The following amendments have been selected: amendment 1 in the name of Jane Hutt, and amendments 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the name of Paul Davies. If amendment 1 is agreed, amendments 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 will be deselected.

And we now move on to the Plaid Cymru debate, and I call on Adam Price to move the motion.

Motion NDM6176 Rhun ap Iorwerth

To propose that the National Assembly for Wales:

1. Notes successful schemes such as small business Saturday for increasing footfall in town centres across Wales.

2. Notes that, following the Plaid Cymru budget deal with the Welsh Government, a fund will be established that will enable local authorities to offer free car parking in town centres throughout Wales, providing a vital boost to town centre regeneration.

3. Regrets that the current business rates system places a disproportionate burden on small businesses with premises in Wales compared to the rest of the UK.

4. Regrets the impact of the recent business rates revaluation on some small businesses in Wales.

5. Calls upon the Welsh Government to:

a) Expand the transitional relief available to small businesses affected by the 2017 non-domestic rates revaluation:

b) explore the designation of the whole of Wales as an enterprise zone in order to provide Wales with kind of competitive advantage needed in order to close the economic gap between Wales and the rest of the UK;

c) ensure that the interests of small businesses are given due weight in the work of the new National Infrastructure Commission for Wales and the National Development Bank;

d) set a target to increase the current levels of procurement from 55 per cent to at least 75 per cent of Welsh public sector spending within Wales; and

e) introduce a ‘buy local’ campaign aimed at Welsh consumers and major purchasers.

Motion moved.

Diolch, Lywydd. It’s a great pleasure to propose this motion in the name of my—we don’t have honourable friends in this place, do we? But, he is a friend and he is quite honourable. [Laughter.]

It’s a timely debate, obviously, because we have the fourth national Small Business Saturday coming up, which is taking place across the four nations of the United Kingdom. It’s a nationwide campaign in each of those countries, designed to encourage people to shop locally and support small businesses, and I’m sure that we’re about to hear that it enjoys—I can fully anticipate probably—cross-party support in this Assembly.

Of course, it’s become something of a truism in politics to say that small businesses are the backbone of our economy. But it’s demonstrably true, isn’t it. When we look at the data, small and medium-sized enterprises account for 99 per cent of Welsh business stock, and they provide employment for well over half the private sector workforce. That’s jobs for more than 0.5 million people. And, of course, we’ve seen, as Wales has endured waves—wave after wave, it often feels like—of structural economic change, as we’ve lost many of our heavy industries, and our large employers, unfortunately, have gone by the wayside, it’s the small businesses and the medium-sized businesses of Wales that have had to take up the slack, and they’ve done that heroically in many cases, not under circumstances that anyone would choose, and certainly not of their choosing. So, this debate is about coming up with timely and innovative public policy proposals to support that core economic motor upon which we all rely. We can’t achieve all the things that we want to in terms of the quality of our public services without this wealth-generating engine, which is the foundation of so much that we want to achieve as a nation and as a society. So, this debate is absolutely crucial.

It seems to me that we are at a bit of one of those turning points in the economy. There are positive indicators. If you think about the potential role of small businesses, there are some things to be cheerful about because as a result of new technology—principally, but not exclusively of course, the internet—entry barriers for people who have a good idea and want to run with it have come down. They’ve come down in Wales and right across the world, and that is reflected in rising entrepreneurialism. It is reflected in the kind of buzzing start-up sub-cultures that we see in this city and in towns and cities right across Wales. So, that’s one vision of the future. [Interruption.] Yes, I will give way.

I thank Adam for giving way. Would he note that that’s not only an exclusive innovation within new start-up companies, but actually established high-street companies that may look like very traditional high-street front windows as well? Amongst these is a shoe shop in my constituency, in the Garw valley, in Pontycymer, which looks like a very traditional, if somewhat old-fashioned, quaint shop from the front and yet it has one of the highest internet trades in Dr. Martens in the UK, on the internet.

Yes, absolutely. Are we going to see him sporting those next week as well—or maybe now? [Laughter.]

I think that existing businesses reinventing themselves, absolutely, is as entrepreneurial as the start-up. Possibly we get too taken up with the hype, maybe, purely of the start-up, but actually the role of existing businesses and established businesses, we know, from the work of the FSB on creating the Welsh mittelstand, and having that continuity of rooted businesses and ensuring that there is proper succession planning, is absolutely critical as well.

The nightmare opposite vision of the future, of course, is one in which we all buy our goods from a single, monopoly provider, called Amazon. That’s the hyper-warehouse capitalism vision of the future, where there is a single global supply chain and very little is produced locally, and you see that that embedding that you have through the existence of small businesses within the local economy is lost.

So, how do we get more of the positive vision and how do you get less of the negative one? That is the exam question, if you like, I think, to political parties and to politicians right across the western world at the moment. We’ve set out in our motion some of our ideas and I’m sure we’ll hear some of the other parties’ ideas as well.

When we look at the data, of course, it is a mixed picture. So, on footfall, as we see different patterns of retail emerging, footfall is up: in Cardiff, it’s actually doubled in terms of city centre football—I mean ‘footfall’, but maybe that’s another question entirely; let’s not go down that route—between 2007 and 2015, and there were slight increases in Pontypridd and Bridgend as well. So, it’s not all doom and gloom, but actually if you drill down into the figures—

Will you give way?

Yes, certainly.

Speaking as a Member for Cardiff via the South Wales Central region, will the Member recognise that it is welcome that the footfall has increased in Cardiff centre, but it has predominantly been focused on the St David’s 2 redevelopment, which is an all-singing, all-dancing retail development and eating option and, very often, people don’t break out into the wider Cardiff experience, and that it’s important that the local authority and Welsh Government promote Cardiff in its wider sense and not just the St David’s development?

Yes, absolutely, and he’s anticipated my point really. These shimmering cathedrals of modern retail have an important part to play, of course, and we wouldn’t want people going elsewhere and going further afield to have those kinds of experiences, but when we look at the picture of some of the smaller towns that, traditionally, are particularly associated with smaller businesses and, indeed, as he rightly says, some of the centres within cities as well, we see a different picture, and it is a more negative one. So, large falls in footfall in places like Aberystwyth, Caerphilly and Holyhead, et cetera. That’s partly to do with the effects of online; it’s partly to do with the competition from out-of-town shopping centres as well. We do see, overall, that there has been a significant decline in the number of retail businesses within many of our towns and cities within Wales, and, of course, we have a higher vacancy rate compared to England, for example: about 15 per cent in June this year compared to 11 per cent or 12 per cent in England and Scotland.

