I have to say that I think this is quite an ambitious Bill, and there are aspects of it that I do very much favour. I would have enjoyed the prospect of trying to work genuinely in the fullness of legislative time with proper consultation—we heard John Griffiths say that many stakeholders just couldn't engage in the timescale that was given. But, I think there's a really good, important local government Bill to be had here, and that this is really the tragedy of the fact that we are not going to see fully coherent proposals come through in a well-worked Bill that probably would have had cross-party support, which should be the aim of constitutional changes.

I very much support the franchise being extended to 16 and 17-year-olds. With apologies to my colleagues, I think local councils should be able to decide what their electoral system is, as long as they get support for that change amongst their electorate. I don't think that 22 systems, which is one choice or the other, first past the post or STV, would exercise our electorate particularly. They would just get used to wherever they were having that particular form of local elections. If we believe in local democracy, why not extend that principle to them to decide on how they are represented and how they constitute their councils?

I don't agree with extending council terms from four to five years. Our change in the Assembly to go from four to five years has not been successful, in my view, and I think a four-year term has a lot to recommend it at all levels of government.

There's much to be said about the general power of competence; the public participation strategy is something that would drag us into the modern age. Corporate joint committees between councils, I think that extends: we've seen how effectively city regions are working at the moment. There's a lot to be said for performance in governance reforms, and then allowing local mergers where councils want to do that.

There is good material here, but we have to face the difficulty that this Bill now requires very extensive committee stage work to look at the amendments. Those amendments are very comprehensive and will have to be crafted by the political groups in co-operation with the Assembly's lawyers. These are extensive meetings. This is serious law, probably one of the most important Bills in this Assembly term.

It's unfortunate the Government has been overtaken by a crisis they couldn't have anticipated, and I accept the challenges that has brought. But your timetabling was your decision, and to place major reform very late in the electoral cycle is always inviting trouble. I made this point when we discussed the Senedd Bill, around using two Bills to reduce the voting age. Also, I think some major things do need to be very well considered when we extend the franchise to people who are not citizens. That is clearly a huge principle that needs a lot of thought and examination, and similarly with the issue of prisoners, if that is brought forward.

Again, I don't completely agree with the very hostile view that no prisoners should receive the franchise. I think for lesser crimes—. We do imprison an awful lot of people in Britain, and have done so since the 1980s when we had roughly 40,000 prisoners, now we have about 90,000, many serving short sentences, and I think we have to be aware of the international organisations and treaties that we have signed, and some of the policy changes we might have to make are a consequence of international law, or decisions in international law, going against us. So, I don't condemn the Welsh Government for looking at that, because it's something that the UK Government has had to do as well. But it's still not elegant to bring in such a reform at Stage 2 and not have it fully consulted on.

So, I really think it would be an act of grace on the Government's part now to accept that, in the situation we find ourselves, which is not the fault of the Welsh Government, it is just not possible to give this Bill the extensive legislative scrutiny that it requires, and it's better to decide to postpone something than to rush something through that would not get cross-party support and may have serious deficiencies because of the unintended consequences. Thank you very much, Llywydd.