Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:19 pm on 5 July 2017.
Diolch, Llywydd. Can I thank everybody for taking part in this important debate? It was tabled because we believe that there needs to be a renewed focus on regeneration here in Wales, and that we need to get some of those impoverished communities, in all of our constituencies, back on their feet and up and running. I think we have to acknowledge that there have been some epic failures by the Welsh Government over the past 20 years. We’ve seen the Communities First programme utterly fail to deliver, as Mohammad Asghar and Mark Isherwood quite rightly pointed out: £0.5 billion-worth of expenditure and the same level of poverty in those communities today as there was—[Interruption.] We won’t be taking any interventions from you, no, not at all.
In addition to that, we saw the scandal of a land bank, of some of the jewels in the crown in terms of a land bank, sold off on the cheap during the last Assembly term by the regeneration investment fund for Wales at a loss, potentially—we don’t know quite what it is—of at least tens of millions of pounds to the Welsh taxpayer: money that could have, and should have, been invested into regeneration projects. And just now we have seen the situation emerge with the Circuit of Wales project where, for seven years, a company has been strung along by the Welsh Government, who’ve given the impression that they’re doing everything they can to support it, and then they’ve pulled the plug just before things were able to be signed on the dotted line, and I think that those—[Interruption.] And I think that those—.