Diolch, Llywydd. In May, we secured a mandate from the Welsh people to deliver our manifesto, committed to creating a stronger, greener and a fairer Wales. In our programme for government we have outlined our plans for tackling the ongoing challenges presented by the pandemic, our departure from the European Union, and the climate change emergency. Our immediate priority is recovery, and, to that end, supporting our health service, our schools and our economy—all so essential for the well-being of our people.

What is also clear from the election result is the support for our manifesto for change and an acknowledgment of the need to reform and improve our constitutional relationship with the UK Government and the other nations of the UK. So, let’s be clear from the outset: reform is needed to enable us to deliver our commitments to support our public services, develop a prosperous economy, and tackle poverty and inequality to their fullest. To deliver policies that make a difference to the lives of people in Wales, we must have a comprehensive set of tools to do the job.

The last few years have exposed the deficiencies of our current settlement, as well as increasing tensions in the wider constitutional landscape of the United Kingdom. We have consistently iterated our support for a union and for a union that must change. We continue to lead the debate in Wales and doing so with practical proposals for positive change, most recently in the second edition of ‘Reforming our Union: Shared Governance in the UK’. 

Llywydd, in our manifesto we promised to establish a commission to consider the constitutional future of Wales, and today I want to set out how we intend to deliver on that promise. Given the direct impact our governance arrangements have on the people's lives we want to see the commission leading engagement with the public to raise awareness and to help build a wider public consensus. We want the commission to ascertain people's views on those issues that are most important to them in the way the constitution operates and the implications for the services that they value. And we want the commission to build a consensus with civic society on how we reform the constitution of the United Kingdom to build a stronger Wales and a stronger but fairer and more equal partnership.

The commission will be inclusive and it will reach beyond Wales to other nations, regions and communities of the United Kingdom to consider how we can build a better constitutional partnership. We expect the commission to be outward facing and to engage with civic society and the public as widely as possible, for a genuinely national conversation about the future of Wales. In particular we want the commission to reach out to those who might otherwise not come forward to participate in such a debate, to those people and communities who are largely disengaged from politics, or rather who have become sceptical about its relevance to their lives and to that of their families and its ability to make a difference.

We will establish a commission of citizens. They will be people who will represent the diversity of our society and communities, and it will include those with the skills and abilities that come from real-life experiences enabling them to reach out and engage. Their task will be to seek to identify and build consensus about our values and the sort of Wales that we want to be.

We will encourage the commission to think about how its work can support the seven well-being goals, as set out in the well-being of future generations Act, and to operate in a way that is consistent with the five ways of working the Act sets out.

We will encourage the commission to identify and learn from the best examples of citizen engagement and to be innovative in the way in which it approaches its task. It must be a people’s commission, engaged in a people’s conversation, with genuine grass-roots engagement, and how we achieve that will be our biggest challenge. We will need to develop a new language of engagement, one that avoids the language of politics and constitutions that we are so used to, a language that talks about the things that are directly relevant to people's lives. But to do this, we know that the work of the commission must be informed by robust evidence and analysis.

In addition to a traditional call for evidence and engagement with academics, we also intend to establish a panel of experts alongside the commission. They will undertake research and analysis from which the commission can develop ideas and recommendations. We envisage the panel comprising of established expertise from within and outside Wales. They will provide the expertise and the hard data and information, which, we hope, will free up more of the commissioners' time to focus on the big conversation we want to initiate.

Key to ensuring the commission's success will be its composition. It must be capable and independent. It must be as representative as possible of the society with which it will engage. This will include representation from a breadth of political and civic backgrounds. It must also be able to demonstrate expertise, and its members must represent all ages and be drawn from the widest possible range of sectors in civic society: public, private, third sector, civic and grass-roots organisations and social partners.

The role of the chair or co-chairs will be key and will need to provide leadership in its outward-facing role as well as building a consensus within the commission. Over the summer, we will be considering the issues in further detail and discussing the commission further with all the parties represented in the Senedd, and I intend to update you further in the autumn at the earliest opportunity. Diolch, Llywydd.