Reading through the report of the committee—I'm very grateful to the Chair of the committee for his introduction this afternoon—and reading through the Government response, my overwhelming feeling was that there wasn't a great deal of difference between the two, that there's a great deal of shared ground, particularly in terms of ambition and vision, between both the Government and the committee. That, of course, is something to be welcomed. However, in reading through both, I also felt that both were somewhat unsatisfactory in different ways. Let me explain why I think that.

If I look back over the period of devolved Government in Wales, there are things that we've done very, very well, and there are other things where we've done less well, and that's the nature of governance, of course. I think energy is one of those policy areas where we haven't succeeded over the last two decades or so, and I believe it's something where we can learn lessons. I'm glad that the First Minister has taken his seat for this debate, because I'm going to congratulate him on a decision that he made—he looks even more worried now. [Laughter.] He is beginning to wish he'd gone for a cup of coffee.

But when I was an energy Minister some years ago, I was one of three energy Ministers in the Cabinet. There was myself, there was the economy Minister and the First Minister at the time. All had responsibility for energy, and it would surprise nobody in this Chamber or elsewhere that the three of us together achieved nothing, that we didn't deliver, because we had a fragmented approach, and we had Ministers competing, if you like, with each other, rather than working together. So, I think bringing together the responsibility under a single Minister and changing the machinery of Government to reflect that is an important decision to make, and it's an important way of driving forward policy. I welcome the commitment that the Minister herself has made to this. I accept the points that she's made in an earlier debate, and have been made elsewhere, about the unsatisfactory nature of the settlement, as well. I won't seek to rehearse those arguments again this afternoon.

But it appears to me, given where we are and given the nature of today's settlement, that there are two roles that, broadly, the Welsh Government can play in energy policy. The first is a more passive role in terms of creating a consenting and planning regime that will enable others to take decisions that are mainly commercially driven.