So, the challenge of the changing pattern of retail certainly is a very, very important one for us in Wales, and we need to respond to it. Part of the response has to be, as we’ve discussed many times in this Chamber, looking at the issue of business rates. It doesn’t seem to me right that we are actually taxing people that are in physical retail premises effectively at a higher level than those that are trading online. So, we need to have, I think, a more innovative response to that.

In the amendment—we’ve linked this to a wider potential, which is to turn the whole of Wales into an enterprise zone. We need to build some competitive advantage, some comparative advantage, for our businesses overall—that’s small, medium-sized and others. It’s not an original idea, I must confess, making the whole of Wales—as the Cabinet Secretary knows, but I’m not referring to the article in ‘The Spectator’. Actually, it was the Ulster Unionist Party that recently called for Northern Ireland to be made an enterprise zone as a whole, so I’m not sure that’s the kind of Celtic alliance that my friend behind me would have supported. But good ideas can come from any direction, and, certainly, we need to be looking at coming up with new and innovative ideas that give our businesses, particularly the small and medium-sized businesses and start-ups, et cetera, that kind of edge.

Procurement—again, a key issue. We obviously have rehearsed many times the importance of the public sector, and I think my colleagues will refer to that, but I would also urge us to look at the private sector. Let’s look at what our large private sector businesses can do as well in terms of local procurement. Why could we not actually have a buy local and buy Welsh campaign that includes the private sector and have a kitemark for corporate local responsibility, if you like, so that we know that, even when we are shopping or having business with larger businesses, they themselves are actually locked into a local supply chain? The Romanian Government have just passed a Bill that insists that 51 per cent of food in local supermarkets in Romania is part of what they call the ‘short supply chain’—that is, it’s basically part of the local food system. And they are still within the European Union. It’s a much more creative interpretation possibly than we’ve had up until now in terms of EU procurement rules. If they can do it, then, certainly, we can as well.

The development bank, the national infrastructure commission—these new institutions that we’re going to create absolutely need to listen to the needs of small businesses. Small businesses haven’t always had—they have the FSB now, but they haven’t always perhaps had the lobbying power of large businesses. Sometimes, when we look then at creating these institutions, the needs of small businesses are ignored. I’m glad to see that the business case for the development bank, in particular, is emphasising the need of providing loans to microbusinesses. Similarly, with the national infrastructure commission, I know what the small businesses in Wales think is the pressing infrastructure need. It’s not actually the bottlenecks of the M4, it’s the bottlenecks in our digital infrastructure, it’s the inability to get connected to the same extent that businesses around the world are. That’s where, I’m sure, they would like to see us invest.

I have selected the six amendments to the motion. If amendment 1 is agreed, amendments 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 will be deselected. I call on the Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Infrastructure to move formally amendment 1 tabled in the name of Jane Hutt.

Amendment 1—Jane Hutt

Delete all and replace with:

Notes:

a) the impact of successful schemes such as small business Saturday which increases footfall in town centres across Wales;

b) the draft budget agreement with Plaid Cymru, which includes £3m for local authorities to run pilot schemes to evaluate the impact of free town centre parking;

c) that the current business rates system raises £1bn which supports public services in Wales that small businesses rely on;

d) that the revaluation of business rates by the independent Valuation Office Agency is not designed to raise additional revenue and that while some rateable values have increased, overall they have fallen;

e) the Welsh Government’s commitment to introducing a new permanent small business rates relief scheme in 2018;

f) that the National Procurement Service has increased the number of Welsh businesses winning contracts and

g) the Welsh Government’s intention to:

i) ensure that the interests of small and medium sized businesses are given due weight in the work of the new National Infrastructure Commission for Wales and the Development Bank of Wales; and

ii) publish new economic priorities in 2017, to make Wales more prosperous and secure.

Amendment 1 moved.

Move.

I call on Nick Ramsay to move amendments 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 tabled in the name of Paul Davies.

Amendment 2—Paul Davies

Add at end of point 1:

‘but regrets that Wales has the worst high street vacancy rate in the UK and that footfall on Welsh high streets is down by 1.4 per cent compared with October 2015.’

Amendment 3—Paul Davies

Delete Point 2 and replace with:

Welcomes the draft budget commitment to introduce a pilot scheme for free parking and calls on the Welsh Government to further work with the retail industry to develop an integrated approach to town centre regeneration which incorporates free parking, business rates reform, simplified planning, town centre managers and a responsible night time economy.

Amendment 4—Paul Davies

In point 5, delete sub-point (b).

Amendment 5—Paul Davies

Add as new sub-point at end of point 5:

‘recognise retail as a priority sector in the development of the Welsh Government’s new economic strategy.’

Amendment 6—Paul Davies

Add as new point at end of motion:

Regrets that the One Wales coalition government failed to extend business rate relief for small businesses in Wales.

Amendments 2, 3, 4 5 and 6 moved.

Diolch, Presiding Officer. I’m pleased to contribute to this debate and to move the Welsh Conservatives’ amendments in Paul Davies’s name. As our amendments highlight, Wales has the worst high-street vacancy rate in the UK, and footfall is down by 1.4 per cent, compared with October 2015. Okay, one of many statistics, but an important statistic nonetheless. I think we are all very well aware of the important role our high streets play in local economies across Wales, and that’s in urban and rural parts of Wales. We’ve had many, many debates—some of us more than others—in this Chamber about this over the years. I’ve spoken in many of them, and, in the last Assembly, I chaired the Enterprise and Business Committee’s report into high-street regeneration. I’ve got a copy of it here. It still makes very pertinent reading. That report made a number of recommendations—21, in fact. How many of those recommendations that were accepted at the time by the Welsh Government have been acted on? Indeed, in those days, the revaluation was not even on our radar, but there were other issues to do with the decline of our high streets that were on the radar, and which the Welsh Government was aware of. Three years on, I think it is important we do have an update on the implementation of those recommendations.

