Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:34 pm on 28 September 2021.
I thank the Member, because I think those are genuinely important points. And I think, as we design inter-governmental arrangements for the future, then ways of being able to draw in regional voices in England will be very important in all of that. Now, in the last few days, I've had opportunities to meet with metro mayors from many parts of England, and that includes the north-west as well, and the Mersey Dee Alliance is a very important part of the landscape for the economy of north-east Wales.
One of the difficulties of finding a way of acting—I'm thinking of the right word, for a moment, Llywydd—in a thoroughgoing way with metro mayors is they're all different—they all have different powers, they all have different responsibilities; there's no pattern. So, you can't have just a single approach that is easy to take from one set of relations to another. But I think the general point that the Member makes is an important one, and that, as metro mayors and English devolution mature, then, those relationships along our border, in the north-east with Liverpool and Manchester, but with the south-west of England as well, will be very important to Wales.