I’m glad to rise in this important debate brought by our fellow Assembly Members. All of us here today know how dramatically our lives are changing. Indeed, nobody would bat an eye if I said I’d visited a supermarket this morning and paid for my goods at the self-service counter, and nobody would bat an eye if I said that I’d taken a train to Cardiff, my journey controlled by one signaller sat at a computer terminal at my destination city. Equally, if I said that when I got to my office in the workplace, I did online banking at the click of a button. Yet, these three simple acts, barely believable when the National Assembly for Wales was created in 1999, illustrate both the challenges and the opportunities to Wales’s economy.

Today, life becomes easier for the consumer, but what about the individual who used to be employed at the supermarket, the signaller and their family, and the bank staff who used to work in banks up and down our high streets? Too often, we can read statistics without comprehending the meaning, and I note in this motion under bullet point 2, and I quote, an estimated 700,000 jobs are at risk in Wales over the next two decades as a result of automation.’

A single job lost can devastate an individual, endanger a family and is corrosive to a community and a society. Never have I quoted the former Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, but I was struck by a ‘Newsnight’ report that he recently undertook after visiting Ebbw Vale, and its sentiment. He said, ‘So, having spent some time in Ebbw Vale, I’m much clearer in my own mind about why people voted for Brexit in large numbers, particularly older voters, because how much money was spent by the European Union on that shiny building or that project? All of that paled in significance to the feeling, the longing for a return to past certainties, when the steelworks were open, when everyone had jobs, where people had money in their pockets. And when people had an opportunity to rattle the cage and say, “We want that back”, it wasn’t so much that they are left behind; it was their feeling about what they had left behind.’ And that’s an interesting concept.

Now, the fourth industrial revolution will challenge all our certainties and will require Government invention and intervention, and from us as a Welsh Labour Government because we know other parties in this Chamber will allow the market to take its course, irrespective of the human cost. We all saw in Wales last year the difference an activist Welsh Labour Government can make. Whilst the UK Tory Government did not act to block the dumping of state-subsidised Chinese steel when they could have done, the Welsh steel industry was put at risk, it was put at harm and it was put in jeopardy. We need to seize the moment and match or exceed the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development levels of investment in research and development to ensure Wales is at the forefront of future growth in industry.

So, I support the proposal that we need to revisit the ‘Innovation Wales’ strategy, and continually challenge ourselves to do all we can to ensure Wales is ready to embrace the fourth industrial revolution. Diolch.