Diolch yn fawr, Dirprwy Lywydd. Thank you to all those who have taken part in what’s been a really interesting discussion of a very important report. So, thank you to the committee for putting the time and the effort into making what I think is a constructive and significant contribution to this very important area of public policy. Dirprwy Lywydd, there are only three things, really, that are at stake in trying to devise a future regional policy here in Wales. We’ve heard them all during the discussion: we need the money, we need the autonomy, and then we need to have the creativity to be able to design a set of policy proposals that meet the challenges of the future. So, I’m going to say something briefly about the first two and then focus a little more on the third.

As far as the money is concerned, well, David Rees in introducing the report made that point on behalf of the whole of the committee that the UK Government must live up to the commitments made during the referendum that Wales will not be a penny worse off as a result of the decision to leave the European Union. I repeat the positive welcome that the Welsh Government gave to the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s early decisions on the funding of European Union obligations in this area, but the time has come to move beyond those original guarantees to making sure that Wales has, in the long term, the resources that we will need to put our policy proposals into practice.

That takes me to autonomy, and that’s a point that was made very directly by Steffan Lewis, but taken up by Eluned Morgan as well, because a shared prosperity fund—if we are not careful—is a Trojan horse for a further rollback in the devolved powers of this institution, above and beyond those we are already struggling with through the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill. Have we had any discussions with UK Ministers? Not that I am aware of. I see this fund in headlines. As far as I’m aware, the Welsh Government has had no discussion with the UK Government as to what it means by such a fund.

How might such a fund be devised? Well, all too easily in a way that would cut against Welsh interests. What if, as Eluned said, unemployment was to be a basic criteria for access to the fund? What if reductions in economic inactivity, where Wales has outstripped the rest of the United Kingdom altogether, was to be a criteria for access to such a fund? Wales has benefited enormously from European funding and we know that there are other parts of the United Kingdom that look jealously at that and see this as an opportunity to share in some of the resource that has come to Wales because our needs are greatest. It’s really important to put on record again, Dirprwy Lywydd, that the money we get through the European Union—I know that sometimes, in a way, people find it a sclerotic and complex rulebook, but it’s the only money we get where there is a rulebook, where the reason we qualify is because there are criteria laid down and we benefit from it, and where there are disputes there is a rulebook you can go to to get an arbitration on those points. The Barnett formula, as we have found in the DUP deal, has none of those essential characteristics. And that’s why, while I understand the points raised in recommendation 4 of the report—and the Government has accepted all the recommendations in principle where they rely on actions by the UK Government, and wholly where they are entirely in our hands—why, in our commentary on recommendation 4, we make the point that while we are absolutely committed to a truly needs-based formula for funding in this area, the open and transparent EU approach to allocating funds has served us well, and the simplest way of guaranteeing Welsh interests in this field is through full replacement funding in the baseline of the Welsh Government, giving us a permanent uplift to the annual core budget and then the autonomy, in the way that Steffan Lewis set out, to be able to deploy those funds in the way that will work best here in Wales.

That brings me then to the third point that I started off with. If we’ve got the money and we’ve got the autonomy, then we need to be able to demonstrate that we have the policy capacity and the policy imagination to be able to design a regional policy that will be fit for the future.

The sixth recommendation in the committee’s report encourages us to develop such a vision and purpose for regional policy in consultation with partners, and that’s been an important part of the way we try to go about this and why our policy paper, which will be produced in the autumn, is still in the final stages of gestation, partly because we wanted to make sure we were able to take full account of the committee’s own report and the debate that we’re having here this afternoon, but also because we wish to continue to discuss it in our European advisory group, with our partners at the programme monitoring committee that Julie Morgan chairs.