Diolch, Heledd. You made a number of very important points there. I think Professor Evans has been very clear that what she’s looked at is a part of a jigsaw, and that the jigsaw is complex, and that we need to get all parts of the jigsaw right so that we can—sorry for the analogy—see the whole picture emerge. We’ve got a number of other reviews ongoing, and one of them is very much part of our co-operation agreement, and that’s the overarching review that the National Infrastructure Commission for Wales will look at, which is the overall how can we prevent our communities from suffering what the communities you’re referencing have suffered in the past, and how can we be more resilient. They will be able to look at all of the various pieces of the reviews that we’ve been doing.

There’s no single agency that’s going to be able to do that. It’s hugely complex, and as a result of us coming out of the European Union we’ve inherited a number of things at the Welsh Government level that are probably not best situated here. There absolutely needs to be some regional working by the local authorities, because as you rightly say, there are cross-border issues and so on. There is definitely a skills and resilience issue in this area, we know, because the Welsh Government is fishing in the same pool for flood engineers and flood resilience officers. So, making the best of that across Wales rather than us all competing with each other for well-qualified but hard-to-get-hold-of staff is obviously not a good way forward, either. We’ll definitely be having all of those discussions.

We have done a number of other things, not least in response to some of the things you’ve raised in the Chamber, actually, around making sure that NRW works better with community groups. We’ve very many more community groups, I’m pleased to say, since we last discussed this in the Chamber, being set up as part of the package. We have 27 communities now in the south Wales Valleys with community flood groups in them—that’s more than we had before. I have to find the page—it's 37 in south Wales, 13 in mid Wales and 24 in north Wales now set up. There are many more communities who could set them up, and we have put the resources in place to help them do that. We have a number of community engagement pieces running, not just about flooding but about community energy and about community forests, all kinds of things. And one of the things I was talking about to some of the rural housing enabler people that we employ very recently is getting them together to get a kind of resilient communities forum, which would include flooding, of course, in it. Well, climate change adaptation, actually—because it’s not just flooding, it’s drought as well. Because the communities that tend to be flooded in the winter then tend to have drought in the summer. So, it’s about trying to see, again, that complete picture.

I think this is a complex area to look at. The legislation is not fit for purpose. We’ve known that for quite a long time. The section 19 reports, as Professor Evans rightly says in her piece, have grown up as a kind of custom and practice, really, because the legislation underpinning it is so inadequate. But rather than a knee-jerk reaction to changing that legislation and fixing that little one piece, what we’ve asked for is a series of reports around—. Start with a blank bit of paper, actually. How would you set this up in Wales? What should it look like? Who should be responsible for what? Who would you expect to do the resilience work? It isn’t just about the riparian—you know, the riverbeds, or the culverts. It is about the drainage and the highways and the sustainable drainage systems and the new build. Actually, it’s even tied up with the phosphate issues that we have, and the run-off. So, it's quite a complicated set of things. We have a number of things ongoing, looking at the individual pieces of that, and then I expect the national infrastructure commission, as part of our joint commissioning of them, to pull that together as a single set of recommendations to us, and that we then would have a coherent programme to go ahead and look at.

It's up to them entirely, but I would expect that to include what I've just set out: more regional working, better pooling of skills, a better and much more straightforward understanding of what each local authority should do, what NRW should do and what the Welsh Government should be doing, and whether or not the new body that we hope to set up through the coal tip safety process should have some kind of supervision over it, or whether the environmental governance people that we're going to set up should. You know, there is a complicated set of things that we're doing here, and rather than just add more and more agencies into it, we're trying to make the best use of the agencies we have in place, so that, actually, in the end, the Mr and Mrs Joneses in our communities have an understandable process by which they can feed in, which is where I'd like to get to and I know it's where you'd like to get to too. In the meantime, if they want to write to Martin Buckle at the committee, then, obviously, they're the ones who are taking forward the current review. So, there is a place to send anything that you think has not been covered in this.