll return to later.

When defending their bank closures, banks are always keen to point to the role that post offices can play in providing banking services and to signpost their existing customers to their local Post Office branch. But is the Post Office really a viable alternative? Well, we explored this and what we found is that banks aren’t able to really offer the full range of services as other Members have pointed out, and this is compounded by the lack of public awareness about Post Office banking services as well, with 55 per cent of adults supposedly unaware they can use the Post Office for banking whatsoever. So, that led us to recommendation 7 where we asked the Welsh Government to review its support for the Post Office network and to raise awareness of these services across Wales. And again, the complexities of devolution came to the fore in the Welsh Government's response here, with them accepting our recommendation only in part, as funding for post offices is a matter for the UK Government. So, again this made me think whether a made-in-Wales solution is needed to circumvent these constraints.

And that leads me on to the community bank of Wales, with its intention to offer current accounts, face-to-face banking and provide loans by experienced staff. Could this be the solution that we are looking for? Well, the stakes are high indeed as public expectation is set to build around this very popular Government policy. When we questioned Mark Hooper of Banc Cambria, which has been awarded the seed funding to develop the community bank of Wales, he told us that the bank could feasibly create more than 50 branches in Wales within five to seven years, and he estimated that about 12 of those would be fully manned and the rest automated. Now, while this could be a welcome step to support our communities at the sharp end of bank closure, I do think there needs to be some expectation management here, and Welsh Government needs to be clear with people if only roughly a fifth of branches would be fully staffed. I know that communities in my constituency with no bank would be delighted to think that Banc Cambria might set up a branch there, but would they be quite so keen if they knew that it was just to be automated? So, although the Welsh Government has accepted our recommendation on this, I still feel it's an area that could require more scrutiny as plans develop.

And to conclude, this has been a vitally important inquiry, and I look forward to seeing Welsh Government's progress in this area.