There’s no doubt at all that we need an integrated approach, which involves a close relationship between the Welsh Government on the one hand, the retail industry, a simplified planning system, and business rate reform. Of course, although this is one of those catch-all, or catch-many-things, motions that includes many different aspects, uppermost in our minds over the last few weeks has been the impact of the business rates revaluation. I have to say, turning to the Government’s amendment to this motion—well, it’s almost an alternative motion, I suppose you would call it—yes, we know that the revaluation is not designed to raise additional revenue, and we know that, overall, rates have fallen, but that doesn’t help those businesses that have been affected by an increase in rates. Let’s not forget that those businesses that have seen increases have, in many cases, seen nothing less than eye-watering increases. Only yesterday I received an e-mail from a constituent with a business in Tintern, who said, I quote, ‘It is with concern that I note the increase to my business rates of 60 per cent, which I think is unreasonable, unjustifiable and plainly diabolical. We are a visitor centre, which we could not run from a lock-up shop.’— Could not run from an internet site, indeed. ‘There is no admission charge. Your decision’—and this was addressed primarily to the Valuation Office Agency, copied to me—’Your decision will ultimately be the making of whether we continue in business or not.’

There was another one received a couple of days ago: ‘I’ve just received the revised rateable value for my business, and due to, at present, a non-increase in the small business rate relief threshold, my business will be charged, for 2017, nearly £2,500 that it is not charged now. I cannot support this cost and it will cause my business to close.’ The e-mail goes on: ‘Can you please advise how this can be avoided, or please come to my shop-closing sale that I intend to hold?’

Heart-wrenching, heart-rending e-mails from people who are at the end of their tether now they realise the effect that this will have on their businesses.

Cabinet Secretary, this is a deeply worrying situation. If nothing is done, we could see a loss of small businesses next year on a scale not previously seen, at least in those parts of Wales where the worst effects are seen. That will have a knock-on effect for high streets, employment and shoppers. This cannot be the intention. I’m sure it’s not the intention of the revaluation or the Welsh Government. Our businesses need action and reassurance, so we therefore support the call to expand the transitional relief available to small businesses affected by this revaluation. These aren’t just statistics; these are real people with livelihoods, staff to employ, and families to raise. Making ends meet can be difficult enough, as we know, without these sorts of rates hikes.

As the motion says, the current business rates system places a disproportionate burden on small businesses here, compared with the rest of the UK. At the end of the day, this is also a question of fairness. The Labour Party have always proclaimed to be the party of fairness—or always did—so, I don’t see how you can stand by and allow such a disparity to develop between the winners and the losers, both within Wales and, indeed, between Wales and across the border, where we have seen different relief support packages coming through.

To close, Presiding Officer, and just turning briefly to the last parts of the motion, we believe a target to increase procurement levels is a good idea. Levels of Welsh procurement are way less than they should be. I met with a local engineering firm in Chepstow last year that had given up on applying for contracts this side of the border because of the dominance of larger firms in the process. So, we need a greater weighting towards local firms and, yes, a buy-local strategy would be a very positive development. So, there’s a lot of good things in this motion. In conclusion, I thank Plaid Cymru for bringing it forward. Let’s get on with the job of regenerating our high streets and providing necessary support for our local businesses, so that they may flourish, put money back into the local economy, and improve the local economic environment for everyone.

My comments relate to section 2 of the motion, which refers to parking charges. Empty town centres and boarded-up shops are an all too familiar sight across Wales, despite attempts to liven things up with a little bit of tinsel and Christmas lights at this time of year. The decline of the high street across Wales reminds us that we need a strategy from the Government to support local businesses in our communities. As we’ve heard, it is becoming increasingly difficult for commercial operators to survive on the high street. Whilst developments on the outskirts of towns flourish, and online shopping is on the increase, high-street retailers are seeking support from Welsh Government. In my constituency, in Bangor, one in five shops is empty, although I have to say that there are signs that things are improving since establishing the business improvement district in that area.

In another town, Caernarfon, it’s a story of success as independent, niche operators create excitement. So, the picture isn’t an entirely bleak one. Following an agreement on the budget between Plaid Cymru and the Welsh Government, a fund of £3 million has been established that will enable local authorities to pilot the use of parking facilities for free in town centres across Wales. This will also enable local authorities to assess the actual effect of this on the regeneration of town centres. I hasten to add that it’s not free parking every hour of the day, every day of the week, every week of the year, in all car parks: that isn’t the answer. That’s not a realistic thing, to start off with, and it could also militate against the intention, with office workers misusing the scheme and parking there through the day, for example, meaning that there wouldn’t be room for people who want to come to the town centres to shop.

Evidence from Welsh Government itself has shown that out-of-town destinations that offer free parking benefit at the expense of town centres. Lots of councils across Wales do offer free parking schemes over the Christmas period in an attempt to attract people to spend their money in town centres. Gwynedd Council, for example, this week has stated that it wants to offer free parking across the county to encourage people to visit our town centres over the Christmas period. But what our motion today notes is our success in establishing a new fund that will allow local authorities to offer free parking facilities at specific times in towns across Wales. In Plaid Cymru’s opinion, this will be a fund that will allow local authorities to make a bid for a grant to offer free parking for a few hours to support towns that really need that support. We would need specific criteria to ensure that specific towns qualify for this scheme. I think that the best way forward would be to create a pot of money that local authorities could bid for, and then to have criteria for the funds. For example, a council would put a bid in for £100,000, say, to offer free parking for three hours a day for a year in a small, convenient car park near the town centre, and the funds then would go partly to compensate the council for the fees that they would lose. The bids would have to be measured against criteria—for example, a high street that has lost such and such amount of footfall for such and such a time, a car park near the high street, and an explanation of why the council thinks that it would make a difference. The council would have to measure the success of the scheme as well in order to increase the evidence available related to the effectiveness of offering free parking in increasing use. The fund should allow councils to trial the scheme in specific areas.

So, that’s an outline of some ideas about how we should go about implementing this fund, and we look forward to being part of that discussion, if possible, so that we do develop a scheme that is viable and is genuinely going to have an effect.,

We need a holistic strategy to regenerate our high streets. Offering free car parking as a policy on its own, of course, isn’t going to solve the whole problem. But Welsh Government does need to try and pilot these kinds of alternative schemes to try to overturn this historic decline.

This Saturday, as part of Small Business Saturday, I’ll be visiting a range of small businesses that enrich my constituency, starting with the Headmistress hairdresser at the Maelfa shopping centre in Llanedeyrn, celebrating 40 years cutting and shaping the hair of local residents. I’m sure that, during that time, she has listened to all the achievements and disappointments, including the births, deaths and marriages that mark the milestones in people’s lives. Next, I will go to the excellent butchers next door—the best butcher in Cardiff by a long way—a man who knows exactly where all his meat and eggs come from, and makes his delicious pies himself. What’s not to like about a stew pack at £2.96 a kilo, which even the poorest family can afford, as well as the fabulous salt marsh lamb, and other cuts for special occasions? I’ll then walk across the corridor to the fruit and veg shop, run by another local member of the corridor. Every day for the last 40 years, she has left home at 5 o’clock in the morning to go to Bessemer Road wholesale market to make sure she gets the best value fresh produce for her customers. She delivers bulky items like sacks of potatoes to people who don’t have cars.

