Part of 2. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:53 pm on 4 July 2017.
I fully understand that point and that, of course, was included in the original statement. But the idea that, for a project that would be funded privately to the tune of £375 million, a guarantee on the part of the Welsh Government that would cover less than half of that could be put on the Welsh Government’s books as entirely a public sector project is self-evidently ridiculous. And therefore, there must be a way through this. The Welsh Government guarantee would never be called upon upfront in any event under the terms of the deal, because it’s an annual amount that the Government would be obliged to pay. The worst-case scenario is that the assets were built and that the racetrack itself never made a penny of profit so as to pay the interest to the investors—Aviva in this particular instance. Then, the Government would be called upon on annual basis to pay that element of the guarantee to them. You will never be called upon to provide £210 million in a single lump sum, and the £8 million worst-case guarantee is amortised over a period of 35 years. It’s absolutely preposterous that these Government accounting conventions should be used to frustrate a project that would utterly transform the whole of south-east Wales. Surely the Welsh Government ought to exert itself and strain every sinew to try and find a way through.