Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:42 pm on 30 November 2016.
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—