Well, there can be no better illustration of the dead hand of Government than this decision today, and the contrast is most instructive between what’s going on an hour away from Cardiff along the M4 by James Dyson creating an international technology park, which is going to cost between £2 billion and £3 billion, and our utter failure to be able to be the handmaiden of private finance for what would otherwise have been a transformational project in Ebbw Vale—a place that, goodness knows, needs every helping hand that it can get. [Interruption.] The Member for Blaenau Gwent can make silly party-political points, but I don’t think they will impress his constituents, who are going to be the victims of his own Government’s failure of imagination today.

I notice that the Cabinet Secretary didn’t actually give an answer to Adam Price a moment ago about publication of the due diligence, and I think this is absolutely vital. In fact, I think, in the presence of the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, it’s now clearly incumbent upon us to have the most wide-ranging investigation of the way in which this dismal story has unfolded over the course of the last six years. Are we really expected to believe that the Government accounting conventions about whether something is to be classified as public expenditure or private by the ONS and the Treasury have come as a blinding revelation today or yesterday and the Cabinet was totally unaware of these conventions hitherto? Why have we not heard this point at any stage in the past couple of years since this project has become a viable possibility in political terms?

The funding structure of this project, although the numbers have changed, has been, in principle, the same since the start. We know that the Government has never been asked to put any public money in upfront; it’s always been asked for a secondary contingent guarantee of private sector senior debt, which would crystallise only in circumstances when the site had been fully developed. So, what the Government liability would have been is an annual figure to refund the senior investors if the Circuit of Wales promoters were unable to pay the interest on their bonds, starting at the earliest in 2024 and ending in 2057. So, we’re asked to believe that we have to capitalise the whole of this expenditure today when none of it is going fall due until 2024, and only then on a one thirty third basis—on a 3 per cent per annum basis—which will actually come out of the Government’s annual managed expenditure. And so quite why this needs to be capitalised at this stage and then torpedo the entire project is a matter that must be regarded as of the utmost seriousness, because here accounting conventions, rather than the substance of the project, are the dagger that the Cabinet Secretary has plunged into the heart of the project. The reason for that has not been explained, because it is a contingent guarantee that may never be called, because, if the racetrack were to be built and were able to pay the lenders less than half of the cost of construction—what they’re due under their current contracts—then the project would not be in danger at all, and nothing would ever come onto the Government’s accounts. So, I’m at a total loss to understand why this possibility—which may be called upon at some future date, but only on that limited basis—should now be regarded as one big sum that could fall due immediately, because that will never happen.

And, therefore, what I want to know is why this issue has not been addressed hitherto between the Welsh Government and the Treasury or the Office for National Statistics, and why it is that the people of Ebbw Vale, most of all, have been led up the garden path until this side of a general election,