Part of 1. 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Infrastructure – in the Senedd at 2:14 pm on 9 November 2016.
Thank you for that answer. Cabinet Secretary, we’ve had a number of high-profile collapses of businesses involving an awful lot of public money, and it’s not just here on your watch or indeed your predecessor’s—she was the one who made a lot of these decisions—but it goes right back to the days of Ieuan Wyn Jones and £2 million for ragworm farms, which we got not one penny back for. I absolutely appreciate that we have to gamble in order to help build the economy, but can you please assure us that you’re going to rigorously implement a process for vetting and doing due diligence on business applications? If you look at what a farmer has to fill in for a small grant, it is, in many cases, far, far, far more information than a business that just seems to need to put in a plan and an outline structure. I do think that, for the sake of public money, and to ensure that the money is in the right place for the right companies, and that they are truly supported, so that we don’t have this cycle of up and down, we need to be more diligent in how we do this.