The next item is the short debate. Mark Isherwood has been successful in the ballot for this short debate. Mark Isherwood.

Diolch, Llywydd. Having attended approximately 1,600 Plenary sessions since first being elected in 2003 as an Assembly Member, then as a Member of the Senedd, this is my final one. I look back at five terms and 23 sometimes fun, always frantic and frequently frustrating years in this role. By my reckoning, only six of the Members here in 2003 are still Members now, and half of us are retiring.

As I walk down the corridors of this Welsh Parliament, they're filled with imagined ghosts. When I arrived, which sometimes feels like yesterday and sometimes 100 years ago, I joined an Assembly that was still a single corporate body in law, but was already operating in large part as if the legal separation of power between Parliament and Government, which was to follow, had already happened. I established friendships across all the parties, although almost all of that early friendship group have since moved on or passed on. I also remember how Peter Law and John Marek put truth before diktat when they resigned the Labour whip.

Having previously worked in the building society sector, where I obtained professional banking qualifications, and having held several voluntary positions, including housing association board member and chair of school governors, I arrived here with a working knowledge and understanding of many of the issues affecting the people of Wales, including what was then a threatened, but avoidable housing crisis, including what was then a threatened, but avoidable economic crash, including the worryingly high levels of persistent poverty in our communities, including, from personal experience, the systemic barriers facing children with what we then called special educational needs, and including serious allegations relating to certain public bodies. Woe betide any principled whistleblower who dared tell the truth; a theme that has continued throughout my years as a Member here and remains prevalent in Labour Wales today. It was from 2003, not 2010, that I started highlighting these issues in the Chamber, in committee and cross-party groups, in the media and in my response to external inquiries.

At this point, I must thank my long-suffering staff, who are amongst the longest serving in the Senedd, for supporting me in the multiple Shadow ministerial roles I've held, and for doing the heavy lifting on my ever-burgeoning case load. It has been a privilege to chair the Public Accounts and Public Administration Committee during this sixth Senedd and the legislation committee during the third Senedd term. And I thank the hard-working clerking teams and the members of those committees. It has been a privilege to chair purposeful cross-party groups on many often related social justice matters, past and present, over many years, including those on disability, on autism, on deaf issues, on neurological conditions, on hospices and palliative care, on funerals and bereavement, on Fuel Poverty and energy efficiency, on violence against women and children last term, and on north Wales. It has also been a privilege to be the Wales species champion for the magnificent, evocative and threatened curlew since 2016, working with Gylfinir Cymru/Curlew Wales to highlight the multiple and multispecies benefits that curlew recovery would bring.

Behind the rhetoric about disability rights and the social model of disability, I continue to hear daily from and about disabled adults and children with neurodevelopmental conditions and people with life-limiting conditions who are still being blamed, bullied and labelled by senior public officials who refuse to do what is right in law and practice and continue to be allowed to get away with this. Behind all the legislation, strategies and plans, there remains a real need for inclusion, equity and understanding grounded in lived experience, so that people and their families can participate fully in their communities, thrive, experience happiness and have a genuine voice and control over their lives. This will require a wholly different approach from future Welsh Governments in practice as well as in word, recognising the people who know what is best for their communities are the people who live in them.

The Labour Welsh Government spent £0.5 billion on their scrapped Communities First programme to tackle poverty in the most deprived communities in Wales, but failed to do so. After they spent billions of structural funding intended to close the prosperity gap, Wales still had the lowest prosperity per head amongst the UK nations, with the lowest wages and highest proportion of low-paid jobs in Britain. The Industrial Communities Alliance's local authority members in Wales have now expressed deep concern that the UK Labour Government's proposed successor to the UK's shared prosperity fund, the local growth fund, will take a sledgehammer to services presently supported in Wales by the UK's shared prosperity fund.

Labour and Plaid Cymru Members sneered when I warned, 22 years ago, that Gordon Brown's borrowing would lead to a day of reckoning. They sneered when I said, 21 years ago, that the International Monetary Fund had warned that the UK banking system was more exposed to sub-prime debt than anywhere else in the world. They sneered when I said that the National Audit Office warned Gordon Brown's Treasury, three years before Northern Rock nearly went bust, that it needed to set up emergency plans to handle a banking crisis, but did nothing about it. They sneered when I said that the Financial Services Authority had reported political emphasis by the Blair-Brown UK Government on the need for them to be 'light touch' in their approach to bank regulation. Therefore, the architect of austerity, Gordon Brown, bequeathed an economy on the brink of collapse, with the highest level of debt in the G20 as a share of GDP, behind only Ireland and Greece in the EU, and the highest budget deficit in peacetime UK history. If you have a big deficit, the lenders own you and set the terms, and those high-deficit countries that rejected what we now call austerity got it in far greater measure.

Around 30 per cent of children in Wales are currently living in poverty, which Labour and Plaid Cymru have blamed on post-2010 Conservative UK Governments, dodging the reality that child poverty in Wales reached the highest level of any nation at 32 per cent before the credit crunch in 2008, when there were Labour Governments at both ends of the M4. In reality, 27 years of devolved socialism has left Wales with the highest poverty rates in the UK and the lowest employment and highest economic inactivity rates in Great Britain. In human terms, this means the anxiety of unopened letters, the calculation at the supermarket till, the pride swallowed when asking for help. This is a consistent record of abject failure.

