Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:45 pm on 21 March 2017.
I think that’s a really interesting idea. So, there’s nothing to stop collections of small businesses, community interest groups—it’s not closed in any way, so anyone can apply for it. I’m more than happy to explore the idea of assisting collections of businesses to apply as well; although we haven’t done that yet, it’s a good idea well worth taking forward. There’s nothing to prevent it, but nor have we encouraged it so far, but I’d be happy to look at that. There are probably some legal bits to get over, like you’d have to have a lead contract entity and so on, but I’m sure we could smooth out some of the difficulties around that, and I’m very interested in the communities of practice idea, the clustering arrangement, and generating more solutions to the challenge out of that clustering and, sort of, communities of practice-type arrangement.
What we could do is we could look to see if we can involve public or communal assets, which would be particularly suited to that kind of thing. So, just off the top of my head, if we were looking at more community-based projects—footpath preservations, and opening up the countryside, access, that sort of stuff—we might encourage solutions to some of the challenges we have in Wales to get our communities more connected to their landscape, and get groups of small SMEs, community-interest companies, involved and engaged in that. So, it’s certainly something well worth looking at. And as I said to Darren Millar, this scheme is particularly beneficial for early stage small or medium-sized enterprises because we’re happy to help them commercialise their idea and to help them develop it. So, it’s specifically good for small companies in that way. We’re also happy for them to retain all of the intellectual property rights and so on, because it’s their solution to our problem, so you could get some good communities of practice and some social capital developing out of some of the IP and so on. So, I think it’s an excellent idea worth exploring, and we’ll certainly take it up in the next round.