8. Will the Minister outline what the Welsh Government is doing to regenerate communities in Pembrokeshire? OAQ(5)0075(CC)

I thank the Member for his question. The regeneration priorities for Pembrokeshire are to support town centres and to help sustain resilient communities. This is being delivered through support from the town-centre loan fund and the town-centre partnership initiative.

Cabinet Secretary, you’ll no doubt be aware of the planned closure of Lloyds bank branches throughout Wales and that the number of planned closures in Pembrokeshire is wholly disproportionate to the number of nationwide closures, given that three of the 49 planned branch closures happen to actually be in my own constituency. Deputy Presiding Officer, I should declare an interest as a former employee of Lloyds Bank. Given that these banks are a lifeline for many people and that their closure will have a huge impact on those communities, can you tell us what the Welsh Government is doing to help to mitigate against the negative effects of these closures on communities in Pembrokeshire, and what specific regeneration assistance will actually be available to support those affected communities?

Of course, I recognise the impact that bank closures can have on constituencies, and other Members have raised that too. It seems to have all gone downhill since the Member left, perhaps, in terms of his former role. Specifically in Pembrokeshire, we are supporting Pembrokeshire County Council with £1.25 million through the Vibrant and Viable Places town-centre loans scheme to reduce the number of vacant, underutilised and redundant sites and premises in the town centres of Pembroke, Milford Haven and Haverfordwest. We do have to work in partnership to make sure that we get this off the ground here. It’s really hard to turn communities around—once these properties become empty, getting them re-floated is a difficult one. So, I and Ken Skates are working across both parts of the departments to make sure that we can make investments not only in Pembrokeshire, but across Wales.

Minister, there can be unforeseen consequences to regeneration on occasion. Improvements to the road infrastructure, for example, in Fishguard means that Transition Bro Gwaun, which is a community regeneration project, is losing its home, which is used to have a surplus food cafe, involving many local people and also doing a very good environmental job. They also do a wider regeneration job in that they have a community turbine part-owned by the local community. Obviously, this is a decision, I accept, for Pembrokeshire County Council, and I’ll be contacting them directly, but I think a clear direction from Welsh Government that there should be an integrated approach to ensure that we don’t lose things when we do regeneration activities would be useful in this context.

This is the whole purpose of the well-being Act. The well-being of a community is based upon looking at what the community needs, what the community has and what we can develop with them. Again, I’m not familiar with the very specific question the Member raises, but it seems to me that this could have been planned through in the first place. I would urge the Member to take it up with the local authority.