Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I'm pleased to have an opportunity today to update the Senedd on the next steps that the Welsh Government will take to implement the Cymraeg 2050 strategy. The journey to 1 million speakers and to double the daily use of Welsh by 2050 has captured the imagination of people across Wales since the last Government made its announcement back in 2017. I'm very delighted to have been appointed Minister for the Welsh language and to have the opportunity to lead the next stages of the strategy.

The strategy itself, and the five-year work programme that I am publishing today, is key to our work to meet the well-being goal of a thriving Welsh language. We are living in challenging times and I am aware that we need to turn goodwill towards the Welsh language into action that is robust and rapid. The commitment to do this runs through the programme. Our vision is outward-looking and inclusive. We want to create bilingual citizens who are confident to use the Welsh that they already possess. In a nutshell, we want everyone in Wales to feel that the language belongs to us all.

Of course, our response to the pandemic and its impact on the use of Welsh language is central to the work programme, and the main elements of Cymraeg 2050 are clear and they continue. With a strategy that extends over such a long term, we knew that changes in society could mean that we would need to adjust our priorities over time. Of course, that had to be done sooner than expected, and the work programme reflects this.

Today, we are also publishing our response to a recent report about the impact of COVID-19 on Welsh language community groups. We are increasing our focus on community development and ensuring that our work helps people to help themselves and their communities to use the Welsh language.

Planning well and strategically is central to our vision. This is what we will do: we will plan carefully to increase the number of children and adults learning Welsh, and we will increase the opportunities available for us to use Welsh with each other, in geographical or virtual communities, workplaces or social spaces.

The 58 areas of action in the programme show how wide-ranging the work is and how many opportunities we have to make a difference. I'm grateful to our partners for the commitment that they have shown. The pandemic has been a difficult time, but I look forward to rebuilding and collaborating further.

The results of the 2021 census and the language use survey for 2019-20 will be published during this Senedd. It's important to note, therefore, that this is a flexible work programme, and I stand ready to review and develop it in light of the census, together with the evidence that we continuously collect.

The work programme builds on the commitments in our programme for government, and embeds its ethos of a Wales that is stronger, greener and fairer into the general commitments: stronger as a confident bilingual country with a unique identity; greener, in growing the green economy and creating good jobs, closer to home, in areas where Welsh is the main language; and fairer, through the work we do to plan, legislate and invest to expand Welsh-medium education, so that all children from all backgrounds have access to Welsh in all parts of Wales.

Therefore, it's my pleasure to present this ambitious work programme for the new Senedd term. I look forward to working with my ministerial colleagues and across government in Wales to implement all of this programme. The next decade will be crucial in terms of language policy, and we must all come together—politicians, local authorities, and society as a whole. The Welsh language belongs to us all; so does the responsibility to implement policies in its favour.