Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:39 pm on 15 November 2016.
The Member makes a very good point indeed. We’d expect that to work all the way through the policy. I would very much expect the employment advice service to be able to pick out somebody who has Welsh language skills and assist them to train so that they can do something with the Welsh language that helps their employability, and we very much will be pushing that. But we’ll also be looking to have bilingual advice services, obviously, so that people who want to access the service in Welsh—perhaps those furthest from the job market would be a particular case in point, so if you’re facing particular economic or social difficulties in accessing employment, you might want to do that through the medium of Welsh, because that’s the language you’re comfortable with; we will be making sure that that’s facilitated. Also, we’ll be making sure that employers take proper account in their skills plans of their Welsh language needs. So, again, in reference to the employer Pelican Healthcare that we met with yesterday, they were talking to us about their need for Welsh language customer service people in their work, and obviously that’s a big growth area in Wales and one of our big selling points. So, we will be absolutely certain to be including that. My colleague Alun Davies and myself have been discussing how we can get the best out of our Welsh language features, both to help individuals but also to help employers identify the skills that they need so that we can fund it accordingly through the regional skills plan. So, it’s very much part of the mix, in exactly the same way, actually, as we were talking about diversity. So, it’s very much part of the diversity mix, and we know that it drives the bottom line. Again, I would emphasise to any employers who are listening to this that this isn’t about putting an extra burden on them; it’s actually about driving their bottom line by providing a better service.