Diolch. I'd very much like to start by thanking the committee for preparing this comprehensive report, which they published on 23 March, and for giving me the opportunity to respond to it. I acknowledge the conclusions made within the report, and note the contents.

Before I provide my response to the committee’s report and to the points made by Members here today, I would like to just take the opportunity to pay tribute to the staff of Natural Resources Wales for their efforts to protect and manage our environment and natural resources, particularly in working to address the climate and nature emergencies. Like many others across the public sector, Natural Resources Wales have served the people of Wales in the face of the United Kingdom's departure from the European Union, the COVID-19 pandemic and, most recently, the impact of the war in Ukraine. NRW staff and officials are passionate about their purpose and role in responding to these challenges, and the individual efforts of each and every member of staff are very much appreciated, and I wanted to just start by noting that.

As the Welsh Government's principal adviser on issues concerning Wales's natural resources, it is of course imperative that Natural Resources Wales and its leadership team are held to account in the exercise of their executive and legislative functions, and I commend the committee for its work in that regard.

Your report made eight recommendations, with three recommendations particularly requesting a response from Welsh Ministers. So, in terms of those recommendations, in recommendation 1 of the committee’s report for me to set the timetable for completion of the baseline review of NRW—and I know, Llyr, you acknowledge this—they completed the initial baseline review activity in November 2021, which provided my officials and I with a clearer view of NRW as an organisation, the structure and the apportionment of its resources across work areas. Since then, my officials have been working with NRW to examine the allocation of resources and undertake a prioritisation exercise to ensure that its resources align with ministerial priorities and are sufficient to discharge NRW's statutory responsibilities. In addition to that, my officials and NRW are also jointly working together to bring forward, this summer, service level agreements in key areas of work, one of which absolutely does include the Water Resources (Control of Agricultural Pollution) (Wales) Regulations 2021. The five areas are, in fact, pollution incident management and enforcement, the woodland estate, water quality, monitoring in general, and flood issues in particular.

NRW and I recognise that the current budget position is unsustainable in the longer term and that we need to work together to ensure resources are used efficiently and effectively to deliver on statutory obligations, the remit and the programme for government priorities. So, we expect this next phase of the baseline review to conclude before the end of this year, so once the service level agreements have been worked on with the officials over the summer, myself and the NRW leadership team will meet once more in the early part of the autumn term. We will do some more work on establishing priorities, and then we will discuss exactly how any uplift to their resource will work. I will want to make absolutely certain that I'm getting value for money for what's currently there, and also that we understand what any uplift in resource would actually do for the people of Wales.

And I can't emphasise this enough, because before the baseline review—. And, you know, the Llynfi issue is a matter of real regret, I know, to the NRW staff, and it's something that none of us would ever have wanted to see in Wales, and we certainly don't want to see it again. But until the baseline review, they actually didn't know how much it was costing them to send people to each incident or how to budget for that, so it’s clearly essential that they understand the base costs of that sort, so the overheads and exactly what the cost of managing each incident is, in order to be able to make decent judgments about how to deploy their resources. They also need to understand what each part of their remit looks like in resource terms, and how they can be adjusted, depending on what's currently happening out there in the world. I get, for example, incident reports, every single day from NRW staff responding to various incidents. It's easy to see the breadth of incidents that they have to respond to, and they have to make judgment calls on what they're receiving in terms of whether it's actually worth sending somebody out. Obviously, in the Llynfi example, they misjudged that badly and I know that that's something that they very much regret.