Thank you, Acting Deputy Presiding Officer; how nice to see you in the chair. We’ve seen significant improvements in the employment rate in Wales over the last Assembly term. Between February and April 2016, the employment rate was close to a record high figure at 71.9 per cent, and is well above the rate of 65 to 67 per cent experienced in the mid to late 1990s and the early years of the 2000s. To put this in context, there are now nearly 1.5 million people in employment in Wales. This success is the continuation of a longer term trend. The employment level in Wales has increased by 18.7 per cent since devolution, compared to a 16.5 per cent increase for the UK over the same period. That’s an extra 227,000 people in work in Wales since the start of the Assembly.

Whilst employment policy remains a non-devolved area, the Welsh Government’s contribution to this disproportionately strong performance through our skills and employment programmes and our investment in the economy should not be underestimated. Over the last Assembly term, we successfully delivered a number of innovative programmes that responded to the challenges of the economic climate we found ourselves in. Our Jobs Growth Wales programme is one example. Launched in April 2012, it responded quickly to the exceptional recessionary pressures that saw almost a quarter of young people in Wales between the age of 16 and 24 unemployed. The programme sought to offer young people with limited or no experience of work a foot in the door with an employer, and the chance to gain six months’ experience of real work with an expectation that they would be kept on after support from Jobs Growth Wales had finished. Sixteen thousand, three hundred young people in Wales have taken part in Jobs Growth Wales since 2012. For Jobs Growth Wales, 75 per cent of the young people in the private sector strand of the programme that completed a six-month opportunity either sustained their employment or entered further learning. I don’t know of any other similar programmes that can boast such figures.

Since the start of the ReAct II programme in October 2008, over 28,000 workers whose careers were interrupted by redundancy received Welsh Government support to gain new skills and return to work quickly. This good work has continued with the launch of ReAct III last year. However, the economic climate has changed and our suite of employability support needs to adapt to reflect the new environment within which we are operating.

Wales still has significant employment challenges around our skills levels, around the spatial concentration of unemployment and inactivity, and with the ongoing threat of redundancies within some of our key strategic industries. Our employability support needs to modernise to respond effectively to these challenges. A growing body of evidence is suggesting that our current suite of programmes is too complex and fragmented, making it difficult to develop a coherent pathway to employment for a jobseeker and resulting in support that can sometimes be inflexible in responding to individual need.

There are broader changes too to policy at UK level, which will have a significant impact on the delivery of skills training for unemployed people in Wales. The introduction of the Department for Work and Pensions’ new Work and Health Programme in 2017 presents an opportunity to more effectively align the breadth of employment support on offer to individuals across Wales. Our active involvement in the commissioning of this new contract will ensure that lessons are learned from current Work Programme delivery and that the needs of the Welsh labour market as a whole are incorporated in future programme design. This new programme will be significantly smaller than DWP’s existing Work Programme and will mean a greater volume of individuals seeking to access Welsh Government support. We are working with DWP to estimate the impact of these changes both in terms of the number of people to whom we will need to offer support and the type of assistance required. Both of these factors will require changes to our own employability programmes.

We outlined in our manifesto that we would create a new employability programme to support individuals of all ages to find good quality employment. We want this support to be tailored to individual need and, where appropriate, aligned with emerging job opportunities in local communities. Our aim is to bring together the activities from our main employability programmes, Jobs Growth Wales and ReAct, traineeships and our new Employability Skills programme into a single employability support programme that will better meet the needs of those requiring support to gain, retain, and progress within work.

The new programme is being developed using the most recent evidence and research into the delivery of effective labour market programmes. It will be informed by evaluations of the Work Ready, Jobs Growth Wales and ReAct programmes, the Skills Conditionality pilots, which we conducted with DWP, and the traineeships evaluation and review. We have a wealth of evidence available to us on what works.

Our new programme is anticipated to begin delivery from April 2018. Between now and then we will conduct a series of pilot activities with further education colleges and our existing network of work-based learning providers to test the capacity and willingness of the sectors to innovate and respond flexibly to the needs of individuals and employers, and with Careers Wales, Jobcentre Plus and local authorities to test assessment, referral and job-matching processes. We also intend making changes to some of our existing programmes to enable us to transition smoothly to delivery of our all-age programme.

Our new Employability Skills programme will reflect a different approach to delivery with a greater focus on a work placement and a continuation of support once an individual secures employment. We will continue to deliver Jobs Growth Wales until March 2018 but at a lower rate of wage subsidy, reflecting the improved economic climate and the findings of the evaluation, whilst continuing to recognise the importance of young people gaining their first foothold in work. This is a demanding timetable and a complex programme of work, but I am confident that it will result in a programme more fit and flexible to respond to the labour market challenges and opportunities we face, both now and in the future. Diolch.