—over the next three years. So, Deputy Minister, I do respect what you are trying to attempt in this, but I'm telling you here and now this will backfire, and it's just a shame that our children are being used in this way.

So, answer these questions if you wouldn't mind: will the Deputy Minister explain to this Senedd why she introduced a Bill, drove it to Royal Assent and, to quote you,

'without having done the intensive work' that's had to be done since?

In fact, this is not the first time that you've been caught out with spiralling costs. Since the explanatory memorandum, the Bill has increased from a range of between £2.3 million and £3.7 million to £6.2 million and £7.9 million respectively. The revised regulatory impact assessment provides a total cost of awareness-raising activities of £2.8 million, previously described as being in a range of £1.3 million. And information on the out-of-court disposal schemes, not originally costed, was estimated at between £810,000 and £2.5 million. This legislation should be a lesson to all that costings need to be properly calculated and taken into account before agreeing to any new legislation. Question 2: will you clarify if the Act is now going to cost more than the highest estimate of £8 million and why you chose to waste such resources on legislation that gives control over enforcement to two reserved institutions, the Crown Prosecution Service and the police?

Thirteen years after the introduction of the smacking ban in New Zealand, a survey found that almost 40 per cent of mothers would still smack their child and 70 per cent would not report a parent if they witnessed them smacking their child on the bottom or the hand. Question 3: bearing in mind your commitment to use representative surveys to track levels of public awareness and changes in attitude, will you agree for the surveys to be answered anonymously, so to establish if parents continue to use reasonable chastisement and would not report a parent?

Deputy Minister, you know how strongly I and some of the Members on these benches feel. We do not believe that this legislation was necessary or required. I would like to thank all those parents who bring up their children in this era of a Welsh Labour Government with massive levels of child poverty, and they do so in a caring, loving and considered household. Diolch.