Thank you, Presiding Officer. I also want to thank the Plaid Cymru representative for introducing this important debate today. I move the amendments that have been tabled in the name of my colleague Paul Davies on behalf of the Welsh Conservative group.

I think everybody in this Chamber agrees that the higher education sector is of enormous importance to Wales. We know that our universities, as has already been said, are major employers and that they have a significant contribution, which they make on an annual basis, to our economy. They also, of course, do contribute to the success of Welsh exports and those earnings have been growing in recent years. Of course, there’s the employment that they offer to those who are directly employed to them, and of course, those who, through the trickle-down economics, are employed in jobs as a direct result of having universities in their local communities. There’s no doubt in my mind that, because of the increasing global nature of markets and the increasing global nature of our economy here in the UK, we will need to be a country here in Wales with a very highly skilled workforce, and those universities help to deliver just that and many of them have very good and close working relationships with employers to meet their needs.

I think it’s worth reminding ourselves today that it’s not just universities that are delivering higher education. Many further education colleges now across Wales have an increasing proportion of their income down to delivering what traditionally would’ve been delivered in the university sector. I think, at the latest count, around 8 per cent of the income of further education colleges in Wales is actually higher education related. In fact, that percentage is as high as 20 per cent in some of our further education colleges.

So, let’s not forget that that is the context that we’re talking about. Now, I have to say, in point 4 today we’ve tabled a significant amendment that changes the nature of many of the points that have been made. The reason that we’ve done that is because we understand that there is a need to maximise and replace those sources of income, in terms of the research income, for our Welsh university sector in the future if, as a result of Brexit, we no longer have access to funds like Horizon 2020.

Now, Horizon 2020 is a significant source of research funding—it accounts for around 20 per cent of research funding at the moment here in Wales—but it’s not the only source of research funding. Eighty per cent is coming from elsewhere. We also know that there are risks in the future to the proportion of the European research funds that we currently receive—not just because of Brexit, even if we are part of Horizon 2020 post Brexit—and that may well be the case, depending on the negotiations and discussions that take place—then we know that there are hints from the European Union that the focus of Horizon 2020 research funding will be on promoting and developing quality research culture in parts of the EU and those other participating countries that don’t currently have high-quality research. So, we will probably be losing out in terms of our share of that cash in the future. So we don’t know what those changes are going to be yet and it’s difficult to speculate. [Interruption.] Yes, I haven’t got a lot of time, though.