These people provide a service to their community and aren’t just interested in the bottom line. That is one of the fundamentals of small businesses. So, I’ll add my voice to those encouraging people to spend at least £10 in local shops this Saturday. We either use them or lose them, and people need to be mindful of the community cohesion they offer beyond the ability of the warehouse emporiums, which have a role for dry goods or large wholesale purchases, but can never replicate the intimacy and community cohesion of small businesses. That’s why Labour-run Cardiff council is investing £1 million to regenerate the Maelfa shopping centre, and I salute them for it.

Turning now to the contribution of Nick Ramsay, the glass-half-empty approach, I’d like to point out to him that, compared with the Welsh Labour scheme, where more than 70 per cent of small businesses in Wales will receive support either through the retail relief scheme or the other schemes that are available—. Compare that with the UK Government, run by your party, where only a third of business rate payers will pay no rates at all. Over 60 per cent in Wales will not be paying, so I think that we need to get some balance into this debate about the immense support that the Welsh Government—[Interruption.] Yes, I’m happy to do that.

I’m very grateful to you for giving way on that. I did actually say in my contribution that, on average, there is a reduction in rates across Wales. So, I did acknowledge that. My point was that, for those businesses in those parts of Wales that have been affected, they have been particularly badly affected. I think it would be a complacent approach not to recognise that, and to put in particular measures for those businesses so that they don’t have to suffer. We don’t want anyone to suffer from this revaluation.

Okay, I understand that. But there is also a further fund to assist with transition where businesses have seen a rate rise. We have to remember that the valuation office is an independent body, as is highlighted in amendment 1. It is independent of both Welsh Government and the UK Government.

While some rateable values have increased, overall they have fallen as part of this revaluation. There’s £10 million on the table in transitional relief to businesses that have been particularly affected, so more than three quarters of all businesses in Wales will receive some form of tax cut to cover their rate bills over the next year. There’s going to be, over the next year, £200 million in financial assistance to businesses through mandatory and discretionary reliefs.

The Deputy Presiding Officer (Ann Jones) took the Chair.

I’m also very proud of the work that’s done to regenerate town centres through Vibrant and Viable Places—£110 million to bring town centres back to life, since 2014 up until next year—new affordable housing, upgraded community facilities, creating jobs, supporting people into work and securing additional investment, mainly through the EU.

Car parking—I just want to highlight the fact that car parking is not the panacea for regenerating communities. There’s lots of examples of where free car parking actually prevents people who need to shop from actually getting a place. So, there’s lots of interesting examples produced by Sustrans that people actually want better facilities for pedestrians and cyclists and that they are more likely to return to the high street and spend more money over time than customers arriving by car. Unlimited free parking hurts high streets.

Outside the UK, in New York, new bike lanes and removal of parking boosted trade on Eighth Avenue compared to other areas of the city. And an innovative approach used in San Francisco has demand-sensitive charging where the parking price changes depending on how many spaces are filled, ensuring turnover of customers at busy times. I think that’s a really interesting bit of evidence from across the world. We have to look in detail at what works. Cheaper car parking is not the panacea to make our high streets a success again.

I will be mainly focusing on business rates, but if I could just follow up on what Jenny Rathbone has just said, no-one is making the case that city centre parking is a panacea in any way. But they should be recognised by their actions, and I notice that the Labour council in Rhondda Cynon Taf have just announced free parking over the Christmas period in order to promote town centres in that area. So, you must take action yourself if you are to criticise others.

But I want to focus on business rates, and the opportunities provided by reforming business rates to regenerate many of our town centres. I will be spending Small Business Saturday visiting small businesses, and I hope to be in Narberth, one of the towns which has succeeded and demonstrated how changes to business rates can regenerate the centre of a small town. There was a business rates holiday over a long period in Narberth in order to allow new businesses to be established and to actually break that link that you would have to commit for a long period to take over a property. Anyone who’s visited Narberth will now realise that that approach has led to a number of small businesses establishing, from butchers to craft shops to food outlets, but also everyday shops. So, you can go to Narberth and find what you need for your weekly shop and pay very little to park, if I may say, for an hour or two.

But it’s also true to say that the Government hasn’t responded to the increase in business rates in an appropriate manner that actually learns lessons from towns such as Narberth and other towns in Wales. We are at risk of creating a business rates system that could be among the highest in Britain, and I don’t think that that puts the local high street in an ideal position by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t think that the Government is demonstrating that they want to see the kind of local market establishing itself, as Adam Price outlined in opening the debate. We’re about to move to a system where, in terms of the rates, we in Wales will be the most expensive in that regard in Britain. That doesn’t give us that edge, and it doesn’t show support for businesses, and it doesn’t actually put businesses in that competitive position that we would like to see in promoting our small businesses on the high street.

That, of course, is a pledge broken by the Government. They pledged to have an improved system in their manifesto, and of course we saw the greatest spin possible that continuing the current regime was in some way a cut in business rates. Well, the small businesses have seen through that spin and have seen that the devolution of business rates hasn’t benefitted them in the most appropriate way. I do hope that this will be a temporary system, because if we are serious about developing the economy, we must use all economic tools possible. We have very few of these tools, and there aren’t many provided by the Wales Bill either. But we do know that business rates are one of the most powerful tools that we have in our armoury—outwith the block grant, of course. So it’s one of the things where we can make a difference.

One thing that we can do and consider in earnest here in Wales is to change the multiplier to the CPI, rather than RPI. Another thing that we could look at is why on earth we have one multiplier across the whole of Wales. Not all areas of Wales are the same; not all businesses are the same. In Scotland, they have different multipliers for small businesses and larger businesses, and I would like us to look at that—[Interruption.] In just a second, yes. But I would hope that we could look at regional multipliers, too. For example, I’m always banging on about the Cleddau bridge being tolled, and that is a toll on small businesses in an enterprise zone. We can consider how we could use the business levy to respond to the toll in that area. I will give way on that point.

Diolch yn fawr. You mentioned the question of the split multiplier that applies in England and Scotland. Isn’t it the case, though, that we have to be cautious about drawing those direct comparisons, because the nature of the tax base is actually very different—certainly in England—from Wales? In particular with the small number of higher value rateable properties in Wales, the burden on those of carrying the discount for the larger small business sector would be probably uneconomic. Would he acknowledge that?

