As a Member of this National Assembly, and being frequently on the receiving end of Government strategy documents—and they do come thick and fast—you’re often oscillating between a state of confusion and a state of despair. I have to say, having speed-read this document this afternoon, I feel a mixture of both. Confusion because I think I was under the misapprehension that this was going to be the date of the publication of the new economic strategy. I’m not the only one, because I notice Lee Waters tweeted yesterday:

‘Ahead of tomorrow's launch of a new WG economic strategy I've set out some thoughts in today's Western Mail’, and a very good article it was, too. And here we come to the despair, because there were better, more interesting, more original ideas in that single-page article than there are in this document.

What, actually, we’ve got here—. Remember that we were—[Interruption.] And if I was there, I’m sure the same would be true of Hefin David’s business briefing next week. ‘Ahead of the publication of the Welsh Government economic strategy’—you need to improve your internal communication at the very least.

What we’ve got, actually, is a kind of beefed-up version of ‘Taking Wales Forward’, published last year. It’s kind of ‘Taking Wales Forward’ on steroids, really, isn’t it? It’s gone up from 15 pages to 27, so nobody can accuse the Welsh Government of not making progress. That’s a 100 per cent increase in Welsh Government productivity.

We had four cross-cutting strategies. Now we have—what is it—five cross-cutting priorities, and four key themes and three action plans. You certainly can’t accuse them of not being comprehensive.

I don’t have the time to go after all of those, but I’d like to concentrate on one, and, seeing as we have been celebrating 20 years since 1997 and devolution, let’s concentrate on the economic, because that was meant to be the big advance, the devolution dividend. As has already been referred to, really, of course the progress there has been limited. Looking at the 18 bullet points—that’s all it is, if you’re looking for the contours of the new economic strategy, 18 bullet points across two pages—I’m trying to understand, therefore, what that tells us about the content of the new economic strategy. Maybe the First Minister will be able to help me. The first question is: is there a real acceptance of the scale of the challenge? I think there is on the backbench on the governing side. I’m not sure there is on the frontbench. Because, as was already referred to, in 1997, where were we? Seventy-four point one per cent of GVA per capita. Where are we now in the latest figures? Seventy one per cent. We’ve gone backwards. We were seventh overall, by the way, in terms of the 12 standard UK economic regions. Even on the Welsh Government’s favourite economic indicator, which is gross disposable household income per head, we’ve also gone backwards—87.8 per cent to 85.3 per cent. So, is there an acceptance of the scale of the challenge? The First Minister, in his remarks earlier this afternoon, said that in the 1990s we were a country that young people wanted to leave. Well, actually, we saw a report over the summer from the Resolution Foundation showing that Wales has a brain drain. More graduates lost to Wales between 2016—a net loss of over 20,000 graduates during that period. We’re tenth of the 12 UK standard regions in terms of the extent of graduate loss.

Secondly, are there going to be targets? We’ve had appallingly poor progress. How can we actually measure whether we’re going to have a better record of delivery in the future? Because, as Chris Kelsey said, there are few details and few specific targets in this strategy. And where is the desire, the appetite—which I do sense, to be fair, on the Labour back benches—for radical change in terms of strategy? We’ve basically followed the same strategy for 40, 50 years, which is, essentially, reliant on foreign direct investment. That’s it. We’ve ploughed that furrow. And where has it got us? Where is the appetite in these 18 bullet points for accepting that that strategy will not serve us well in the future, therefore we need radical new ideas?

Finally, on the last day of term, the Cabinet Secretary said that you were going to publish this cross-cutting strategy and then there would be an extensive stakeholder engagement programme. I think that’s jargon for ‘talking to people’. Well, I did a little bit of talking over the weekend, because I wanted to know what was going to be in this economic strategy that didn’t appear, and I spoke to some leading business people that I know and will be known to many people here; I spoke to some leading Welsh economists. Not one of them knew what was going to be in the economic strategy or in the bullet points because nobody from the Welsh Government had spoken to them. So, on what basis have you come up with these 18 bullet points? Who have you spoken to? Because I fear that what we’ll get when we finally see the economic action plan is, once again, an empty vessel with no substance.