Firstly, I would like to thank Mark Isherwood for bringing forward a legislative proposal that would help us to create a better Wales. It is a sad fact, however, that the BSL community continues to face such challenges, even after the petition submitted by Deffo!, which then called on the Welsh Government to improve access to education and services in BSL to improve the quality of life for D/deaf people of all ages. Our nation has simply not delivered and I wholeheartedly agree with introducing the requirement that public bodies co-produce and publish their own BSL plan to develop awareness, training and improved access to front-line services.

As Members of the Senedd, we truly represent residents who use BSL, so I thought it essential that my own office team and I strove to learn. This should be the case across front-line, public-facing bodies in Wales, so that services are at least trying to be accessible to the around 7,500 people who not only use BSL, but rely on it in Wales. We need to empower this community. Now that requires us to have a Welsh Government that acts on the Children's Commissioner for Wales's findings that there is a blatant lack of support available to ensure that family members can use BSL. With a lack of communication skills, this, therefore, places an unnecessary and unfair barrier between BSL users and their families.

Now, a Government that addresses the terrible fact that only half of all adult BSL courses were fully funded by the Welsh Government, that has to change; a commitment to tackling the finding by the National Deaf Children's Society that not all online learning resources are accessible, despite schools being required to make provisions available under the Equality Act 2010; and legislation that helps to address the unacceptable fact that levels of support provided by local authorities vary, I can see no better way of achieving this than through this proposed Bill and the establishment of a BSL national advisory group. In fact, we could go so far as backing Professor Graham Turner's suggestion of a signing Parliament, to boost engagement in securing positive changes across Wales. We need to see progress, so I do hope that the Bill would also explicitly require the publication of BSL performance reviews.

I endorse all the comments made by the speakers previous to me today. I am pleased to be voting in favour of progress and this particular proposal, and I would ask all my Senedd colleagues to do the same. Thank you. Diolch.