Ms Jane Davidson:

I am the author of #futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country, which tells the story of how Wales became the first country in the world to put into law the Brundtland principle for sustainable development, namely, development that meets the needs of the present without compromising on the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This principle still underpins everything that the UN does. I was also involved in enshrining in law our interpretation of the UN sustainable development goals through the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, which I proposed in 2010. On the back of that, I have spent the past two years as chair of Wales Net Zero 2035, a group established through a formal co-operation agreement between the Welsh Government and Plaid Cymru to look at how Wales could achieve net zero in a just and nature-positive way 15 years earlier than 2050. If members are interested, our reports were published on 16 September and are currently being considered by politicians in the Senedd. Without the Act, our group was unlikely to have been commissioned to do work that accelerated the response in these difficult and challenging areas of climate and biodiversity.

I will provide a brief history of the law in Wales. We started with a duty to promote sustainable development in the exercise of our functions when I became an assembly member in 1999. It was included in the first Government of Wales Act. We discovered over our first decade that the duty to promote meant nothing in law, so although we may have been promoting sustainable development considerably, as I am doing today, it was clear that, if we were really serious about it, what we needed was a duty to deliver. Since we had made the political decision to put sustainable development as our central organising principle of government, I proposed that law to deliver.

The relevance of all of this to the committee's discussions is that the accountability mechanism included an obligation on all public services in Wales, including the Welsh Government - we may wish to revert to this in questions - to be held accountable by an independent commissioner for future generations, by the auditor general and, ultimately, by the courts through judicial review.

I welcome the discussion on this Private Member's Bill to report to the Government on what the establishment of an office of ombudsman for future generations in Ireland should look like. The committee has heard about the pact for the future, but it is probably worth setting out the last commitment made in that pact. It speaks of appointing a special envoy for future generations to support the implementation of the declaration. This is something that civil society across the world fought hard for and I am delighted to see it was taken forward.

This proposal came about because of global interest, particularly from young people, in the Welsh model.

The duty is now on the UN Secretary General to report back on implementation by 2028, but he has made it clear he is going to progress with that now. That means that Ireland and other countries working out their own models could be really useful to the UN in the global international context, if this was to proceed to a next stage and look at what Ireland wants to do with this sort of approach. I want to make it clear to the committee that it is never my intention to suggest that any country should adopt the same model as Wales. Our model is right for us. It was developed for us and by us. I am happy to explore it in further detail in questioning. In essence, we have four pillars, which include culture, society, environment and economy. We have seven goals laid out on the face of the Act. We have five ways of working, also laid out on the face of the Act. We have what we want to achieve and how we want to achieve it. In the paper I submitted, there are pictures of both of those.

Since we are the only country in the world to have legislation to deliver on the sustainable development goals and to have a statutory commissioner, I hope that some of our learnings may be of use to the committee. My key learnings, to start the process off, as a founding minister, include that if a country is serious about looking after current and future generations alongside each other, there needs to be a clear role, with statutory obligations on government and public services. The architecture of the system chosen is very much a matter for any individual country. It will find different ways to the way that we have been doing it. It must take into account the culture and values of a country, because no country can borrow those fundamental aspects of value frameworks from another. There has already been a mention of the importance of engagement with the public. The importance of engagement with public and civil society in endorsing the approach has been critical. We started this journey in 2009, through the One Wales One Planet scheme. In 2014, the government handed the UN conversation on the world we want over to civil society. Those civil society outcomes are there, in the law, on the paper, in the Act. It is legislation that is for us and by us, but there still needs to be much more engagement between the government, its public services and the people of Wales to deliver on those five ways of working.

Going back for a moment to the what and the how, the what to do is often very clear and we prepare processes to do it. In Wales, all organisations subject to the legislation are also required to maximise their contribution to all the goals. They do not sit with individual ministers. They sit as a collective responsibility. It is a holistic approach. They have to demonstrate those five ways of working in all their decision-making and think long-term and preventively, involving people in how decisions are being made, collaborating and integrating outcomes. The committee may wish to consider whether there is an opportunity at this stage of the discussion on establishing a commission to see if there could be further consideration of the "what" and the "how" together, in an explicit way, and how all organisations are charged with the responsibility to maximise their outcomes in all the goals. Interestingly, there is an increasingly strong view in Wales at the moment that it is the five ways of working, rather than the goals, that are becoming the missions of Welsh organisations and really releasing the imagination, particularly of young officials, with a new kind of vision for a Wales which can adequately deal with complex problems. In that, those five ways of working could have much more impact than the more traditional approach of using goals or target-setting that we have all been involved in.

I hope this Bill is able to proceed to Committee Stage. I look forward to members' questions and comments. Diolch yn fawr iawn.