Diolch yn fawr iawn am y cwestiynau, a diolch i’r Aelod am beth ddywedodd hi ar y dechrau am y trafodaethau sydd wedi bod dros yr haf gyda’r awdurdodau lleol a phobl eraill yn y maes.

Of course, I recognise what she says about what was in Plaid Cymru’s manifesto; I would have known it from the number of Plaid Cymru council leaders who told me how much they disagreed with that way of proceeding. [Interruption.] I think I met more than you by the sound of it. However, the point is that I have been very keen in the discussions I’ve had to look for ideas where there is a consensus that can be built around them, and this idea that Plaid Cymru had previously put forward has clearly, in the discussions that I’ve had, been one that people have been willing to see the merits of that way of doing things, and I’ve been keen to bring that forward here this afternoon.

The Member asked: what’s the purpose of all this; what are we trying to achieve through it? And the key word for me, Dirprwy Lywydd, has been resilience. There’s a lot of agreement amongst local authorities about the challenges that are there to be faced: the challenges of austerity; the challenges of shrinking budgets and growing demand; the challenges of recruiting staff to specialist positions, and so on. I think the model that I’ve outlined this afternoon allows us to grow a new resilience into the system in three distinct ways. I think it will help to build economic financial resilience, because I think this will be a way in which we will be able to move some money into front-line services and save money in other ways that we do things. I think it will provide resilience in terms of staffing. There are some very fragile services provided by very small local authorities, where working on a regional basis will allow staff to be deployed in a different way. And I think it will provide quality resilience as well, because I think that by acting on a regional footprint, it will be more possible in social services, for example, to grow certain sub-specialist expertise amongst our staff, which simply isn’t possible when you’re acting entirely on one local government boundary.

The Member asked me about answerability in the system. It’s an important question and it’s one that her party must have thought of when bringing forward proposals for regional arrangements. I have two things to say on that this afternoon, while wanting to be clear that it’s an important topic to keep talking about as we move into the detailed discussion of these proposals.

First of all, in my proposals, the role of the local councillor becomes even more important than it has been up until now. We retain all 22 local authorities, we retain locally elected members, and those individuals will have an important role in future in acting as a source of guidance and expertise to their electorate in making sure that anyone who wants to know where a decision is being taken, that they are able to influence that decision when they choose to do so.

The second thing to say is that this is not a new issue. It is not as though we have never had regional arrangements in the past. As a much younger person, I represented South Glamorgan County Council on the South Wales Police Authority. It was a combined authority of south, mid and west Glamorgan. Every month, members of south Glamorgan council were able to ask me questions about the way in which I had discharged my responsibilities on their behalf. So, we’ve found ways of creating answerability and accountability in shared systems in the past and I’m confident that we can do so in the future.

On the issue of integration, it is a very important question. My party has not shared her party’s view that the best way to secure integration is through a disruptive reorganisation of services, but by aligning the boundaries of health and social services directly, I think we will open up new and better possibilities for integrated services in the future. It’s only one tool in the armoury. We’ve already announced that we will mandate pooled budgets, for example, for residential care purposes between health and social services from 2018. I think these proposals assist in that.

Finally, she makes an important point in relation to back-office services and employment. It’s why what I’ve said this afternoon is not a direct replication of what the Williams commission said. I want to see greater use of back-office services because I think the experience of health service back offices is that you do get more efficient and better quality services as a result, but I want it to be done in a developmental and organic way in which we take careful account of the fact that many local authorities are very important sources of employment in some parts of Wales, where jobs of that sort are in relatively short supply.