Thank you very much, Llywydd, and thank you to everyone who participated in this discussion. Well, if public transport is the Cinderella of public services, then the bus service is her forgotten little sister.

Thank you very much, Delyth, for opening this debate so eloquently, painting a picture for us at the outset. We've heard that many of these companies that provide these services are community companies and how important the community is at the heart of that provision.

Now, if we look at our communities, for far too long, people who are far more knowledgeable than me have been asking why we are seeing depopulation in our rural and post-industrial communities. The response, of course, is complex, but one undeniable fact is the lack of public transport. Our communities can't afford to lose more services, but as things stand, that's what will happen, and if we don't see the BES being reintroduced, then we will see more services disappearing. The Deputy Minister just mentioned that we'd seen the number of staff in bus services disappearing during COVID, well, I'm sorry to say that, if the BES is not reintroduced, the rest of those staff will also disappear, losing jobs because of the routes that are lost. 

This Government, I'm afraid, has a bad practice of developing policy based on urban experiences, and trying to force that on other communities. Health and leisure are perfect examples of this. And when this model fails, then, rather than drawing up a new fit-for-purpose model, what happens is that our communities are deprived of services. In reality, it is a colonial model—our rural and post-industrial communities are being exploited for their valuable resources, particularly our young people who are being extracted from those communities, and then there is no investment in those areas to replace them and to keep them viable. That is the definition of a colonial process at work here in Wales.

During the last 20 years, we have seen health services, post offices, banks and other services being centralised away from our communities. The result of all of this and more is that people are expected to travel for these services to the nearest town or city, as we heard from Luke earlier. And we also heard in that contribution about the impact of this on the economies of our communities.

This has been a process that's been ongoing here in Wales and the loss of this BES puts the cherry on Margaret Thatcher's cake. But, I was very pleased to hear Huw Irranca and others calling for the reversal of Thatcher's deregulations in the 1980s and I was pleased to hear the commitment of the Deputy Minister to try and push in that direction.

I've noted examples from my constituency in the past—