Carwyn Jones: Well, we look forward to the day when there is a Labour Government in Westminster, but she asked me to list what we have done. Well, 11,000 people have been helped since April 2015; the recent homelessness statistics for the first quarter of 2017-18 show a steady rate of success in times of increasing demand; 63 per cent of all households threatened with homelessness have had their...
Carwyn Jones: Well, the Wallich I know very well. Oddly enough, their headquarters in Bridgend are on the street where I live—literally down the road. We’ve worked with them on a constituency basis over many years to help people who’ve been faced with homelessness. I refer the Member back to the point I made earlier on that we’ve allocated £2.6 million of the funding for innovative projects to...
Carwyn Jones: Yes. There’s no need to replicate what’s already being done or to reinvent the wheel. We know there are organisations that have first-hand experience on the ground of helping people. The job of Government in those circumstances is to help those organisations, and that, of course, is what we’re going to do with the funding we’ve announced to enable projects to come forward that are...
Carwyn Jones: Yes. ‘Prosperity for All’ sets out a range of actions and priorities that will benefit small and medium-sized enterprises, and they include the development bank, enhanced Business Wales support and infrastructure investment.
Carwyn Jones: The Member has addressed an issue there that is absolutely right. We have faced too many instances in the past where businesses that the Germans would describe as the Mittelstand businesses, the owners tended to sell rather than grow. It’s a problem we’ve had for years. We looked at one point at whether we could look to resurrect the Cardiff stock exchange to enable them to grow and then...
Carwyn Jones: One hundred and fifty thousand jobs have either been created or preserved as a result of the money that Welsh Government has made available. We’re not going to apologise for that. The reality is that the move towards repayable finance was originally made in 2010—seven years ago. Now, circumstances have changed since then. We’ve found that businesses were not able to access finance. They...
Carwyn Jones: I don’t see the two as being in conflict. It is right to say that we have been very successful in attracting foreign direct investment and many, many thousands of people in Wales are employed by companies outside Wales. That is not something that we should apologise for—it’s a mark of our success. He is right to say that, certainly, the experience that I had at the start of the last...
Carwyn Jones: Yes. The advanced manufacturing sector is vital to a growing and prosperous Welsh economy. I have a touch of the Theresa May lurgy this afternoon, I see. There’s nothing behind me that’ll fall off though, I trust. [Laughter.] The sector is typified by highly skilled, highly paid jobs and above average productivity, and we continue to support companies in the sector in Wales to sustain...
Carwyn Jones: Well, colour coating steel is advanced manufacturing. If you look at Shotton, for example, it’s highly technical. Photovoltaic cells are involved in the production there. It’s not an easy definition to make, but from our perspective, we know the sector is defined by a range of standard industrial classification codes published by the Office for National Statistics. Those codes were agreed...
Carwyn Jones: Well, the role of ensuring support for exporters when they seek to export to markets where payment is not always available is done, of course, by Atradius across the road. That is their role—formerly Nederlandsche Credietverzekering Maatschappij, formerly, of course, the Export Credit Guarantee Department. So, in terms of indemnifying exporters, that is not something that we would look to...
Carwyn Jones: Yes, of course. Perfectly right. We wish to work with manufacturers and producers, and when they produce something that is world leading, then of course we would love to meet with them.
Carwyn Jones: We are making a significant investment in all housing tenures, which is reflected in our 20,000 affordable homes target. We’re providing additional support for social housing and financing to get small companies building again, as well as new schemes to make home ownership more accessible and support for innovation.
Carwyn Jones: Well, I’m delighted that 35 schemes have applied for support from the first round of the innovative housing programme. They have been assessed by an independent panel, and we will be announcing the ones that we will be supporting before the end of this month.
Carwyn Jones: Wel, rydym ni yn rhoi cyllid refeniw i Ganolfan Cydweithredol Cymru er mwyn rhoi cefnogaeth i grwpiau cydweithredol tai. Mae hwn yn rhywbeth sydd yn cael ei wneud ar draws Cymru. Rydym ni’n moyn hybu ffyrdd gwahanol o adeiladau tai, gan gynnwys, wrth gwrs, ffyrdd gwahanol o adeiladu tai gan grwpiau cydweithredol.
Carwyn Jones: I’d be more than happy to work with ‘The Big Issue’ in order to promote it. I know, as a group, we do advertise and pay for that in ‘The Big Issue’, as I’m sure other groups do as well. I’d certainly be interested in helping a campaign to encourage people to buy ‘The Big Issue’. When it comes to the actual vendors, their circumstances tend to be very, very different, so, for...
Carwyn Jones: Yes, I do, and the advantage of a community land trust, of course, is that the land is owned communally or by a trust. The houses are leased from that trust, and so there is a limit as to how much those houses can be sold for. People can make a little money from houses that they sell, but the prices are kept low enough to be affordable—so, a hugely important model that we want to promote....
Carwyn Jones: They’re set out in ‘Prosperity for All’, and the Cabinet Secretary will publish an economic action plan later this year that will support delivery of the strategy.
Carwyn Jones: It’s not clear, if there’s a covenant on the land, who would lift it, or whether the Ministry of Justice would have to go to court to lift it. It’s not clear without looking at the documentation. Port Talbot is hugely important in terms of manufacturing; we know that. A year and a half ago, he will know, things were bleak as far as the steelworks were concerned. The great fear that I...
Carwyn Jones: We are still on time to complete the project in 2022. Discussions have taken place—they’ve been ongoing for years—with National Grid on what we should consider in order to ensure that the crossing is built.
Carwyn Jones: Well, the answer is, in no uncertain terms, ‘not yet’. There is no kind of agreement as yet. I raised this with the grid about two to three years ago. At that time, we wanted to consider with them how we could develop a crossing for the Menai. At that point, they weren’t interested. Things have changed since then, but we’re not in a position where we can say, ‘There is an...
