Thank you for those comments, and thank you, also, for welcoming the common objective of obviously wanting a well-working, efficient and robust electoral system.

I think the crux is that the world is changing: we have technology, we've learned opportunity, just as we do within this Senedd with hybrid meetings—we've learned how to use that. And this is a consultation, and it's not about forcing anybody to vote, but it is about ensuring that you can maximise the opportunity for all those people, for the diversity across our society of abilities and so on to be able to participate in voting. Because maximising voting, maximising the opportunity to vote, is about creating a very healthy democracy. For me, that has always been, actually, one of the well-being goals that really, we should all be aiming for, because a society where increasing numbers of people don't participate I think is on a very dangerous slope, and I think we see that around the world.

You talk about it sucking up time, well, of course, in 2017, we were given specific responsibilities to enable us to actually change and to reform our electoral law, and we see out of that opportunities. The consultation is about exploring those opportunities and looking to how we might drag our electoral system into the twenty-first century. After all, what we've had in the past up to now have been some pilots, which have not been about—no-one ever believed that the four pilots that we carried out were going to suddenly transform the turnout and there was going to be this massive rush to the electoral polls. It was always about the technical mechanism for how we might actually do things differently, to show that we could digitise, to show that we could actually run elections in a different, more—and to that extent, they were very successful. If we really wanted to worry about sucking up time, it might be helpful if you called on the UK Government to dismiss the retained EU law, which is going to suck up enormous amounts of time in a totally unnecessary way. I leave that to one side.

I see it as a real attraction to use the powers that we have to look at how technology can make voting more attractive, make it easier, and also maintain robustness and simplicity. I have to say that when I listened to some of your comments, you reminded me of sort of a Captain Ludd—you know, the person who went around opposing, Darren the Luddite [Laughter.] And I think that that's a bit of the difficulty with the approach here. You should really follow the example of David Cameron, and David Cameron said,

'The changes we're making...are modernisation with a purpose. That purpose is to make sure we can meet the big challenges of our age'.

And in many ways, if you take our democratic health really seriously, then facing up to those challenges and looking at how technology can actually make our electoral system more attractive I think is well worth exploring, and if there are things that the pilots show that can work, then we ought to do that.

Automatic registration: well, it seems to me that having as many people as possible who can vote and are entitled to vote on the electoral register is an absolute objective that we should actually have. And in terms of the issue of being registered twice, well, at the moment, I don't think it is an offence to be registered twice or even registered three times. What is an offence is to vote in more than one place. I remember as a student, I was always registered in two places: my hometown and wherever I was depending upon when the election would actually take place.

On the prisoner franchise, we certainly have an ambition that, at some stage in the future, for a certain category of prisoners, part of the rehabilitation of prisoners and part of the engagement of people reintroducing into the democratic process is something that has an attraction to it. It won't be happening this time around; it is something that is certainly in the longer term, mainly because in order to achieve it, it requires a positive engagement with aspects of the referred justice system that we don't have at this moment.

In terms of simplicity, can I just say that the comment you made about not diverging, I don't believe that we are diverging? What we are doing is modernising. What the UK Government is doing is actually diverging—diverging from basic principles by creating hurdles that will make it more difficult for people to register for voting and also to be able to vote. But, as I said, this is a consultation, and I look forward to the inclusion of your and, no doubt, your party's input into that consultation process. Those views, obviously, will be considered, as will all views.