Part of 3. 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:24 pm on 28 June 2017.
I think that we should be left in little doubt that the supermarket sector is really a dog-eat-dog, cut-throat-competition business, and I’m afraid, like any unfettered market, it eventually leads to monopoly. I suppose I don’t want to live in some sort of dystopian future where we all have to buy our food from one supermarket. So, there are some concerns here about the way in which the supermarket industry dominates the UK food market and what we can do to regulate it so that they behave a bit better than Tesco has behaved in this case.
What Julie Morgan and Hefin David and I want—and others who have constituents who are affected by this—is to have some sort of clear strategy for the future to ensure that they aren’t being pushed into other jobs that are then going to be eliminated in turn. It seems to me that automation is one of the issues that makes it very challenging for people in the service sector, where people are going to have to be prepared to retrain and change in line with new technologies. So, I wondered if you could say a little bit more on how your thoughts on developing your new economic strategy could be influenced by what has happened in the case of Tesco.