Diolch yn fawr, Heledd, and thank you for the support for the work that we're doing, because it is hugely important work. We talked about this as being something that has been developing over the course of a couple of years. We developed a lot of this work in the wake of the Black Lives Matter campaign and the murder of George Floyd and what we saw happen around the world. We've taken that opportunity to build this anti-racist consensus around some of this.

I think it's absolutely right that what we say—and I think this was one of the points Tom Giffard was making as well—is that what we are not seeking to do here is rewrite history. History is history, and the facts of history and what happened are there. But, what we can do is we can contextualise our history and we can acknowledge our part in some of the more unsavoury parts of our history, and we can seek to understand the impact that that had on future generations in the way that we commemorate those statues, paintings, or whatever it might be, in public. I think that is absolutely the right thing to do.

Like you, I'm only too well aware that there will be voices that are not in line with this and that will not want us to do those things, but that doesn't mean that we should necessarily listen to all those voices, because if what people are trying to perpetuate is racism, then that is not something that I'm interested in listening to. I am interested in listening to why people think we may not want to do things in a particular way, but I'm not interested in listening to racist views and racist voices that perpetuate those inequalities in our society.

One very valid point that you have raised is what do we do—because this is not mandatory, this is voluntary—what do we do in those areas where a public body may choose not to take up something? Well, I think one of the things that we have already done, because we've started to do some groundwork on this already, is that we have paid—through the 'Anti-racist Wales Action Plan', we've made quite a bit of funding available to a number of organisations, including small museums, to train their staff and curators to actually understand what the issues are. And just as an example of that, I visited Abergavenny museum relatively recently and the staff there were saying that they had undertaken this training that had been provided, and it was suddenly like lightbulb moments, that they started to understand that the way in which you commemorate and the way in which you display your collections and exhibitions, you tell a story, and that you have a narrative. And they showed me, they had a little cottage kitchen in Abergavenny museum, and there was tea and sugar on the table, and they said, 'We've never thought, in explaining what all of this was in this kitchen, about where tea and sugar came from, and how it arrived on those tables'. So, they are now looking at taking all of that on board, and they were very much welcoming the guidance that will be coming down the road so that they can think very long and hard about how they engage with the local population in correctly interpreting all of that.

But as I said, it is not mandatory, and because it is not mandatory, it will not be coming with any funding as such. But what I would say is that it may be possible to build the delivery of objectives into future funding opportunities, linked to the emerging culture strategy—and I know that that's something, Heledd, that you've been very interested in right from the outset, and we're now making significant progress on that—and there have been previous funding collaborations between Cadw and the National Lottery Heritage Fund, supporting some of the reinterpretations around some of the more controversial public monuments, and I would certainly hope that that would be something that we could look at again in the future.