I’m not sure if I accept the argument entirely. I accept the evidence that you’ve provided, and it’s one of the things that I want to mention, because it’s one of the issues around parking. One of the things we haven’t done in Wales is to use business rates to look at things such as car parks in supermarkets and out-of-town developments, where there are no taxes at all. So, in looking at that, I do think we need a fresh approach. We’ll have to gather that evidence, but I think we need a fresh look at how we can move forward here.

The final thing I want to mention, as my time is coming to an end, is the fact that we perhaps could reflect on business rates and reflect on the issue of business rates for tourism businesses. There was a meeting last night of the tourism marketing association of Abersoch, where there was a great deal of discussion on the fact that a number of businesses are only operational for six months of the year, when tourism is at its peak. Any overview of new business rates has to take tourism businesses into account.

Small Business Saturday—what a fantastic way of helping our amazing business owners, our shopkeepers, hotel owners, leisure facility operators, cafes, our pubs, those in the service industry, our farmers, our cab drivers; in fact, all those who get up early in the morning, work hard all day to provide for themselves and their families—the small business owners who we expect to provide for us all year round, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, in fair weather or foul, good health or bad, and even when they feel that everything is actually competing against them, and that Government policy is working against them: business rates, rents, overheads, VAT returns. Such initiatives can have a real boost to town centres across Wales, such as Conwy in my constituency, where 92.5 per cent of shops are independent. Here in Wales, though, we still have the worst high-street vacancy rate in the UK, with footfall down by 1.4 per cent since last year. So, there is room for improvement.

We recognise the benefit to town centres and our high streets that free parking can have. We welcome the £3 million of funding has been awarded for a pilot scheme designed to end town centre parking charges announced in last month’s budget. Neath Port Talbot and Swansea councils will be offering free parking over the festive period to attract shoppers and benefit local businesses and town centres. But, this should be promoted all year round, not just in the lead-up to Christmas or for Small Business Saturday. Such initiatives can help to combat the loss of business to out-of-town retail parks. Blaenau Gwent and Torfaen offer free parking all year round, as they prioritise the regeneration of their town centres. Yet Cardiff council, which almost doubled the maximum parking charges to £10 last year, despite much opposition, saw a profit of £3.5 million. This is not the way councils should be gaining revenue. We must look at an improved business rates system and better relief.

Thank you very much for that. Just to point out that the whole purpose of raising the money from parking charges is to give councils the money to introduce safer roads for cyclists and pedestrians. That’s an important source of revenue, otherwise we won’t be able to make advances.

Thank you for that, but how many businesses are under the cosh and do we lose as a result of these high car parking charges?

We are calling for improved rate relief for businesses valued up to £12,000, and tapered for those up to £15,000. In response to the draft revaluation, the Federation of Small Businesses has called for more regular revaluations to ensure that bills are more reflective of economic circumstances and rents, and for an agreed position on the local retention of business rates as soon as possible. Local retention would ensure local authority support, showing support for businesses, and could be reinvested in promoting and regenerating our high streets.

Finally, it is essential that we recognise the benefit of small shops to the Welsh economy and our communities. There are 3,096 convenience stores in Wales, providing almost 25,000 jobs in Wales. Seventy-four per cent are owned and operated by small business owners. These offer valuable community services—local notice boards, cash machines, mobile phone top-up, parcel collection and click and collect services. Seventy-nine per cent of independent retailers in Wales engaged in some form of community work in the past year—collecting money for charity, providing support to community events and activities, sponsoring a local sports team or hosting local community or business association meetings and projects

Deputy Llywydd, we must acknowledge and value our high streets to ensure that our town centres remain prosperous and vibrant after Small Business Saturday, after Christmas, all year round. Small Business Saturday, 3 December—let’s tweet it, let’s Facebook it, and let’s celebrate it. [Assembly Members: ‘Hear, hear.’]

I’ll follow your call to arms, Janet—your passion shines through. I think we should be having this debate in relation to how we want our debates to be perceived by the public, and how the public can actually engage with the debates that we have in the Assembly. I say this because I sometimes think that we can come up with quite high-end ideas, but when we talk to people on the street, they’re very simple about what they actually want to see happening in their communities. For example, in Neath, they want to have actual decorations on their Christmas tree that will make the experience of going into town more pleasurable. They want to be able to have a pleasurable shopping experience across Wales, and I think what we’re missing in this debate is a unique selling point for our town centres: Hay-on-Wye, an excellent place to go to buy books; Penarth, boutique shops. Let’s look at how we can make a map of Wales and look at different towns in a different light, and sell that to ourselves and sell that to people who come to Wales.

I often imagine myself as a tourist in Wales, or as a traveller. What would I do if I wanted to go abroad, and what would I want to see? I think we should try and scope our services and our small businesses in that manner to offer somebody something different in the different towns and cities that they visit. I think we are lacking in that. We’re not selling ourselves effectively to Wales, so how then can we sell ourselves to an international community in that context?

Last night, I did a Facebook update on the fact that I was going to buy Christmas presents early to get it out of the way, because I was feeling a bit of a Scrooge and I didn’t really want to spend all of December shopping. I said that I was buying them online, and I had instant criticism from people for buying online. But there are local businesses who sell online, and I don’t want to name brands, but Etsy is a really good website that incorporates lots of different products. You can actually tailor it so that you can buy from Wales only, and then Welsh producers only who make their own crafts and make their own things. And I think, again, this is something we need to be developing and specialising in, because it doesn’t have to mean that if you’re buying from the internet that you’re buying from the Amazons of this world. There is value in just sitting at home, in bed, just clicking on something and not having to go to the town centre. That’s a light-hearted comment; I’m saying there’s a mix of how people want to approach small business, and how we can engage.

But I certainly think what we need to do more of is to see small businesses as part of the community and for the community to feel that the businesses are working with them. Bridgend was used by Adam Price as an example, but I know that businesses there are increasingly frustrated about the fact that they are seeing not enough people coming and shopping in their town centre. The elephant in the room, is it not, is that in some town centres there are not the quality shops or the variance of shops that people want to have? You know, people will not go into our town centres if they do not have the type of shops that they want to shop in. It’s just the reality of life.

