The point is that, for all the delays, and the so-called ‘due diligence’ that has been undertaken by the Welsh Government, the auditor general made no disparaging remark about the private sector project itself, but made lots of disparaging remarks about the capacity of civil servants and advisers of the Cabinet Secretary to reach a decision on what is a minute portion of the total amount of money that will ultimately be spent if this project goes ahead. Yes, of course, we must do due diligence, but the limitations on the risks to the public that are evident in this project are out of all proportion to the proposed benefits that are likely to arise. After all, all that the Government is being asked to do is to provide a secondary contingent guarantee of a portion of the private sector funding—there’s no public money going into the project—which will only kick in when the assets are actually created. So, the contingent liability, which is less than 50 per cent, will be secured on 100 per cent of the assets, and it will only be a maximum of £8.5 million a year that the Welsh Government would be on the hook for, because it would guarantee the annual payments that are due to Aviva, the principal funder of the scheme, over a period of 20 years, so that although, technically, if the project fails completely, never makes any money and none of the assets can ever be sold, there is a potential loss of £8.5 million for 20-odd years, that, in the scale of the resources available to the Welsh Government, is nothing.

If this project were to go ahead and be successful, on the back of the transport infrastructure improvements that Rhianon Passmore introduced into the debate in her intervention earlier on, and many other good things that are happening as well, like the improvement to the Heads of the Valleys road, and, we hope, electrification of railway lines as well, then this would be the real catalyst of beneficial change to those northern Valleys communities who, throughout my lifetime, have been the Cinderella of the United Kingdom.