Should our amendment to be agreed, we also request that a printing change be made to ensure that the new heading reflects promoting awareness of the changes to the law made by section 1. Amendment 1B: amendment 1B is in line with the committee's recommendation 9, which stated that, as part of a public awareness campaign, there should be details about the support available to parents to use alternatives to physical punishment when disciplining their children. During evidence at Stage 1, the witnesses we saw before the committee raised serious concerns about harder-to-reach groups who needed to be made aware of removing the defence. For example, Children in Wales, Action for Children and Play Wales stated that some families and communities may be harder to reach with information and support. Welsh Government needs to make sure that they receive the information they need. Now, while the Deputy Minister states that she would work hard to ensure that harder-to-reach groups receive this information, a duty to provide information on alternatives to physical punishment would ensure that future Welsh Governments would maintain a successful awareness-raising campaign. I note the Deputy Minister accepted the recommendation, through our amendment, but this does not explicitly include a duty to provide details about support for parents. As will be expanded upon later, the Deputy Minister has relied upon the 'Parenting: Give it Time' campaign to be delivered alongside awareness raising. However, this is only an online resource and she must be clear about what other avenues will be available to parents who do not have access to the internet or are part of harder-to-reach groups. Amendment 1C: amendment 1C supports the committee's recommendation 15 that explains that the Welsh Government should ensure clear advice is provided on what people can do if they have seen or learned of a child being physically assaulted. We urged, at Stage 1, that although many professionals were already under a duty to report concerns about physical punishment, regardless of the Bill, other witnesses raised concerns that it could create the potential for claims of abuse that are unfounded. In particular, some were worried that children, who may not realise the implications of reporting, could make allegations that are actually untrue. While we would expect the awareness-raising campaign to include the consequences of false accusations, this could also be reflected among adults, if the public are not sufficiently made aware of how they can report and in what situations they can report a case of assault.
Thank you. I've got several speakers. I've got Suzy Davies first, then Dawn Bowden.
Thank you very much, Chair. Thank you Minister, and thank you, Janet, for that. I think it's worth just pointing out at this stage that the majority of the amendments that are being made and articulated by Janet there are based on committee recommendations, and those recommendations were made after taking evidence from the public at large, but also you as well. So, that suggests that, at that stage, we weren't reassured by the offer that you were making because we felt the need to put these recommendations into our report. Now, I recognise that you've moved some way on some of these amendments, and we'll been talking about that through the course of the debates on other groups. But the one thing to bear in mind here is this is legislation, now—that means that this is the instrument of the Assembly, not of Government, and if this Assembly feels that the face of the Bill is unclear on the minimum requirements of a public awareness campaign, then we have the right to suggest the things that we would like to see in that public awareness-raising campaign. The list that Janet has given is a minimum. The reason these have been tabled individually and independently is that some may be acceptable where others may not be, so it will be disappointing to hear that you're rejecting them all, and the reason they need to go on the face of the Bill is that, if you are going to introduce specifics via regulation, at the moment we have no reassurance about how you're going to do that—about what input the Assembly, on behalf of our constituents, could have in designing that public awareness-raising campaign. Unless you accept some amendments in other groups, that is the position with this Bill: the influence of the Assembly will be zero over the content of an awareness-raising campaign. In terms of it being non-time limited, I think the amendment has been tabled in the way it has not to oblige you to an everlasting, never-ending campaign of awareness raising. But if you bear in mind that, seven years after the introduction of this Bill, there's going to be some reporting on the effectiveness of the Bill, what is the point of doing that if you don't then have an obligation, should the reports require it to be necessary, to continue promoting the changes in the law? I accept that that can't go on for centuries, but to actually limit it to two years on an issue that is so sensitive, and which has a reach beyond our boundaries, I think is genuinely a mistake. Finally, you mention that safeguarding is everyone's business. I think that's true, but I think Janet Finch-Saunders was right to say that members of the public, ordinary individuals, not professionals, will need assurance that they're doing the right thing. The amendment as listed is not even there to encourage people to do that, although that can be read in that way, but it is to help them be certain that they are doing the right thing. If this is going to be up to the individual, as you've said, and the committee itself wasn't reassured that individuals would know what to do, perhaps I can ask you to consider at Stage 3, if you're going to reject this amendment, how you can reassure members of the public that, if they are going to intervene on the back of this law, they're making things better, not worse.
Thank you, Suzy. Dawn.