Can I thank the Cabinet Secretary for the statement, and also for the advance copy of the statement that she’s just made? Quite wide-ranging—I think, if I could be critical, rather low-wattage: we need a bit more oomph in this, probably the most critical area of Government policy.

Can I just start first of all—? And there are many areas where we agree with the Government’s approach; it’s very much a matter of ensuring it’s implemented effectively. Let’s start with energy efficiency. I don’t disagree with what was said by the Cabinet Secretary, but I think there are some key things, now, where the Welsh Government has got to hold other actors to the fire and ensure they deliver their promises. The smart meters roll-out, for instance, needs to accelerate very sharply. It seems to me that Wales has just been left behind by most of the companies, and they’re doing all of England, a bit like the approach we had to electrification of the railways, which is an issue I think has come up in this Chamber before. I am very concerned that we really have so far to go on that. I know the energy companies are now making all sorts of promises about how quickly they’re going to do it, but gosh, they do need to catch up. Smart meters offer a great chance, both in terms of energy efficiency and getting lots of people out of fuel poverty, so that they can keep their homes warm at the lowest possible cost.

You’re right to look at the opportunities we have to create buildings that generate energy, rather than just consume it. I think the ambition needs to be as great as possible. So let’s produce the building regs, let’s lead the UK in this area, let’s train our workforce to be able to do this work, and then we may be attracting business from all over the UK through a highly sophisticated workforce. So, I think that’s a really important area. It’s also a marvellous area in terms of generating the local economy. It is really, really productive.

I think the private sector, in terms of energy efficiency, needs to play its part also. I understand from a Barclays survey that 50 per cent of Welsh manufacturers fear for their energy resilience—and they’re probably right to—and that they may suffer shortages caused by a lack of supply or cost in the future. Well, one of the things they can really do is to use energy more efficiently. And I think the idea of using energy efficiently is then to reduce the total amount you need, rather than being profligate in other areas. It really has to lead to more effective and lower consumption overall.

Can I turn to fossil fuels? Let’s state the obvious: carbon budgets will help, but why have we got to wait until the end of 2018 before we see the first one from the Welsh Government? That’ll be halfway through this Assembly. Those carbon budgets are supposed to help you make decisions and the legislature to scrutinise them. I really think being dilatory in this area is frankly a failure of leadership. I particularly welcome the Chancellor’s autumn statement in what he said for electric vehicles and general cleaner transport, including public transport, and also the infrastructure investment that will be made available for recharging points and other infrastructure, some of which you mentioned. I think we need some detail out of you, Cabinet Secretary, basically. Are you going to use some of the moneys that are going to come to Wales to ensure that we catch up? Because we’re considerably behind on electrical charging points, for instance. I would also like you to take a lead with the local authorities and other public transport providers—that we can do a lot to move them away from the often intense use of diesel fuel and look at other options, because it’s important that we take advantage of the great shift we’ve had to public transport use in the last 10 or 20 years; that’s very important, but we could be doing much better to deliver cleaner public transport. That’s a double win, if we do that. It could also extend to the taxi fleets, incidentally, if they were using hybrid and moving away from diesel, or even going totally to electric. So, I do hope that you will feel confident enough to give us greater leadership in that area as well.

Can I just, in passing, mention the need, I think, to reimagine our urban spaces? I was much encouraged by what some of the leading cities in Europe have just said, led, I think, by Paris, saying that we really need to look at the urban space and think what’s there that can be used differently. I know they’re setting very ambitious targets to make them diesel-free areas. But, you know, we’ve got cities full of roads and pavements, and we often talk that we need more infrastructure for cycle lanes and for pedestrian lanes. Well, we could redesignate quite a lot of what we already have, thank you very much, and that would change people’s attitudes pretty quickly and allow us to live lower carbon-intensive lives. I think this is really important in terms of the direction of travel.

On renewables, as a result of the Wales Bill we will be better placed to move forward more rapidly. I do acknowledge that the Welsh Government has not had as many levers here as it would like, and I’m pleased that we will have more. That will allow us to set much more ambitious targets. If we look at Scotland—and this isn’t a comparison to condemn the Welsh Government, because there are wider reasons why this has happened, but, anyway—Scotland is set to generate the equivalent of all its energy needs by renewable methods by the early 2020s. So, I think we need a target. It can’t be by the early 2020s, but we shouldn’t delay that target for very long, and we need to be as ambitious as possible as to when we may get there.

Just turning to the low-carbon economy, your vision is that this is a great opportunity, and that is also my hope. What was once one of the world’s most intensively carbon economies now has a chance to be part of a new way of doing things, and a new way of conducting our economic lives. A lot of this is disruptive; a lot of what is happening in the world economy is disruptive, but it does actually bring the barriers to trade down a lot as well, and relatively poorer regional economies like Wales have a chance here. But to do that—and this is not just in the energy sector, this goes across the board—we need to invest in the skills of our workforce and concentrate on skills in terms of energy. I referred to that a little earlier.

I also think the advantages—