Ms Jane Davidson:

Regarding the nature of Wales, we are a very different country from Ireland. We look at Ireland in envy in terms of its per capita income and so on. There is a strong community approach and Wales. One of the things that has happened through the legislation is that people have felt more able to go to their public services and ask for changes. Those changes might be as simple as, for example, we suddenly discovered there are hundreds more allotments that have been created in Wales at local level since the Act. There are huge efforts to produce more sustainable food. From the government's perspective, when I was a politician, for example, I wanted to ban smacking, which most of us agreed on. We initially did not have the powers and then there was not a sufficient majority for it. Those kinds of things sailed through once we had the Well-Being of Future Generations (Wales) Act. The 20 mph proposition was strongly supported by politicians, but there are implementation issues. The big challenge for Wales now is moving from having a policy that people broadly like – they like being able to hold their politicians to account – but they also feel we are on a journey that is speeding up and they want greater action and definitely greater public engagement.

The Deputy made the point that only 13% of the world's population have democracies like ours. I often feel that we are almost daily at risk of losing that 13% in a way because we are becoming increasingly bipartisan. That is something we are trying to head off by keeping this much wider engagement.

I refer to things like deciding rather than putting money into new motorway roads; repairing other ones in local areas; changing the way businesses are supported if they do things that are more sustainable; and designing out emissions – the pathway work that we just finished. It was commissioned by two thirds of the members of the Senedd and would lead us from a point where currently we would be far behind other nations in the UK and we would then be ahead because we would tackle some of the key problems in an holistic way, not department by department. That is an underlying theme that has come through in the dialogue. We cannot expect either the First Minister of Wales or the Taoiseach to hold the ring for everything, but if they hold the ring for the complexity of the way the rest of us have to work in our departmental silos and keep ensuring that we maximise our impact on each other, that in itself would be a massive culture change. People like the fact that these things are all part of decision-making, not just at government level, but at public service level, local government level and all the way down to parish council level. There is a chain throughout Wales and the big opportunity now is about how we improve public health, for example, rather than look at health in terms of how many more doctors and nurses we need. It shifted the character of discussion in every frame of work in which we are involved.