Housing is key to community regeneration. However, Wales has an affordable and social housing supply crisis that did not exist when Labour came to power here in 1999. I campaigned with the sector from 2003 to prevent this, but Labour ignored the warnings until the damage was done, causing the housing and homelessness crisis in Wales. The UK Housing Review 2011/12 stated that, by 2010, the Labour and Plaid Cymru coalition Welsh Government had by far the lowest proportional level of housing expenditure of any of the four UK nations. Even last year, Wales was the only UK nation to see fewer new home registrations than in 2012, and this Labour Welsh Government now massages the figures to pretend that they are going to meet their woefully inadequate housing target.

Voluntary and community bodies are key to thriving Welsh communities, delivering essential services side by side with service professionals and service users, but economically illiterate Welsh Government budgets have starved them of resources, thereby generating far higher cost pressures for our overburdened hospitals and social services. You know who I'm talking about. In contrast, we want a Wales where the indispensable work of community groups and hubs is recognised, respected and supported. Because community action is not a nice-to-have but an intelligent investment in social and economic well-being.

Policing and justice are key to community safety, operating on an east-west basis across Wales. Most people in Wales live in or near regions straddling the border with England. However, with the Welsh Government controlling key services that support prevention and rehabilitation, Wales has the highest imprisonment rate in western Europe. Yet Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru are calling for the devolution of policing and justice, quoting reports that fail to reference the established, deep-rooted joint working with neighbouring police forces across the invisible east-west crime and justice border with England. Because we prioritise community safety over ideology, the Welsh Conservatives will continue to oppose this.

Welsh Labour operates within the ideological straitjacket bequeathed by Marxism—yes, I studied it too—which has consistently prevented them from taking the action needed to fix Wales. Plaid Cymru have acted as Labour's pernicious props, through coalition, co-operation agreements or budget deals. They seek to divide the British people and destroy our United Kingdom, just as our enemies seek to destabilise the western democracies, betraying the true legacy of unity amongst the Britons, Cymry, across Britain, wrongly labelled 'foreigner' or 'invader', 'Wealas' or 'Welsh' by the Dark Ages invader. In reality, we are one.

And then we have Nigel 'Homer Simpson' Farage's temporary coalition of cowboys, con artists, conspiracy theorists, chancers, charlatans and the economically challenged. The last time Farage's gang formed a group in the Senedd, it blew apart within weeks and sabotaged effective scrutiny of the Welsh Government for five years.

However, let me finish on a positive note, by thanking—[Interruption.]—by thanking—[Interruption.] It is very frustrating to be leaving this place having dreams to tackle those issues and having faced these continuous barriers and refusal to understand and listen, or straitjacketed thinking. However, let me finish on a positive note, as I say, by thanking Members across the parties who have worked with me positively on many issues, including the cross-party groups, by thanking this Senedd for enabling my British Sign Language (Wales) Bill to become legislation and by thanking the people of north Wales for allowing me to serve them since 2003. It has been an honour to do so. [Applause.]

The Commission is responding to this debate. I am giving the time over to Joyce Watson, a retiring Commissioner, to reflect on her time in this Senedd. Joyce Watson.

Diolch, Llywydd. I didn't expect to be elected in 2007, as No. 2 on the regional list, so to be stood here today is quite a bonus. It's been an unexpected journey, really. My father was a farm labourer from Llanbrynmair, joining the army to fight in the second world war. I grew up in Tywyn and Manorbier camp, one of eight children. My mother was a school caretaker and hotel cook. I left school at 15 and returned to education as a young single mum.

I never dreamed that, one day, I'd be elected to serve the people and the places that I know and I love so well. So, to do that for the past 19 years has been the honour of my life. I'm grateful to everyone who has put their trust in me—the party, the voters, my long-serving and loyal team, Commission staff and colleagues, the many people and organisations that I have had the pleasure to work with and campaign alongside, and my long-suffering family. You've all helped me to enjoy and fulfil this privileged role to the best of my ability.

My politics has and always will be instinctive, occasionally brusque, born of experience, moved by unfairness and motivated to help others flourish. I’m especially proud of my work on women's rights, from ending violence against women to promoting women in the construction industry to setting up the Senedd's women's caucus.

Representing Wales's most beautiful region—and I’m claiming that title—has inspired me to fight for our environment, proposing legislation to reduce surface water run-off, voting against a badger cull, and campaigning to improve water quality and also to reintroduce beavers. I've had a few run-ins, of course, but it has always been with good intentions, strong convictions and honest disagreement.

As a Commissioner, I've served this institution internally, and I've been honoured to represent it internationally too on the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, the Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians, British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, and the Council of Europe's Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, and there's clearly a common theme there: no short names are allowed. But also, as a Commissioner for equality and social justice in this Senedd for the last 10 years, I'm really, really pleased to have been supported by a team from the Commission that really pushes those agendas, and we have done an awful lot of work in terms of making this place that we work in—serving the people who are here—the very best that we can.

So, goodbyes are always difficult. I'll continue to cross paths with many of you in the future, if not swords, but they're important too. So, goodbye, and thank you. [Applause.]

Diolch, Joyce.