It’s a pleasure to follow the Member for Llanelli and I congratulate him and his colleagues for securing this important opportunity to create some space for new thinking, for the reasons that he has eloquently outlined—we certainly need them, don’t we? I think Karel Williams has said that there’s a word in Welsh for actually repeating the same mistake over and over again, it’s called ‘twp’. And we simply will replicate the failures of the past unless we’re prepared to experiment in the radical way that the Member has suggested.

We should not, of course, shy away from the fact that what the foundational economy and, indeed, other sets of related ideas—the work of Mark Lang on deep place, and Dave Adamson on the distributed economy—represent together, I think, a coherent critique and alternative to the economic policy paradigm that has prevailed over many a generation, which essentially is almost the mirror opposite, indeed, of what has been served up to us as conventional thinking. So, whereas the foundational economy has two core elements, really, which is sheltered markets—local sheltered markets—and grounded firms, we have been focusing on global markets and foreign-owned firms, with little appreciable long-term economic benefit. And so, I think it’s time to turn the world the right way up as far as the Welsh economy is concerned.

It’s going to take, I think, a huge concerted effort, which will take some years and probably efforts across party, I think, to defeat the prevailing paradigm. It is so deeply embedded in our thinking—look at the apprenticeship levy: we actually take the retail sector out of the apprenticeship levy, whereas, actually, in terms of the long-term benefit of employees in that sector in communities, looking at driving up the skills base in a sector that has been bedevilled by low-skill, low-wage labour, you know, is the way that we should be going. So, we need unconventional approaches. I do hope the Welsh Government will create a national innovation body. But that national innovation body, to drive up innovation—in all sectors, in all areas—should not be captured by the old, narrow science and technology global-market-facing version of innovation, because innovation needs to be there at the heart of our foundational economy as well.

So, there are very, very significant challenges, but that is no reason for us to shy away from the opportunity. We will have a new economic strategy unveiled, I believe, in the next few months, over the spring period. Now is the time for the Cabinet Secretary to be bold. The answers of the past have failed us.

One of the themes that Karel Williams and his team have referred to and talked about is the missing middle strand. And one of the problems that many of our successful medium-sized companies have faced, time after time—Rachel’s Dairy, Avana Bakeries, I suppose, is another example of it—is that, when we create success from within our grounded firms and we create successful medium-sized businesses, of course, they reach a point, often due to succession planning, where people want to exit, and yet, of course, we have no means at our disposal, at the moment, of keeping that ownership, keeping that grounded firm grounded, and we all know the results of that.

The policy challenge, to go from the meta to the very specific. The development bank that we are creating, will it be based upon the ideas in terms of finance that are being promoted by Karel Williams and his team? Not the venture capital model, not actually getting people to cash out, but actually creating long-term finance. As I referred previously, La Caixa, the charitably owned bank in Catalonia, which actually takes long-term stakes in businesses that are deeply rooted within their economy, has the double benefit, not just of developing and generating a dividend for the charity that owns the bank, but also making sure that those successful companies stay successful for generations to come.