We do want to ensure that we have a number of different tools available to us to stimulate economic activity and to create work and to create jobs, and, as I said in answer to an earlier question, to create not just jobs but careers in the Valleys. We’ve outlined an approach, which is to ensure that we use not only the metro, but other travel routes as well, as spines, if you like, within the Valleys, and to ensure that we have locations along those different transport links where we can focus in on individual sites and individual places, and to create strategic hubs that can lead, in themselves, to the potential for growth and for jobs to be created in those locations in the Valleys region.

At the same time, we will be continuing to invest in the foundational economy and in local economies to ensure that we do have investment in local entrepreneurs, local businesses, local jobs and local companies. So, we will be using tools such as those in order to stimulate and create economic activity within the Valleys. Our objective is to close the gap between the Valleys and the rest of Wales over the coming years, and we will put forward a plan and a timescale as to how we see that happening.

In terms of the landscape park, this is what I believe to be a really exciting opportunity for us to appreciate and value the Valleys in a way that perhaps we haven’t always done in the past. I want it to be a regional park concept that will stretch from the British in my friend’s constituency in Torfaen across to the west and to Carmarthenshire in the west—somewhere where we can appreciate and value all the different landscapes and places within the Valleys. I spent time with my colleague, Dai Rees, at different times in the Afan valley. I know there are plans to maximise the value of that landscape there, but I also know from my own personal experience of living in the Valleys that we do want to get up on the tops in the commons to explore and to understand the history, and not just the history of industrialisation, but the history before industrialisation that we have in the Valleys and the heritage that we have available to us, and to not only ensure that we have a tourism offer, if you like, for people from elsewhere, but also for ourselves, and we can value and appreciate the places in which we live, and learn again the history of industrialisation in the Valleys.

I spent some time as a young man, and even today, up in Trefil, the quarries there—the limestone quarries above Tredegar—and also then following the tramway down Brinore into Talybont and elsewhere: the linkages that were created before we had the M4s and the railways of this world. So, I hope that we would be able to do that. I hope that that would be an exciting and transformational project and one that will not simply transform the Valleys, but the lives of people who live there.