Llywydd, once in every generation a specific case comes to light that points to a deeper and more difficult truth about a governing party, often—particularly—when that party has been in power for many years. I’m thinking of the beef tribunal, for example, in Fianna Fáil-led Ireland in the early 1990s, the Scott inquiry in the Conservative Government, and probably too many examples to mention about the Blair Government. But you get the point. I think that the Circuit of Wales is a case in point. Something has gone desperately wrong here. We can’t for certain say what that is yet, but we know that it’s our responsibility to ask that question and get to the truth, and that is at the heart of amendment 3.

I’d just like to speak briefly, though, to begin with, to amendment 2, which is far more straightforward, really, which is simply asking the Government—. Given the fact that probably almost £10 million now has been expended by the Government on this project, surely it would be worth our while, in respect to the taxpayer and the investment in this project, to try and get everyone around the table to see if some of the technical issues that the Cabinet Secretary referred to in his statement on 27 June could be solved.

Now, he may say, ‘Well, look, we’ve got the technology park out of it’. I have to say, though, the idea that actually just building industrial estates is the answer to our economic problems—you know, it beggars belief. Because, if that were true, we wouldn’t have any economic problems in Wales. In economic development, it’s called the field-of-dreams strategy, after the Kevin Costner film about an Iowa farmer trying to create and building a baseball field in an Iowa cornfield—’Build it, and they will come’. They don’t. The whole point about clusters is you have to have a magnet. Read your Michael Porter. The Welsh Government, I think, paid him £250,000 for a cluster strategy in 2002; I got him for free when I studied with him in Harvard Business School. And what he would tell you is, ‘Look, clusters cannot be conjured out of thin air’. The whole point about the Circuit of Wales is that it created an open-air laboratory, a test rink, that would be the magnet, potentially. You can take your view on whether that’s right or wrong, and some Members are sceptical. But, certainly, without it, it doesn’t work. So, surely, the Welsh Government should get around the table to see if these problems can be resolved.

Let’s turn to the calls for an independent inquiry, which both the Conservative party, UKIP, and my own party, have made. There have been a series of misleading statements by the Government—the full range from obfuscation through to statements that are plain untrue, the Government would have known were untrue, and we have 19 words in ‘Roget’s Thesaurus’ to describe that, most of which are unparliamentary, so I won’t test the patience of the Chair. But I’ll go through some of the examples. We might have heard one earlier, by the way. We were told that ONS couldn’t give a definitive statement in terms of balance sheet. We now know, of course, that the Welsh Government themselves had asked for a provisional ruling in relation to its own project at Velindre, but an answer there came not from the Cabinet Secretary as to whether you’d followed that same process to get a provisional ruling in terms of the Circuit of Wales.

The impression was created last week, in terms of the automotive technology park, that TVR and Aston Martin were on board with the technology park without the Circuit of Wales. And yet the record will show, Cabinet Secretary, that they did not know about this until you got up on your feet. That’s what I think the record will show.

Now, I asked the question because what we’ve seen throughout this process is the Government shifting the goalposts and then covering the tracks. I asked whose proposal it was to come up with an 80 per cent guarantee—that was the second proposal that was rejected. I was told by the Government that it was the company that suggested this, in a document dated 15 April 2016. I was then sent a letter by Monmouthshire County Council that actually proved it was the Government. Mick McGuire writing to Michael Carrick on 7 April, before that date, suggesting, and I quote, ‘I’ve spoken to the First Minister’s private office, and they’ve confirmed that he’s happy for officials to advance with the Circuit of Wales and Aviva on a viable alternative business plan B that achieves a fairer sharing of risk. To achieve these objectives, the areas that you need to consider include the guarantee to Aviva should be 80 per cent or less’.

And, most seriously of all, of course, is the statement made by the First Minister during the election campaign, when he gives the reason for the rejection of the first proposal as this: ‘What happened originally was we were looking for a guarantee of £30 million. It went to £357 million.’ When asked when that occurred, he said ‘in the last few days’ and he repeated that in an interview with ‘The Western Mail’ a few days later. And yet we now know, because we have a letter from Aviva, which says this, Llywydd:

the manner in which the deal was rejected did not reflect well on Aviva Investors. Especially as it quoted that we requested a 100% underwrite a few days before the rejection, when in fact this deal had been worked up with the Welsh Government (through civil servants) for many months and nothing in our funding structure changed in the run up to this announcement.’

Now, if what Aviva is telling us is true, then we have been misled in the most serious manner possible. That is why we need an independent inquiry.