Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. I rise to support the two amendments in the name of my colleague. One of them expresses, once again, our sense of deep frustration, which I know is shared more widely, that we still haven’t got the new economic strategy that we were promised. I remember the Cabinet Secretary saying in this Chamber a year ago that the economic strategy would be presented in the new year to the First Minister. I suppose, technically, he wasn’t misleading us, but he said this morning to the economy committee that it would be produced in the autumn. When I pressed him what ‘the autumn’ actually meant, because, remember, we were promised it in the spring, in the summer, before the recess, et cetera, he said that it will be published before Christmas. You have to ask, ‘Which Christmas are we talking about?’, but let’s actually hope that something will be forthcoming in the meantime, because we need a new economic strategy badly.

Now, what we have to rely on at the moment—. Because there have been two changes of administration since the last economic strategy that the Welsh Government presented, so we have to read the runes to understand what is the thinking behind economic policy. Now, the only comprehensive statement I’ve been able to come across, and, to be fair to him, it was written in a personal capacity, was by the chief economist of the Welsh Government. It gives us a flavour of the thinking that lies behind the Welsh Government’s economic thinking. In that, he says—it was published in the ‘Welsh Economic Review’ last year:

‘In terms of the trends since devolution on these key economic outcomes, the story is broadly positive.’

Now, ‘You get two economists in the room and you get three different viewpoints’ is the old saying. But I have to say I have to disagree. As Andrew R.T. Davies has said, if you just look at the figures—and you can cut it in a variety of ways, but, if you look at the key figures of GVA per capita, mean average weekly earnings, gross household disposable income per head, which used to be the Welsh Government’s favoured measure, on all of those we’ve gone backwards since Labour have been in power over a period of 20 years. So, that devolution dividend has not delivered. Certainly, we’ve gone backwards—marginally on some, more significantly on others, but certainly there has not been the improvement in our standing that we were hoping to see.

So, we need a new economic strategy because the old one has failed us, and, if we continue doing what we’ve done, of course, then we shouldn’t be surprised, as we know, if we end up with the same results. So, ‘Where have we gone wrong?’ I think is a good starting point. I think that there are some clues there in some of the data. If we look at issues like entrepreneurship, for example, in the early years of the Welsh Government, to be fair, there was the publication of a national entrepreneurship action plan. I know because I was a little bit involved in the drafting of it at the time. That actually did begin to have some early success, if you look at the figures, in terms of new starts for businesses. During the period 2002 to 2005, you saw a 21 per cent increase in new starts for business in Wales, compared to just a 13 per cent increase in the UK. That wasn’t replicated, of course. There was a change in the political weather or the policy weather around the middle of that decade, and so, from 2005 onwards, we saw a reduction or a return to a fall in terms of the business numbers.

There was an attempt with the economic strategy in 2010 to actually arrest that decline, and that economic strategy was quite clear that we needed to shift the emphasis back into indigenous capacity, where we’d started in 2000 in terms of the entrepreneurship action plan. Unfortunately, that economic strategy in 2010 was binned, effectively. There was a reversion to the old-style thinking, which has been this over-obsession with foreign direct investment, which may give you some short-term gain in terms of a press release and some job numbers. It may, actually, in difficult times—. And we realise that, in the economic crisis, we were in defensive mode. So, in the short term there can be reasons why you want to emphasise it, but in terms of the long-term task of changing the underlying trend of the Welsh economy, then we need to return to that thinking at the heart of the national entrepreneurship action plan, which is investing in indigenous enterprise and innovation, because it’s the skills, knowledge and ideas of our own people that will ultimately deliver to us the economic improvement that we want to see.