Well, Llywydd, first of all, I thank Peter Fox for his kind opening remarks, and I recognise, as I try always to do, the experience that he has as a former leader of a council having to make actual decisions when there are really difficult choices to be made.

Can I say, Llywydd, that I welcome the Prime Minister's decision to attend the British-Irish Council? He's the first Prime Minister to do so for a very long time. I think it was an important, symbolic decision, given the continued tensions in relationships around the Northern Ireland protocol, and given the pressures that are on the diary of any Prime Minister to give up the amount of time that he did to be there and to hold separate meetings with a range of different individuals. I think that's commendable and I hope, as I said in my original answer, that that constructive start sets a different tone for the future in terms of inter-governmental relations.

As well as bilateral meetings with the Prime Minister, he also chaired the first meeting of the Prime Minister's council. This was part of the inter-governmental relations review that was concluded in March of this year. No previous meeting of the council had been held. So, again, very early on in his tenure as Prime Minister, Mr Sunak made it a priority to chair a meeting of that council, and I was glad to see that as well.

I did, of course, take the opportunity, with others—the Chancellor of the Exchequer attended the council, as did Michael Gove—to raise the issue of the uprating of benefits, and the triple lock for pensioners, but I also was able to put on the record a set of modest in their way but very important in the lives of the people affected actions that I believe the UK Government could take in its autumn statement.

I argued strongly for the abolition of standing charges for prepayment meter customers. What can be worse than finding, when you finally manage to get some money together to put on a supply of electricity, that that money has already been eaten into paying a standing charge for all those days when you weren't able to use electricity at all? It's a deep economic injustice, and this Government could simply abolish those standing charges and make the companies absorb the costs, as the Government did when it said to the BBC that it had to pay the cost of free licences for the over-75s. They could take their own example and apply it to prepayment meter customers.

I argued for an increase in discretionary housing payments and the local housing allowance. Here is an absurd example of a Government saving some money with one hand—small amounts of money—by failing to uprate those allowances in line with inflation, and paying far, far more with another hand when those people find themselves made homeless because they can no longer afford the rents. It makes just sense from an economic, public purse point of view to put that money in a different place and to do better with it.

Then, I offered the members of the council to share the experience that we have had here in Wales, led partly by my colleague Jane Hutt, in providing guarantees against loss to credit unions, so that they are able to offer loans to people who otherwise would be regarded as too risky. In a normal assessment of risk, you wouldn't lend money to that person. Credit unions in Wales are able to do that because we offer them a guarantee against loss. The wonderful result, Llywydd, is this: of course you lose money when you lend to people who are in very, very difficult circumstances, but 80 per cent of the money that the credit unions loan to people covered by our guarantee comes back from the people themselves, because of the way in which credit unions operate. That's another area in which the UK Government, with modest investments, could really help those people who otherwise will be forced to go and borrow money in the most expensive and risky parts of the market.