Thank you, madam Deputy Presiding Officer. I’m very grateful to the Cabinet Secretary for today’s statement and indeed for the commitment to create the infrastructure commission, originally set out in the compact, and also for the willingness that he has just set out in his statement for the role, the remit, the status and the focus of the infrastructure commission to evolve, and for it itself to be able to address some of the wide cross-cutting areas of potential interest that it may want to focus on.

I’m grateful to him for having had sight of an early version of the consultation document, which has been published today, and for the positive engagement that we’ve had with the Government so far. He’s aware, and it won’t come as any surprise, obviously, because Plaid Cymru published its own document setting out our vision in terms of the national infrastructure commission recently, that there is some daylight, I think, between us still on a number of issues. If I may, in my short remarks here, I’d just like to concentrate on three of those very, very briefly.

The Cabinet Secretary has just said that, at least initially, the infrastructure commission will be constituted on a non-statutory basis. I note that his party colleague and former leader of the Labour party, Neil Kinnock, recently fairly fiercely actually criticised the UK Government’s decision to quietly shelve their plans, previously, to put the UK national infrastructure commission on a statutory footing. He went as far as to claim that this rowing back had actually wrecked the commission because it didn’t give it sufficient status and independence. So, I was wondering if the Cabinet Secretary could respond or reflect on Lord Kinnock’s view that actually a statutory basis is an important element for a successful infrastructure commission.

Secondly, on the issue of financing, I note that the Cabinet Secretary did refer to financing as part of those cross-cutting delivery issues that he referred to. It is an area of key concern actually. One of the constraints, one of the co-ordination problems—failures—that we have at the moment, I think, is the ability to put together the complex package of financing that is often required in the kind of major infrastructure investment projects that we’re talking about. It’s a very complex, very specialist field and I think the Cabinet Secretary may be getting a bit of a flavour of that, indirectly, with the Circuit of Wales, for example. And because, of course, we haven’t had an infrastructure commission in Wales, that’s held us back in terms of the quantity and the scale of infrastructure investment. We don’t have the expertise available to us, which is really why, certainly in our vision, we see a central role, whether it’s directly or indirectly, for the infrastructure commission in putting together the financing arrangements, including some of the innovative approaches—the non-profit distributing model that the finance Secretary referred to earlier—but also more conventional approaches to public-private partnership as well. So, I’d be grateful if the Cabinet Secretary could say a little bit about his evolving thinking on the role of the infrastructure commission in that. We’re agnostic as to who does it. There is a suggestion that the development bank could actually build up a team that is specifically looking at infrastructure investment. We’re open to that. The point is that we don’t currently have the expertise in Wales and we need to change that very, very quickly.

Lastly, it’s really a question that kind of overlaps, once again, his responsibility and that of his Cabinet colleague the finance Secretary, but it’s a question of the appetite within Government for both accelerating the pace, but also extending the scale of public infrastructure investment. Last year, the OECD produced a report that said that a modern economy, an advanced economy, should be spending around 5 per cent of GVA on the renewal and modernisation of infrastructure. In the UK last year, that was as low as 1.5 per cent. It’s possibly even lower in Wales because of the historic constraints on our ability to invest in projects such as this. The Scottish Government has recently announced a £20 billion programme over the next five years. Is the appetite there in Government, if necessary looking at innovative sources of finance to overcome some of the constraints that we still face in terms of borrowing powers, et cetera? Because would the Cabinet Secretary agree that, as Gerry Holtham, former financial special adviser to the Welsh Government said, this could have a dual benefit for Wales, not just in terms of laying the foundations, through the infrastructure itself, for a generation to come, but also having a very significant stimulus in terms of the economy? If we looked at a £3 billion additional programme over a period of five years, that could be a stimulus equal to 1 per cent additional growth in terms of GVA. So, I’d be very interested to hear what’s the current thinking of the Government in terms of have you got the appetite for actually ramping up a level of public infrastructure investment that, for a variety of reasons, has been far lower than many of our partner and competitor nations elsewhere in Europe over the last few years.