I very much welcome this update from the Cabinet Secretary and the advance copy of his statement. It’s 30 years since Wales lost its only independent banking institution at the time, the Commercial Bank of Wales, and I think we’ve suffered as a result of that glaring gap in our institutional architecture as an economy. I think the question that has to be posed now is: are we going to grasp this opportunity fully, because we’ve been here before? Finance Wales itself, of course, was created in 2000 as a quasi-bank and, as it turned out, it was more quasi than a bank. And we’ve seen other efforts, haven’t we: the Green Investment Bank, the British Business Bank, the Scottish Investment Bank, which is effectively a publicly capitalised fund run by Scottish Enterprise, not a true bank in the colloquial or the technical sense that we understand it.

So I think that’s the standard that we have to hold this new institution to, and it’s in that regard, really, that I’d like to have a sense from the Cabinet Secretary of what his ambition is, how high his ambitions are for this bank, and what breadth and scope he sees for it developing the kind of innovation that he’s referred to in the years ahead. Will it be involved in things like the loan guarantees that are being offered through the Scottish growth fund, export guarantees, which are crucially important as we enter these choppy post-Brexit waters? He’s talked about leverage. Of course, one of the best forms of leverage that any bank will know is, of course, fractional reserve banking, becoming a deposit-taking institution, whether those are deposits as in some public banks, which are actually from the public sector—we’ll be having our own tax receipts soon, what could we do with those, used judiciously—or it becomes a deposit-taking institution from its business clients. So, is there the ability for this bank to develop in that direction?

And there are a few things, of course, that maybe the access to finance review suggested that the bank shouldn’t do and it appears it may well still go ahead and do: the reference to actually running funds, managing funds, in England. Does that actually lead to it losing its focus on its principal public policy goal? Can the Cabinet Secretary confirm that there are plans by Finance Wales and therefore, presumably, the development bank, to run five or six funds in England? Venture capital funds, as well, was another area where the access to finance review suggested that, actually, as with the life sciences fund, that would be better outsourced to specialist venture capital funds rather than done in-house by Finance Wales. Is that the model that will be developed by the development bank? Finally, so that we can have these necessary debates in greater detail than we are able to do now, could we please see a copy of the business plan, so that we can have proper scrutiny on these and many other issues?

Just finally finally, I welcome the fact that this important new national institution is not going to be based here in Cardiff but actually in north Wales. Plaid Cymru has previously referred to Wrexham as the financial capital of Wales. I’m sure he’d agree with that. But can we just have some numbers as well in terms of the number of people who will be based in the headquarters? And is this—. As we’re talking about new institutions—the Welsh revenue authority, why not put that in north Wales as well, and actually build up, both on the commercial funding side, but also on the fiscal side, some real expertise and build up a regional capital for Wales in the north?