In Merthyr, where I come from, my dad has a poem on the bench as part of one of the grants that the Welsh Government gave—a really pretty bench with poems all over the town centre, but that does not mean that more people are going to come into the town to sit on those benches, because the shops that are there are not the shops that they want to shop in. So, I think that these are debates that we really need to be having so that we can encourage people, again, to see the value of our town centres. I don’t know if Andrew R. T. Davies—

Thank you very much, Bethan. You mentioned Bridgend town centre and as someone who’s very familiar with Bridgend town centre, going back to the 1970s when it was a market town, one thing that the shopkeepers in Bridgend do need—and they’re not trying to recreate some era of the 1950s and 1960s—is consistency from the local authority about what plans they have for development. We’ve had pedestrianisation, now we’re reversing that. A bit of consistency would give them confidence to invest in the product that they’re offering the consumer coming into Bridgend, would it not?

Yes, exactly, and I think all they’ve wanted to do is to try and tell the council, ‘Look, these are our problems. This is what we’re trying to overcome. We want people to spend their money here in the town centre but currently they’re not.’ We have to get around that and I think sometimes that the intransigence of local authority officials is actually stifling development in their own backyard, which is an embarrassing indictment on them when actually the businesses only want to support what the council is doing in relation to those business developments.

I’ve had my little rant for the day but I think that it’s important that we try and support our businesses, as Janet said, not just on Small Business Saturday but every day of the week, even if it is online.

I’m very pleased to take part in this debate and I commend Plaid Cymru for bringing this motion before the Assembly. Adam Price can always be relied upon to be an attractive face of his party—[Laughter.]—and is a fund of good and interesting ideas. And there are some of them in this motion. [Interruption.] You want me to withdraw that remark. [Laughter.]

Edmund Burke said that

‘To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to man.’

A good part of the debate today has concentrated upon the business rating system and rightly so. I listened with interest to Jenny Rathbone’s attempt to defend what I think is a very largely indefensible system, and surely it’s a mark of a very bad tax if such a very large proportion of the people who have to pay it have to be relieved of at least a part of the impost it imposes upon them. What we should be looking for are taxes that relate to people’s ability to pay and they should be borne by as large a number of people as possible at low rates. On that basis, then, taxation does not get in the way of generating wealth and increasing prosperity.

The part of the motion that refers to making the whole of Wales an enterprise zone is certainly an interesting idea, but the whole point of enterprise zones has been that it’s been for targeted intervention on specific areas that have specific problems. But I’m very much in favour of making Wales into an enterprise zone in the widest sense. In another place, in the 1980s, where I was imprisoned inside the House of Commons night after night after night as a result of the problems that revaluation of property then caused for local government finance, we debated these issues at great length. Subsequently, when I became the deregulation Minister in the Major Government in the early 1990s, I tried to make it my mission to turn the whole of the United Kingdom into a low-tax, low-regulation economy so that we would then be able to obtain the competitive advantages to which the motion refers for the whole of the United Kingdom. So, I’m broadly in favour of the approach that Plaid Cymru are taking here.

Business rates are an archaic form of taxation, as we know. Adam pointed out the other day that they go back to the 1601 poor law in the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth. It is bizarre, isn’t it, that you will pay more in a tax if you improve your property? But that’s the way in which the rating system works. So, it’s a disincentive to people to improve properties. The way the economy has changed—this was referred to again by Adam Price the other day—with the growth of the internet, properties that are based in specific locations on the high street are of less and less importance as a proportion of the national economy, and yet, the burdens that are imposed upon shops, as were very eloquently described by Janet Finch-Saunders, have denuded our town centres of life and vivacity. It’s a bad tax indeed that empties out the centres of our towns and cities, although interesting ideas such as Simon Thomas pointed out in Narberth are certainly a response to that. But the shop vacancy level in Wales has been referred to by several participants in this debate today and I know that this is one of the biggest hurdles anybody thinking of setting up a business has to jump; it’s something you simply can’t avoid, even though the purpose of the tax was to be unavoidable and that’s why it’s a tax on property. The way it works now is that, yes, indeed, the tax is unavoidable for the property, but it’s not unavoidable for the business, and if the business can’t afford to site itself in a property to pay the tax in the first place, then it’s actually a very counterproductive tax indeed.

So, it’s the inflexibility of this tax as well, which pays no account of the changes in the levels of prosperity from one year to another, which is important to consider. We go through a business cycle, but the tax itself stays the same and so, actually, when the economy’s going into a downturn, it actually accentuates the downturn. So, that is indeed an irrational form of taxation. We’re just going through this revaluation process now, and although I know it’s intended to be revenue neutral, as Nick Ramsay pointed out in his speech, it’s going to hit particular constituencies very hard, and Monmouthshire is one of those areas where the overall rise in rateable value is 7 per cent. It’s actually 9.2 per cent in Conwy up in north Wales, whereas, of course, in other areas, there are significant reductions. The Vale of Glamorgan, for example, is having an 11 per cent reduction in rateable value, and Neath Port Talbot the same and so on and so forth.

The way in which this revaluation is going to impact upon people will vary from place to place. But we must, as part of the impending opportunity that we have to re-evaluate the way in which we tax properties, really look at innovative answers to these problems, and tax, at the very least, land values rather than the buildings upon it. So, this is the first of many such debates I’m sure that we shall be having on this subject.

There have been quite a variety of ideas that have been triggered by this Small Business Saturday debate—some of them cross-party overlapping, which is quite interesting. Today a constituent raised with me the opening of out-of-town retail parks—Russell Jones on Twitter—and he said that it was one of those many challenges facing the high street. Absolutely. And that’s been touched on by many Members in the Chamber today.

With regard to free town-centre parking, it may or may not be a way forward, but I question whether it would be helpful in every case, as Jenny Rathbone has said. But, actually, Sian Gwenllian more or less agreed with that contention and suggested some quite intuitive solutions to some problems, as did Simon Thomas. So, I don’t think Jenny, Sian and Simon are a million miles apart, to be honest with you. It was really helpful to hear. In fact, in Caerphilly—[Interruption.] Don’t be cheeky. [Laughter.] In Caerphilly, more parking not free parking is the issue. I had a short debate two weeks ago on small and medium-sized enterprises; you’ve probably all been watching it on Senedd.tv—[Interruption.] Thank you, Lee. I mentioned that I’d discussed with an AM from another party what we should do with our small firms and our town centres. One of the discussions we had—. It wasn’t actually Bethan Jenkins I discussed it with, but the answer was: they’ve got their own unique personalities, our town centres, and we should be making the most of that—localised approaches. And I’m currently working on a business connections project in my constituency and engaging with owner-managers and discussing some of these localised approaches. Perhaps we should all do that as AMs.

