Thank you, acting Presiding Officer, and thank you, Minister, for your statement. I think your approach is entirely sensible. If we have less money to work with, then it’s very important that we eliminate duplication of effort. Therefore, I welcome your proposal to create the Employability Skills programme, bringing all these other different programmes together. I particularly pay tribute to the Jobs Growth Wales programme, which has been really significant for many, many of my constituents in really giving them the leg up into successful careers that, without that first taste of work, they might not have made it and they could be not having a successful work life. I welcome your reassurances about the importance of giving individual support depending on individual need.

Of course, it’s really important to recognise that, if people have been outside the labour market for a period of time, some people become agoraphobic and need a lot of work to persuade them to get back into society as well as into the rigours of work. I wondered how well we continue to ensure that our schools and colleges are completely focused on ensuring that all individual needs are met, because I was shocked recently to identify somebody who has clearly been on the autistic spectrum all their life and it was never spotted in either their schools or their colleges—it’s only now being identified. So, we need to make sure that individual learning needs are identified early on, because further education colleges do a fantastic job for people who’ve fallen between the cracks in the school education system and they give new hope to people who’ve not had a successful school career. But we surely ought to be preventing that sort of thing happening overall.

I’ve been to a couple of conferences recently where people have been saying, ‘What’s going to happen to training if we’re going to lose all the money coming from the EU?’ Well, obviously, we have to make sure that the Welsh Government is ensuring that the Westminster Government delivers on the promises made by the ‘leave’ programme, because we continue to need that training. But we also I think we have to ensure that businesses, trainers and Government are saying, ‘Well, we’ve got to keep going in any case’, because we can’t possibly not meet the gaps in skills that we’re going to need for the transformative programmes we must have, like the metro, like the smarter energy programme—tapping into our wealth of sustainable energy—like our sustainable housing programme, so that we build the houses of the future that generate energy rather than leaking energy. For them, we need people with very detailed skills.

So, I think the challenge for us is both to ensure that we create the skills that are required by businesses, both across the public as well as the private sector, but we also retain them for Wales because, otherwise, we’re simply creating the skills that other parts of the UK need and we’re subsidising them and that’s obviously not fair. So, I think it’s a difficult balance, but I welcome your statement and hope that we can continue to make to progress despite less money.