Well, thank you very much, Llywydd, and I have to say it is a pleasure to bring this short debate before the Senedd today, to take this opportunity to outline and underline the significant contribution that the horse-racing industry makes to Wales not just in sporting terms, but economically too. And I'm very pleased that contributions to this debate will come from Alun Davies, Sam Kurtz, Jack Sargeant and James Evans.

I thought perhaps I'd start by mentioning a little bit about how I came to be interested in the sport, because up until about two or three years ago, I was like a lot of people in this country, in that I wasn't particularly interested and only had a punt on the Grant National every year or so. But that changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. When racing got the green light to resume, behind closed doors, of course, in June 2020, this was the first major sport that returned to our TV screens at a time, of course, when many of us were still living under strict restrictions. As someone who loves watching sport but, as I said, hadn't taken a great deal of interest in horse-racing before then, I did watch the sport at that time and enjoyed doing so. Indeed, I thoroughly enjoyed watching it. That period demonstrated to me the power of sport in terms of entertaining, and certainly I discovered horse-racing at that time too. And, indeed, that very difficult time provided me with a new hobby—something that I have enjoyed exploring and learning more about in the time since then.