[Inaudible.]—a cut-and-paste job including, possibly, 28 provisions contained within Mark Drakeford's 2017 local government White Paper, which was originally dropped. In his written statement on the Welsh Government's approach to legislation in light of COVID-19 last week, the First Minister asked this Welsh Parliament to work with the Welsh Government to explore novel approaches to scrutiny in order to allow it to progress its legislative programme under current circumstances. This statement omitted any reference to votes for convicted prisoners. It is also noted that the Welsh Government response to the Equality, Local Government and Communities Committee’s report on this Bill only accepts a quarter of our 32 recommendations, recommendations made after detailed evidence gathering from a range of expert witnesses and hours of deliberation by committee members.

The Bill provides that each principal council may decide for itself on the voting system to use, whether first-past-the-post or proportional representation using the single transferrable vote. However, 33 out of 35 respondents to its White Paper consultation disagreed and preferred to keep one voting system for the whole of Wales. Further, as our committee report states,