Wel, diolch yn fawr, Dirprwy Lywydd, i’r Aelod am y cwestiynau a sylwadau yna.

I’ll try and respond to three of the big questions that were being raised. I entirely agree with what Adam Price said, that we are trying to strike a balance in the Bill between immediate continuity—because there is a system that people are very familiar with, it’s a system that has a lot of cross-border components to it as well, and the replies to consultation on the draft Bill were unambiguous from practitioners in asking for us to design a system that would be recognisable to them on the day that it was introduced. But we have to go beyond that to create a Bill that allows for policy departure beyond its introduction. That is what we have aimed to do in the way that the Bill is constructed. It will be of interest, I’m sure, to both the Finance Committee, but also to the constitutional affairs committee, to look at the way some of those regulation-making powers have been constructed in the Bill to try and make sure that, whenever a regulation-making power is used in a way that could alter the tax burden on individuals, that would require an affirmative debate on the floor of this Assembly.

But, at the same time, I believe that it creates a framework of flexibility in which, when new ideas and new possibilities want to be attempted, the Bill, if it becomes an Act, is constructed to allow that to happen.

Again, the Member’s quite right to say that the Bill has a direct line to the fiscal framework negotiations, because it will form part of the block grant adjustment mechanism that we are discussing with the Treasury. I’m very happy to say to Members that I’ve met the Chief Secretary to the Treasury once already, earlier in the summer, and I’m due to meet him again before the end of this month. That will be the start of detailed negotiations that will go on around the fiscal framework and the block grant adjustment mechanisms that will be necessary for this Bill and more generally in relation to the way in which devolved taxes and their interface with the block grant are negotiated for the future. I’m looking forward to meeting members of the Welsh Governance Centre—the authors of the report—tomorrow, to hear directly from them some of those ideas about how we might have a comparator that takes out London and the south east of England, with its distorting effect on comparisons with the rest of the United Kingdom.

Finally, on to the dangerous territory that I was invited onto in the final question—it’s the nature of the powers that this Assembly was provided with through the Government of Wales Act 2014 that we have the powers to replace stamp duty land tax. That’s what we are entitled to do immediately and that’s what this Bill therefore sets out to do. Does that mean that we should avoid a debate on bigger questions about different ways of approaching how we raise revenue, what should be taxed, how these taxes interplay with one another? I don’t think we should avoid that at all. I think this Assembly term may well be the right one to look at those questions, not in the abstract, but looking at how those ideas would, in a practical way, be applied if they were to be operated in Wales, and then to allow those with the responsibility to make informed decisions about them.