2. Will the Commission make a statement on the practicalities involved with holding hybrid committee meetings in the Welsh Parliament? OQ55562

Thank you for the question. Commission staff have been preparing during the recess for holding hybrid committee meetings. The committee rooms have been adapted to enable some Members, officials and witnesses to attend safely in person, with others participating via Zoom. Two meetings of the Equality, Local Government and Communities Committee will now be held on 2 and 9 October to test the format and the facilities. In the light of that experience, the Chairs' forum will be discussing the possibility of making the hybrid format available to other committees in the second half of this term.

Thank you for that, Presiding Officer. I think the answer's pretty complete. It gives me a time frame that we can look forward to as Members. Are you hopeful that any announcement will be made prior to the half-term recess? I appreciate that you said, with the practicalities of delivering it, providing the trial goes well, it would be only in the second half of term, but can we as Members expect some form of announcement out of the trial so that we may understand exactly when it might happen?

Well, in our work in developing new ways of working during this period of coronavirus, as we've developed and trialled new ways of working, we've always done so on the basis of having held pilots, to ensure everything in terms of how the Members are able to take part but also how the IT and the clerking system support us. We do that on the basis of running pilots, as we will be doing with the local government committee in a couple of weeks' time.

Then, the Chairs' forum and the views of Chairs on how their committees are running to date and how they aspire to have their committees working into the future will be essential in how we look to see whether there is an appetite to hold more hybrid committee meetings.

We have now ensured that there is the capacity to hold up to two meetings at the same time in a hybrid format. So, we've done the preparatory work in ensuring that the IT capacity and the space is there for at least that number, but it's a matter of seeing how the first few meetings of the local government committee go in future.

All of this, of course, as we all know, is subject to the coronavirus regulations changing, as we are experiencing at the moment, but we want to enable as much activity in the Senedd as is possible, as we've done to date, and we need to trial new ways of working, and continue to do so. So, thank you for the question.