Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:05 pm on 5 July 2016.
Given that that would ensure access to the single market, and that is the only model that’s currently on the table, the answer must be ‘yes’. But, of course, we have to accept that that would involve free movement of people and, of course, we know that many, many people voted on that issue, above the issue of jobs, actually—I heard it on the doorstep—in the referendum a week last Thursday. The difficulty is: at this moment in time, there’s no model that’s being proposed that would allow access to the single market without there being free movement of people as well. Norway haven’t done it; Switzerland haven’t been able to do it. It is simply the EEA model. The reality is that the UK Government has no real idea of what kind of model might work in the future, which shows the uncertainty of the times that we’re living in, which is why we want to provide as much certainty as we can, from a Welsh Government perspective, and, secondly, why certainty needs to be provided as soon as possible at UK level.