Diolch, Delyth. I share your enthusiasm for it. I haven't been lucky enough to see one of the bees yet, but I've tried a couple of times. I've certainly seen pictures and videos, but not yet in person, so I'm looking forward to that. 

The reason for bringing this forward today is because what we're looking to see if we can develop is a long-term sustainable management vehicle for areas such as the Gwent levels. Clearly, we're not just talking about the Gwent levels, but the whole landmass of Wales. What we're looking to do is see if we can develop a sustainable management model that allows all partners to come together. The Gwent levels partnership is supported by the Welsh Government, but it's also supported by the RSPB, the Gwent Wildlife Trust, NRW, and a number of other partners. What we're looking to see is how we can get that sustainable model to work in a number of different areas and types of landscape in Wales.

Clearly, the Welsh Government cannot fund all of this. If that's what we're going to try and do, we'll be miles off our target. This is about how we can facilitate the best model to come together of citizen science and local volunteers and all of the NGOs that come together, alongside the charities and third sector organisations in that sustainable model. It crucially isn't pivotal on one enthusiastic individual being the pivot point; we're all familiar across the Chamber with places where that happens. So, that's why we're focusing on it—because it's a bit more advanced, it's got a number of people very interested in it.

Part of what the Living Levels partnership is doing is looking at the models of data collection—how do you do some kind of baseline, what does good conservation status really look like, how can we spread that out. I'm also very interested—and I'm using the biodiversity deep dive expertise to do this—in what kind of protection should areas like the Gwent levels have. It's not a national park, it's not currently designated, but it has got a lot of sites of special scientific interest. I say this a lot, and I make no apology for repeating it: if you stop Mr and Mrs Jones on the street somewhere in Wales and you say, 'What level of protection does a piece of land of special scientific interest have?', they're unlikely to think that you could put a car park on it. But, at the moment, you could, really, in some circumstances, do that. So, one of the big things we're also doing is looking at the strategic planning guidance for these areas to actually firm up on the protections—what does this mean.

My own personal view, and I stress it's not the Government's view, is that that hurdle should be very high indeed. You can't say 'never, never, never', because you don't know what will happen, but you can say 'almost never, never, never', depending on a really extreme circumstance where that is, so that we can secure these areas in order to halt the decline that we see at the moment, and then, of course, reverse it and then spread out. There's a big issue as well about the buffer zones around the edge, and so on. So, the Living Levels partnership is just a model that we're looking at to see if we can spread that out.