Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:46 pm on 26 September 2017.
Well, there are of course no firm offers to take space in the area that the First Minister is talking about. My colleagues and I had the advantage on Friday of visiting St Athan and seeing what’s happening at the Aston Martin construction that’s going on there, which is a Welsh Government success story—I fully acknowledge that and congratulate the First Minister. But, of course, St Athan is a very different kettle of fish from Ebbw Vale in terms of its potential attractiveness to investors, without improving the infrastructure still further in the northern Valleys. The whole point of the Circuit of Wales project and the job spin-offs that would come from it is not so much the racetrack itself, but the way in which the circuit would have put it on the map, in a sense, and would have attracted further automotive businesses around it. Given that, as a result of the collapse of that offer, the Welsh Government is trying now to fill a vacuum, I really can’t see why he has turned down the offer of hundreds of millions of pounds of private investment where the Government’s only liability was highly contingent on the total failure of the project, and the assets that would have been created fetching nothing.