Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. I move the Welsh Conservative amendment and speak against the motion and the Government's amendment 2.

Can I first of all welcome the new Plaid Cymru spokesperson to his position and congratulate him on his appointment? I have to say that leading a debate for the first time in the Siambr can be a very nerve-wracking experience, but if he had any nerves he certainly didn't show them today. I can remember the very first debate that I led in this place: the fire alarm actually went off and the whole place was evacuated halfway through. I don't know whether that was as a result of the heat that I was generating in the Chamber, or whether someone was causing a bit of mischief outside, but it did make it all the more memorable. I look forward generally to jousting with you across the Chamber for many years to come.

Dirprwy Lywydd, Plaid Cymru had the opportunity to use their first opposition debate in the Senedd to look at a whole range of issues that are of critical importance to the people of Wales, but instead of choosing to focus on those other important issues like our health service, our schools, our economy, they have decided instead to start the new parliamentary term with a proposal that was overwhelmingly rejected at the recent Senedd elections, an election in which Plaid Cymru put to the people of Wales a pitch for more powers and another referendum with more constitutional chaos, and yet a referendum in which their share of the vote, unlike our share of the vote, went down. They went backwards. They lost ground. They didn't gain any ground as a result of that particular message that they put forward to the people of Wales, and that's because constitutional navel-gazing and constitutional chaos were rejected by the people of Wales on 6 May. And because of that, we must take this opportunity this afternoon in this Chamber to also reject this sort of power play as well.

That's why we make it absolutely clear in our amendment that we believe that there is no mandate whatsoever for the further devolution of significant powers to this Senedd. In contrast to the Plaid spokesperson, we believe that the pandemic and Brexit demonstrate very clearly why we don't need those extra powers because, Dirprwy Lywydd, the greatest tool that we have to rebuild a better Wales is the fact that Wales is an integral part of the United Kingdom. We only need to look at the past 18 months during the pandemic to see how Wales benefits from the current devolution settlement. We've had UK armed forced personnel that have been administering vaccines, that have driven ambulances across the length and breadth of Wales, when the NHS needed that extra support and faced that pressure. They've also flown in personal protective equipment from places such as the far east into the United Kingdom, when our NHS was on its knees and needed that support the most.

The UK Government's procurement processes and investment into the COVID vaccine research are responsible for one of the best vaccination programmes in the world. Without that support, Wales would not be the global leader in terms of vaccine roll-out that it is today. Our roll-out, in fact, would be lagging behind, risking lives and risking our economic recovery. It's thanks to being part of the UK that Wales has had the firepower to protect lives and livelihoods throughout the pandemic with the furlough scheme, the self-employed income support scheme, bounce-back loans, the cash to deliver the economic resilience fund here in Wales, and funding to support the third sector, the arts and our cultural sector. And on top of this, the UK Government has also, of course, invested extra money into our welfare system to increase payments to the people that need it.

Plaid's motion, of course, also asserts that the UK Government poses a threat to devolution, but nothing could be further from the truth. I would remind Members in this Senedd today that it was a Conservative UK Government that delivered the referendum back in 2016 that resulted in a further transfer of powers to the Senedd, because unlike other parties in this Chamber that tried to block Brexit, we actually respect the results of referendums. We know that it's the settled will of the people of Wales to have a Parliament here that has the set of powers that we currently have. There was no power grab by the UK Government following our departure from the European Union either. In fact, Wales has received scores of new powers and responsibilities as a result of our departure from the EU. The United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 actually cemented powers and gave responsibilities to the Senedd in around 70 policy areas, which came to us directly from Brussels. I mean, how you can say that that's a power grab, I will never ever know.

So, instead of balking about the powers that we don't have, let's use the powers that we do have to improve the lives of the people of Wales, to sort out the problems in our health service, in our schools, and in our economy, so that Wales can be the prosperous nation that we all need it to be.