Can I just thank everybody on the committee and the witnesses that gave us evidence? I really enjoyed this session, as a relatively new member of the committee. I think Mike is right. There's no putting this genie back in the bottle now, although, as the report makes clear, we need to be sure what we mean when we're talking about remote working or hybrid working, as the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development call it. And I don't think it would be—. I don't agree with Mike when he suggested that this might be the new normal and a lot more of us will be working more from home. Clearly, if you're serving food in a cafe you can't do that from home, but there are jobs that lend itself to this. If you look at what Admiral has been doing lately, and basically turned the whole of its workforce over to working from home—. I do recommend that Members have a read of this report, and I just want to draw their attention to the later recommendations, which draw attention to how this possibility of working remotely needs to be factored into a bigger jigsaw policy, really. It can't be dealt with in a stand-alone way.

But I'd start by saying that it's too easy to say that we—and who are we in these circumstances—can just set up working hubs in towns and villages throughout Wales without thinking this through. The CIPD isn't actually sure that the call for working from hubs is particularly there, anyway. While the prospect of this would be about reducing the horrors and the environmental damage of commuting, we do need to be clear that the commute isn't just going to be displaced to somewhere else. It's true to say that active travel could play a role here, but it would be quite a step, wouldn't it, to claim that people won't still reach for their car keys when they're still having to deal with dropping children off in school or filling a boot up with shopping. 

The other thing perhaps I just want to draw attention to is to watch out for the unintended consequences of this move, some of which we've seen during lockdown, of course. Because, yes, flexible working sounds great in principle, but what it's done is moved a lot of people who are working at home into working late at night in order to accommodate more domestic responsibilities. And as that's still—unsurprisingly—predominantly women, we have to bear in mind the equality impacts of any changes that remote working might bring to the fore. 

In short, the report recommends that any great shift in working practice has to be planned for, based on the fullest evidence, and that really none of that is possible, as Russell was saying in his opening remarks, without proper digital infrastructure and physical infrastructure, so there has to be a strategic approach to any major overhaul on how we have working lives. Diolch.