Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:27 pm on 14 February 2017.
Cabinet Secretary, thank you for your earlier answer. Can I firstly welcome the Welsh Government’s commitment to providing a full response to the committee’s report on the Kancoat situation? As you said, your response to the report will be considered in full by the committee, so I don’t want to prejudge that stage of the process, or indeed be repetitive with questioning. I’m pleased to hear that you’ve already said that, in principle, you are prepared to accept a number of the recommendations of that report, and I think you also said that you’ve already taken steps to see that those are put in place, and that’s a really positive step, so thank you for that.
Can I ask you, on a broader issue, do you welcome the intention of the Auditor General for Wales to undertake a broader value-for-money examination of the Welsh Government’s approach to business finance, and will you and your officials co-operate with this examination later this year? It’s obviously, if it goes ahead in the format that the auditor general is considering, going to be a very large piece of work, but I think it will be a useful one, both for the Government and also the public to have confidence that procedures are in place to make sure that the sorts of problems with due diligence, and the rest that we’ve seen with Kancoat, don’t happen again. Can I just say, Cabinet Secretary, that the committee does recognise how vital Welsh Government funding is for business in ensuring the future prosperity of Wales—a point made by Russell George in his opening question—and we want to ensure that it’s administered to best effect? We welcome the planned work in ensuring that taxpayers’ money is well spent in the interests of efficiency, value for money, and with wider economic benefits, and I look forward to your response to the committee, and I’m sure that we can move this situation forward.