I’m grateful for the opportunity to take part in this debate. I just want to make a brief contribution, because lots of points have already been made about the banking sector and the need to better serve its customers. There are three banks that are currently threatened with closure in my own constituency at the moment, two of them in a single town in Abergele, which also saw a bank close just a couple of years ago in the NatWest. Now it’s the HSBC that have announced that they’re intending to close a branch, and the Yorkshire Building Society. So, it’s obviously not just about profits if a building society is planning to close. But I have, on behalf of my constituents, obviously, met with the organisations concerned and expressed my very strong objections to their plans.

What really concerns me is that those particular banking organisations didn’t appear to have let their staff know before the announcement was made to the media and in the public domain, which I think is a great disservice to the hardworking members of staff in those particular branches. In terms of the HSBC, they’re going to leave a huge vacant building on the high street in a very prominent location, which was actually the old Abergele Urban District Council building, and I think it’s incumbent upon them to ensure that they look at potential alternative uses for that particular building and work with the community, if they are going to close the branch, to ensure that that building is put to good use and for a community use in a way that it is still a civic asset, as it were.

In addition, the Yorkshire Building Society have told me that the footfall in their branch has diminished significantly in recent years. They did only three mortgages over the last 12 months, so I think it’s also incumbent upon customers of the banks to make use of these resources when they are available on the high streets, because, frankly, I can understand the point of that particular branch saying it’s just not viable for us to be able to have a presence here in the town in the way that we traditionally have. Now, in fairness to the Yorkshire Building Society, they are looking at the opportunities to develop an agency sort of counter service with local solicitors or in another appropriate place in the town, and I think that that is something that we ought to encourage more of, even in places where there is no branch at the moment, from a bank that might be able to develop a presence in a town or location.

Llyr Huws Gruffydd mentioned the NatWest bank in Ruthin, which is in a very prominent and very historic building in the town—one of the finest timber-frame buildings, I would say, in the country. The Cabinet Secretary will know that I’ve written to him asking whether Cadw, or somebody else, might be able to step in in order to safeguard the future of that building. I think it is important that—. It’s had a long history of public service as a building, whether as a bank, as a courthouse with the gallows outside, or in other ways, and I think that to vacate some of these places with relatively short notice is very irresponsible of the banks involved. Now, in fairness to NatWest, they’re trying, again, to maintain a sort of presence in the community through offering other mobile services, but frankly, it’s not the same, and they really are letting their customers down.

So, I think, Cabinet Secretary, what I’m really looking for when you’re responding to this debate is not just sympathy. It’s not just to say that you’ve made representations to the UK Government either, but it’s to see what we can do creatively in Wales in order to expand the presence of banking services across the country so that people can have them in an accessible way. We’ve heard a lot about the way that the post offices are picking up, if you like, a lot of the mess that the banks are leaving behind when they exit some of our communities, and that’s great—it’s good business, no doubt, in terms of transactional business for those post offices. But they are a different beast, post offices. Some people want to share things privately in a bank in a way that they can’t necessarily do in a post office location at a counter that’s full of people waiting to collect their pensions or whatever else they might be in the post office to do.

So, I think some sort of approach here where there could be a national people’s bank is a good way forward. If that can deliver some profits back to the taxpayer here in Wales, then I think that’s another huge benefit that we could possibly derive. I think that when we’re talking about the sort of investment that could be coming down the pipeline in terms of capital investment projects as a result of some of the dividend from the last autumn statement, then there’s a slab of cash there that might usefully be used in order to act as capital for a bank to lend in order to make a return for the taxpayer. I wonder whether you could just comment a little bit about how that might develop, whether that might be a partnership with other banks or whether it might be a stand-alone thing that the Government itself takes forward. Thank you.