But time and time again, business rates do come up. Under the recent revaluation, traders on Cardiff Road in Caerphilly had a higher rateable value than many shops in Cardiff city centre. This, of course, had been the situation since 2010. Rateable values in Caerphilly, actually—Nick Ramsay won’t be pleased to hear—have since fallen, but they sure as hell couldn’t go up. I’m concerned, sitting in the Grazing Ground tearoom on Cardiff Road, that the building opposite is occupied by William Hill and the building next door is occupied by Coral betting. Two betting shops next door to each other. I suspect if there were two independent bookies next door to each other they wouldn’t be able to make sufficient profit to continue. So we need to look at why these things are happening.

The revaluation has improved matters for many businesses, and the Welsh Government’s rate relief scheme is making a difference to those whom it benefits. Nonetheless, small businesses in our town centres need to know that the scheme into which they pay will not disadvantage them in comparison to others. The permanent rate relief scheme, being introduced in 2018, must address these issues.

It’s an interesting problem. At the Economy, Infrastructure and Skills Committee, chaired by Russell George, the FSB praised the simplicity of the Welsh Government’s scheme, but if you’re going to introduce progressive measures into it, then you start to add layers of complexity. If you start messing with multipliers, as Jeremy said, you add layers of complexity and it becomes a minefield to negotiate. So, I don’t envy the Cabinet Secretary’s job, but I would be grateful if the Cabinet Secretary could set out what action the Welsh Government will be taking, up to, including and beyond the point at which the business rates will be reviewed, to help support our high streets and town centres.

I’m grateful to you for giving way. I understand what you’re saying about the problem of additional complexity, and there is great virtue in a simple system. But, nonetheless, people out there in businesses in my constituency and in some others are deeply, deeply worried about this, so they need reassurance. I understand there’s going to be a system put in place for rate relief, but people aren’t reassured at the moment. The Welsh Government need to give them something, just something, that’s going to put their minds at rest.

I think that the complexity of taking action and having unintended consequences could then make it worse for other people. It’s almost like a game of Jenga that we’re playing here—you change one thing and the whole thing could come crashing down. So, I think using the next 12 months to look at what’s going on, to get that feedback and to try and make those changes would be a good thing. But, as I say, it would be interesting to hear from the Cabinet Secretary as to what is planned.

Just to take us back to the beginning, with regard to an all-Wales enterprise zone, I would warn—and Adam Price did use this phrase—any Member against repeating the careworn phrase, ‘small businesses are the lifeblood of the economy’—it’s not only Adam and his party that have used it. This implies that owner-managers have a responsibility for economic growth, which of course they don’t. Economic growth is not their responsibility. In fact, there’s often a distinction between policy makers’ desire for small-firm job creation and the indifference of owner-managers to achieving that objective. They find alternatives to employment and, as I’ve said before, they are quite rightly reluctant employers in many cases. So, instead, we should be looking to make life as easy as possible for owner-managers, without imbuing them with the responsibility for our economic salvation. I think there’s a danger if we think, ‘Okay, we’re going to move away from inward investment to small businesses being the lifeblood of our economy.’ I think that’s a dangerous thing.

Finally, I will be spending £10 locally for Small Business Saturday—wonderful idea from the Federation of Small Business. I’ve enjoyed everybody’s videos, and I hope you’ve seen mine. This debate today is a very good way to highlight that cause.

Thank you very much. I call on the Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Infrastructure, Ken Skates.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and can I start by thanking Members for their contributions to this important debate today? As we’ve already heard from colleagues on all sides of the Chamber today, town centres are at the heart of local communities, providing places to live, shop, do business and to socialise. As Jenny Rathbone outlined, town centres and high streets bring people together in a more convivial environment than generic shopping malls. They bring soul to towns and cities.

We’ve seen evidence of the growing cultural shifts in the way people shop, where people shop and when people shop, as well as the challenging economic environment facing us all. This makes it particularly challenging for our town centres. Some solutions and interventions are in the gift of Welsh Government of course, some are dependent on wider economic factors, and some solutions rest in the hands of small businesses themselves. Initiatives such as Small Business Saturday can, indeed, help increase footfall in town centres and encourage people to shop and buy locally. This year, we will be promoting the campaign through Business Wales, although, for future years, given her demonstrable passion and commitment, I’m tempted to ask Janet Finch-Saunders to lead on its promotion.

As a Government, it is important that we deliver a wide range of advice and initiatives to support businesses in Wales. Through Vibrant and Viable Places, we’ve invested £110 million in 11 town and city areas, creating jobs, supporting people into work and leveraging in an additional £300 million of investment. Through our town centre loan scheme, £20 million is supporting job creation and economic growth, and increasing the supply of housing and improving housing quality. We’ve supported business improvement districts that have helped town centres such as Bangor, and we’ve also supported 20 town centre partnerships in Wales. As this shows, the Welsh Government recognises the importance of a vibrant and diverse high street that supports local enterprise.

Now, business rates clearly are an issue that is consistently raised. Our small business rate relief scheme supports around 70 per cent of all ratepayers in Wales, and more than half of ratepayers will pay no rates at all. Even under the new scheme in England, only a third of businesses will pay no rates. The overall rateable value in Wales is falling and, for the retail industry, it’s decreasing by 8.5 per cent, demonstrating that Wales has not fully recovered from the economic downturn.

Having assessed the impact of the 2017 revaluation, we’ve considered a range of options for supporting effective businesses and consulted on a transitional relief scheme. Consequently, our transitional relief scheme is specifically targeted at small businesses, allowing them to phase in any increase in liability over three years. Nick Ramsay and Hefin David have asked for assurance to be given to small businesses in their constituencies, and my friend and colleague the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government will provide additional support to more than 7,000 ratepayers. A new, permanent small business rate relief scheme will be introduced from 2018 onwards. We’ll consult widely with stakeholders on the design of the permanent scheme and we’ll reflect further on the responses received from our consultation on our transitional scheme. With transitional relief, with small business rate relief and other mandatory—

Andrew R.T. Davies rose—

Yes.

Thank you. I’m grateful to you for taking the intervention. This has been debated extensively in the Chamber here about the revaluation, and I take it the Valuation Office Agency is an independent body, and the Government has no influence over that. In fairness, the Government has put £10 million of its own money on the table, but do you recognise the severity that certain businesses are faced with with the revaluation? The demands that they’ll be paying from next April really pose a huge question mark over their long-term viability. Are you going to be working with the Cabinet Member for finance to see whether the transitional relief money can be extended to help some of those most disadvantaged by this revaluation?

