Our report on these regulations contains three merits points, and I thank the Minister very much for providing a timely response. I'm going to focus on our third merits point, which I'm going to chalk up as a small but very important piece of progress in terms of the Welsh language and actually having Welsh and English legislation and regulations at the same time. Because it noted that the Welsh Government has relied on Standing Order 15.4 to justify the laying of an English-only explanatory memorandum, on the grounds that, in quotes,

'it is not considered appropriate in the circumstances or reasonably practicable to lay it in English and Welsh'.

In our report, we argued that a Welsh language explanatory memorandum would indeed help any Welsh speakers who are interested in these regulations. And so, we asked the Welsh Government to explain why it is not considered appropriate or reasonably practicable to lay the explanatory memorandum in Welsh. This has been something of an ongoing theme for my committee for some time. The response we initially received, again, noted Standing Order 15.4 and stated that the Welsh Government had consulted guidance provided by the office of the Welsh Language Commissioner, and that 

'As the Regulations are of a technical nature and will affect only an extremely small proportion of the population, the Explanatory Memorandum has not been deemed a priority for translation'.

However—hold on—we note that this response has indeed now been superseded by a commitment we have secured from the Permanent Secretary to the Welsh Government, and we really welcome that. I mentioned earlier that the too-often lack of available Welsh language explanatory memoranda for Welsh-made subordinate legislation has been a concern to our committee. So, we wrote to the Permanent Secretary just before Christmas, with the agreement of all the committee members, and stated our belief again that we're not persuaded—we were not persuaded then as we're not now—that Standing Order 15.4 should be used as a means to not produce Welsh language explanatory memoranda, particularly in light of the Welsh Government’s commitment to the accessibility of Welsh law. We also said that explanatory memoranda accompanying any legislation should always be made available in Welsh, and we believe this would follow the spirit of the Welsh language standards.

As a committee, we have been concerned that there may be issues of resourcing in the Welsh Government and we asked for the Permanent Secretary’s assessment of whether Government has sufficient capacity to produce all explanatory memoranda to subordinate legislation in Welsh. We are grateful to the Permanent Secretary for a prompt reply and we very much welcome the commitment that, following a brief bedding-in period, the Welsh Government will produce explanatory memoranda to Welsh subordinate legislation bilingually.  

I draw this to Members' attention this afternoon and I chalk it down to a small success of good collaborative working with the Welsh Government and the committee. Diolch yn fawr iawn.