It’s not that we’ve gone backwards, and that people are somehow poorer than they were. What is correct to say is that, as our gross domestic product—or if you want to measure gross domestic household income as well— has gone up, it has not improved at the same rate as other parts of the UK. That’s the accurate description. He asked the question: what do we do about it? At the heart of it all is skills—it’s skills. What happened at the beginning of devolution is we did see a lot of those businesses that, I think, came here because of the money and provided unskilled work—they left. They went to Hungary. A business in my own constituency went to Hungary. They went to lower cost economies, because all they wanted to do was to manufacture cheaply. Now, we can’t play that game, nor should we try and do it. So, the focus now, heavily, is on skills. One of the questions we’ve always been asked by overseas investors is, ‘Have your people got the skills that we need in order for us to be able to function in Wales?’ Increasingly, of course, the answer is ‘yes’.

We work very closely with further education colleges and we work with our universities in a way that, 10 years ago, wasn’t happening. Our universities were not interested in working towards economic development at that point; they saw themselves purely as academic institutions. In fairness to them, they’ve changed. It will take some time for the fruit of that work to come through, but we are seeing investors coming to Wales that, bluntly, wouldn’t have come 20 years ago—high-end investors who are paying more in terms of the jobs that they create. What’s key now is to keep on moving on that track, not just in terms of FDI. He will make the point, I understand, in terms of encouraging SMEs in Wales. It’s not a question of one or the other, and that’s exactly what we want to do as well, working again with the universities and others, making sure that young entrepreneurs who have good ideas get the support they need to put those ideas into practice. Increasingly, across Wales, we are now seeing those businesses starting to be created and to grow.