Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. I'm very pleased to move this amendment, speaking in the place of my colleague Leanne Wood, who is unable to be with us this afternoon. I'd like to begin by saying that I'm very grateful to the Minister for accepting our amendment, which was tabled in the spirit hoping that she would.

I want to associate myself with all the positive things that the Minister has said about the work of the Equality and Human Rights Commission here in Wales. It's my belief that they do a great deal of work with relatively little resource and I know that that work impacts, as the Minister has said, and I know that it will continue to do so.

However, I wish to raise some concerns, not about the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but about the environment in which it may find itself working. We know that the Conservative Government at Westminster, which is responsible for the funding and the management of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, under the UK legislation that currently governs equality law here in Wales, has a long-term commitment to repealing and replacing this legislation. As the Minister has said in her speech, I have real concerns about what that replacement might contain.

This is a Government with a strong commitment to deregulation—a Westminster Government with a strong commitment to deregulation—and we know, do we not, Dirprwy Lywydd, that deregulation often means removing the protections of the most vulnerable, whether that's the protections of people working in dangerous environments under health and safety, or whether, in this case, this is the protections, for example, of women and girls to have their rights protected in work if they need to go on maternity leave.

I'm very pleased to hear the Minister say that she is intending, as she's said before, to enact the socioeconomic duty and I'd be grateful if she was able to tell us this afternoon what sort of time frame she's intending to do this. Because it's our contention on these benches that the tradition of support for the promotion of equality and social justice, which has been, I think, shared fairly broadly across many parts of this Assembly, is now under threat by the changing environment at Westminster. I believe that we need to insert a sense of urgency in some of the work that the Minister has already outlined.

I was very pleased to hear her say earlier that she was committed to the research, which she's already mentioned to us, to look at what kind of legal framework we may need to have here in Wales to protect the rights of our citizens going forward. I was also pleased to hear her say that that work includes looking at the potential to incorporate the UN conventions on human rights more broadly into Welsh law.

I feel that it is time, and we believe that it is now time, to consider going further than that and to seek a clear and simple devolution of equality responsibilities to this Senedd, because it is my firm belief that we will be able to develop a consensus around the kind of approach to equality and human rights that it may not be possible to deliver in Westminster. And it is my concern that the positive work that the Equality and Human Rights Commission do now may become impossible if they are working in an environment where the UK Government—working at a GB level in this case, of course, because arrangements in the north of Ireland are different—are hostile to its work.

The Minister may remember, going back a very, very long time to the 1980s and early 1990s, that a lot of the good work that was then done by the Equal Opportunities Commission in Wales, led by our late colleague Val Feld, actually had to be done in spite of the central policy that was coming out of the then central Government. I don't think we can expect our Equality and Human Rights Commission to function that way 30 years later, doing positive work like—. For example, the Deputy Minister will remember the creation of Chwarae Teg, which is a very, very important organisation in Wales now, that had to be done in spite of rather than with the support of the then Equal Opportunities Commission centrally.

So, I would ask the Minister, in her response to this debate—and I won't repeat the positive things she's said about the specific pieces of work that the Equality and Human Rights Commission have done this year—to inject some speed into this work, because I feel that the environment may change more quickly than we are expecting, and that we may find ourselves with more work to do if we don't, for example, create a Wales-based legislative framework to protect the human rights of our fellow citizens and to promote the more equal society that I know the Deputy Minister—and she has our full support—is seeking to promote.

So, I don't disagree at all, Diprwy Lywydd, with anything that the Minister has said—I would support it all—but what I am concerned about is that changing environment and the need to inject some speed into this work, so that we don't find ourselves, for example, with an Equality and Human Rights Commission in Wales that has been so stripped of resources that it can barely do its job. Diolch yn fawr.