I think it stands to reason, with £10 million available to assist small businesses, that this Government will help, wherever possible, with the challenge that some small businesses face due to revaluation. We will continue to do that and we will assess any means of assisting those businesses that are hardest hit. But revaluation is not a tax-raising measure, and I think the Member himself would recognise that it simply redistributes the rates payable between properties based on their relative values at the time of revaluation. That said, £10 million is being made available for a relief scheme, and we will look at any other way that we possibly can to assist those businesses that, as I say, are hardest hit.

Another important element of our support, of course, is enterprise zones, and that features in this debate, and a number of Members have spoken about enterprise zones and the potential to create a single enterprise zone for the whole of Wales. As Neil Hamilton identified, scale is an important consideration. The larger the scale of an enterprise zone, the greater the budgetary and deliverability implications, and the greater the risk that any added focus is diluted to the detriment of overall impact, unless there is significantly more financial resource available. Whilst existing zones are spread across Wales, the specific geographic footprint of each enterprise zone allows us to focus and target activity in a practical way. That said, I am keen to examine objectively all of our interventions as part of the work being undertaken on the prosperous and secure strategy for Wales. Of course, I will consider change wherever necessary.

Adam Price spoke about the potential development of a hallmark for Welsh products—a buy local hallmark. It’s a very interesting idea. I recall when I was a member of the enterprise committee, under the chairmanship of Nick Ramsay, I think I proposed a similar idea of a Welsh wheel that would not only capture, on food and drink products, sugar, fat, calorific content and salt, but also environmental impact, which, of course, would be heavily influenced by whether a product is derived, produced and packaged within the UK.

Simon Thomas raised the town of Narberth, which I recall was visited by the former enterprise committee. I think the only other Member in the Chamber—. Ah, David Rees was with us on that occasion as well, with Nick Ramsay. We learnt a lot on that expedition. We learnt that scale is important. The larger the town centre, the more difficult it can be to adjust to modern shopping practices. One problem we know that many high streets face is that, with bank closures and so forth, and shop closures, sometimes you can have, in a high street, a post office at one end, you can have a pharmacy at another, and you can have vacant shops in between. It doesn’t make for a desirable shopping environment. The key to Narberth’s success is that it’s contained in an area whereby there are no vacant premises, or very few vacant premises, but it’s easily accessible, and it’s easy to navigate around. I think Bethan Jenkins made the very important point that quality of place is essential to the success of a town centre and high street. Again, this is something that was very clear in the visit to Narberth.

As highlighted in the short debate a couple of weeks ago, microbusinesses and small and medium-sized enterprises are the backbone of local economies the length and breadth of this country, and they provide a vital role in creating jobs, and in increasing productivity and driving growth right across Wales. That’s why we will always ensure that the interests of small and medium-sized businesses are given due weight in the work of the national infrastructure commission and the development bank of Wales.

I’m also taking the opportunity to take a fresh look at what our economic priorities should be in this fifth Assembly term. I started the process by calling on people, businesses, trade unions and organisations across Wales to feed in their views. There is a remarkable consensus around the importance of skills, of infrastructure, and the influence of wider levers like procurement and planning. These priorities will feed into the four cross-cutting strategies that will set the framework for this term of government. I think we can all agree—and it’s been shown today by all Members’ contributions—that we have to use all tools available to us to provide support to town centres and high streets across Wales to help stimulate local economies.

Thank you. I call on Adam Price to reply to the debate. Adam.

Thank you, Dirprwy Lywydd. It’s been a wide-ranging, largely positive and, indeed, at times, a deeply passionate debate. Thank you, Janet Finch-Saunders, for injecting that note of passion. I’m not going to say it often, so, enjoy. [Laughter.] Indeed, thank you as well to Bethan Jenkins for reminding us that we can even do our bit for the Welsh economy while in our pyjamas, or whatever our choice of nightwear is. [Laughter.]

To take us down back to policy, business rates has clearly been one of the key themes because it is one of the most pressing policy issues that’s facing us at the moment. The finance Secretary is in his place, so I’m sure he will have heard, from all sides, Members referring to the problems that businesses face, particularly as a result of the revaluation, and we would urge the Government to look again at topping up the £10 million that is in the transitional relief, or maybe reintroducing, of course, the retail relief that was created in 2014, actually partly because of the delay in the revaluation, and was unfortunately cancelled before the election earlier this year. So, let’s see some additional action because of the small businesses that are facing problems at the current time. It’s great to see that the parking policy is going to be there, the pot of £3 million right across Wales. Yes, it is true that there is evidence that a simple, blanket free-parking policy—. I don’t think anyone argues that that would work. But there are data available, and there have been experiments across Wales. It is important that we do collect those data as well to see, where parking—and it will be a different pattern in different areas—is a particular problem, can we actually help in that regard. It is—

Will you give way?

Very briefly, yes.

Very briefly, can I just ask that, as part of the package that you have negotiated, how much of that is set aside for evaluation to make sure that those lessons are captured?

Well, I don’t know, but it’s a question that, jointly, we can put to the Government. Certainly, I’d be very keen that it is done on a proper data-gathering basis so that we can learn the lessons for the future as well. I think Hefin David made a good point, actually, that, obviously, the motivation of owner-managers is going to be different. Ultimately, they are there, obviously, to make a profit so that they can sustain the growth of their business. Certainly, they are not simply there as job generators. But they are, importantly, wealth generators, of course, and I agree with him that, actually, maybe we need to shift the focus of our economic development policy on to value-added rather than simply on job numbers. So, I think it is consistent with what he argued there. I think the idea of an all-Wales enterprise zone—. I’m grateful for the support of my fellow Amman Valley alumnus. I referred to the UUP-Plaid Cymru—if that is an unholy alliance, then this is probably taking us down a very, very dark route indeed. But I think the purpose of making the whole of Wales an enterprise nation, if you like, is to give us the tax levers, all of the tax levers, that, of course, can be deployed differently for different sectors, maybe, and also in different parts of Wales. But, unless we have those tax powers, of course, we won’t be able to use them to good effect as a nation. That is, ultimately, I think, the purpose. It’s very, very important for small businesses, but for businesses of all scale as well, that we, actually, as well as getting a new economic strategy, have the levers, the policy levers, that are going to enable us to deliver on that.

The proposal is to agree the motion without amendment. Does any Member object? [Objection.] Therefore, we will defer voting under this item until voting time.

Voting deferred until voting time.