Diolch, Heledd, for those comments and questions. I absolutely agree with everything that you said—your questions and the context in which you set those questions. We have all had to face, quite rightly, some very, very uncomfortable truths as we dealt with the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and what came after that. And you're quite right that it is a tragedy that we had to wait for an incident like that before we galvanised in the way that we did in response to that. But I'm very pleased that we did that in Wales and that we did that quickly. We pulled together the board, the group that worked with Gaynor Legall to produce the audit and come up with the list that she did, leading to the recommendations that we'll be taking forward and that I outlined in my statement today.

I can't give you a definitive time yet in terms of when this will be completed. We're hoping that we will get the stakeholder group together fairly quickly, but we don't want to rush this. We do want to do it properly. We are pulling together a stakeholder group that will draft the recommendations, and, as I say, I want that stakeholder group to be as inclusive as it possibly can be so that we've got people with historical knowledge but we've also got people with knowledge about equal opportunities and equalities, which we need to be looking at for the future as well in identifying and recommending how public bodies and organisations identify people that we commemorate in the future.

We did have the purple plaque scheme, of course, in Wales, which was I think the only nation in the UK that had a particular and dedicated scheme looking at how we commemorate remarkable women in Wales. I'm very proud of the fact that one of those purple plaques is in my constituency, commemorating Ursula Masson, who set up the Wales women's archive. It was one of the things that I remember when I was first elected. The constituency that I represent is a fascinating constituency with an incredible history, but very, very few women, if any, are commemorated in it. One of the first things that I did when I was elected was to draw up a pamphlet about the remarkable women of Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney, because so many of those women were integral and essential to the prosperity of that constituency. They were the power and the support behind the Merthyr rising, for instance. So, we have to look at all strands of equality. We have to look at those women, those black, Asian and minority ethnic people in our communities, and LGBTQ communities, that have made enormous contributions to our society, and part of the guidance will be for looking at that in terms of the types of people that we would commemorate. But I would expect and I would hope that those commemorations and the recommendations that come forward would be driven from the bottom up, so it would be local communities themselves that identify people that they want to commemorate. 

In terms of the public consultation, I would very much expect the stakeholder group to be setting out its recommendations about how that consultation should take place. But I would want that consultation to be as thorough as it can be, to be as full as it can be, to be as easily accessibly as it can be, so we have to look at all the options that are available to us to enable that to happen. I have to say, I was very encouraged by the fact that when the Legall audit was initially announced, the responses that we had to it were overwhelmingly positive in terms of what we were trying to do. Yes, you're right, Heledd, there was some reaction against it, as there always will be when we do anything like this, as there was when we declared Wales a nation of sanctuary and so on. But I take from that the positives. The positive responses that we had back from that far outweighed the negatives.

In terms of financial support, in response to the committee's report, we have spent quite a bit, obviously, on getting to the point that we're at now. We have funded that, we funded the audit, we funded the revised edition and so on, and we will, obviously, be funding the stakeholders engagement, and we will be funding the public consultation. What we have not been able to commit to—and I'm not saying that we will not revisit this at any given point in time—is we haven't been able to commit to what the impact of possible removal of monuments or removal of paintings, rededications, reinterpretations and so on would, because it's difficult to know yet how much that would be and what the extent of that would be. So, we agreed in principle with the committee, and I stand by that. We're not saying that we wouldn't help to support and to fund that, but we couldn't put a figure on it now, and we can't commit to that without knowing what the extent of that might be.

In terms of what we do within our communities, Heledd, I think part of our race equality action plan is about looking at that and about how we move towards an anti-racist Wales. My colleague Jane Hutt is doing amazing work with her team on that, and we will hear further reports from her on the work that we will be doing and continue to do in our communities to develop that race equality action plan.