Diolch, Llywydd. Thanks to the Conservatives for bringing today's debate, and I hereby move the motion on behalf of the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party.

I think that Angela Burns has given us an interesting account of the waste of taxpayers' money that has occurred over the past 21 years. It's even more interesting given that the Conservatives are in favour of devolution, yet the evidence of the failings of devolution is staring them in the face. The Conservatives will say that these are the failings of a particular political party—Welsh Labour—rather than the failings of an institution, yet the danger is that in bringing this motion, they're unwittingly giving us a full-blooded critique of devolution itself. I suppose it depends how seriously we take the Conservatives' stated solution to the problem of wasting taxpayers' money, which is to establish what they call a cross-departmental office. Well, we didn't get a lot of detail on this, and I do wonder who would be in it. Do the Conservatives really imagine that the people running this office would be any different in mindset from the people whose spending they are scrutinising? I think I heard Angela say that the new office would be called OGRE, and I fear it would be a bit of an ogre. It's a bit like the old joke about politicians working out how to cut down the number of committees so they set up a committee to look into it. And that's all this cross-departmental office would be: another committee. We already have too many of those.

So, has devolution achieved anything? Well, the Labour Government's amendment gives us a list of achievements, which doesn't, in my eyes, amount to an awful lot. Their amendment today cites free prescriptions, for instance. Yes, we have free prescriptions, but we have a health service that barely functions. Five out of the seven health boards in Wales are in some kind of special measures, with Betsi Cadwaladr in north Wales having been in this position for five long years. I know that the health service in England has its problems too, but they don't seem to be on the same scale as here in Wales. All the evidence is that devolution has given us a health service that is markedly worse than the one we had before. In one case, we had patients who could no longer even go to their local hospital, the Countess in Chester, because the hospital was refusing to admit any more patients from Wales until the Welsh Government had paid the bill. This kind of episode simply wouldn't have happened before we had devolution.

What of the economic benefits that the people of Wales were promised that devolution would bring? Well, in 2003, Edwina Hart, then a senior Labour Minister, told us that poverty in Wales would be eradicated through her Communities First schemes. Fifteen years later, these schemes were finally abandoned. The Welsh Government was unable to cite any evidence that the areas contained within the schemes had derived any economic advantage from having them. This amounts to a waste of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money. As for eradicating poverty, well, what about the promise to raise Wales's GDP to 90 per cent of the average UK GDP by 2010? We never remotely looked like achieving this, and the Welsh Government had to do what it usually does with its targets—it abandons them.

One area where we have definitely gone backwards is inward investment. When we had the Welsh Development Agency, Wales punched above its weight and attracted more than 20 per cent of all UK inward investment. Under devolution, the WDA was scrapped so that we could have, instead, a committee of bureaucrats directly answerable to the Welsh Government. The result is that inward investment has plummeted and it's now only 2 per cent of that of the UK. This is a perfect example of how devolution has actually delivered decline in Wales rather than resurgence.

Can I also mention the M4 relief road that was cited by Angela? There was a choice between two routes, but the Welsh Government opted not for one or the other, but rather not to build the road at all. This after wasting more than £150 million of taxpayers' money on the project. Oddly, one of the grounds on which the Welsh Government cancelled the scheme was its cost, yet now that the UK Government are offering to get involved, the Welsh Government are so obsessive about protecting their rights as a devolved Government that they are rejecting the offer of assistance. The people of Wales end up with £100 million of their money wasted and a road system that still doesn't get them out of the Brynglas tunnels. Please ask yourself: has devolution really done anything at all to improve the Welsh economy? All it has done has been to waste money.

No, while I agree with the sentiments of much of the Conservative motion, I feel an easier method would simply be to give the Welsh public a chance to evaluate what has happened over the past 21 years and to vote to abandon the whole failed project of devolution. What we need is another referendum, with the people of Wales being given the option to abolish the Welsh Parliament and Government. Diolch yn fawr iawn.