1. How will the Welsh Government support the successful efforts taking place in Arfon and elsewhere to attract more women to be county councillors? OQ59302

I welcome the actions being taken across Wales to encourage individuals to put themselves forward for elected office. Diversity delivers better, more inclusive decision making. In advance of the 2027 local elections, work to encourage diversity includes the programme for government commitment to extend the access to elected office fund.

Since the county council elections a year ago, around 35 per cent of councillors in Wales are women. In Arfon, we succeeded in increasing the number of women standing for Plaid Cymru by 21 per cent. This was the result of intentional work by some of us, a great many encouraging conversations, training, mentoring, and the support has continued over the past year for them since the election. But do you agree that we need statutory measures to create the genuine change across Wales's councils to reach a position of equality? And what work is ongoing to create that statutory change that is needed?

A range of work is ongoing at the moment in order to try and ensure that we have a more diverse group of people putting themselves forward for election, for both town and community councils, and county and country borough councils, in future. And those include the reviewing of the access to elected office fund, which was very successful in supporting a number of candidates to become town and community councillors at the last elections, but also looking to see how job sharing, for example, can be extended to more roles within councils, to recognise how important that is for becoming a more attractive option for a wider range of people. We know that women, in particular, and those with caring responsibilities, find that particularly attractive. And we've also been exploring what more we can do in terms of widening the access to hybrid meetings as a way of working, which, again, supports a more diverse group of people. But in terms of making those things statutory—I suppose we're talking about gender quotas here—I think there is a conversation to be had about that, but it's not one of our key proposals at the moment in terms of reforms, but, certainly, something that we should be having a discussion about. I'm very keen to have more of a discussion with Siân Gwenllian about her ideas in that space.

I've been proud to host and speak at both the 2022 and 2023 Equal Power Equal Voice Senedd events, celebrating the Equal Power Equal Voice project, a mentoring programme aiming to increase diversity of representation in public and political life in Wales. Equal Power Equal Voice, or EPEV, is a partnership between Women's Equality Network Wales, Stonewall Cymru, Disability Wales, and Ethnic Minorities and Youth Support Team Wales. And I was also pleased to participate in last month's north Wales regional meet-up for the EPEV programme, at the Autistic UK office in Llandudno, meeting and getting to know more about the mentees in north Wales. Although most of those attending were women, both men and women also identified inter-sectional issues, including disability and sexuality, which combined to create barriers for them. What positive action is the Welsh Government therefore taking with people to address this, in order to increase diversity of representation in public and political life in Wales?

I'd like to begin, really, by joining Mark Isherwood in recognising the importance of mentoring schemes. I've been a mentor myself in one of the schemes, and I found that probably as valuable to me as to the mentee, so I would absolutely encourage all colleagues to look at opportunities to support those kinds of schemes. One of the things that we have been doing is trying to widen our evidence base, looking at protected characteristics, and we undertook a survey of members of the public about their perceptions of local councillors, but then, also, our candidates surveys. And those surveys do show that there is a real lack of diversity, and they did give us some kind of insight, really, as to what the barriers are, in terms of allowing people with protected characteristics—often, one or more of those protected characteristics—being able to participate fully in local democracy. So, building on that suite of research, we've been able to hold a range of workshops, whereby we invited elected members, but also representatives of a range of organisations representing diverse, protected characteristics, to talk in a bit more depth about the barriers that there are to people becoming involved in elected politics. And I think that those workshops have been really helpful. They've recently concluded, so now we're looking at all of the learning that we had from those workshops in order to try and help us set out the next steps in this important agenda.