Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:04 pm on 10 October 2017.
I don’t see the two as being in conflict. It is right to say that we have been very successful in attracting foreign direct investment and many, many thousands of people in Wales are employed by companies outside Wales. That is not something that we should apologise for—it’s a mark of our success. He is right to say that, certainly, the experience that I had at the start of the last decade was that economic policy was geared, because of the WDA, almost entirely towards attracting very large investments at the cost of not supporting SMEs. We can’t afford to do that anymore, because we want to make sure that SMEs are able to grow in the future. At that time, our universities didn’t work with SMEs; they didn’t see themselves as economic generators, they didn’t see themselves as having to produce start-up businesses based around their own research. That’s all changed. Our universities are very much on board now, and we have worked with organisations like the FSB. We’re interested in what the FSB have to say in terms of what we can do to support businesses in the future, but we have to understand that all countries—well, all open countries—rely on foreign direct investment. They create many thousands of jobs in Wales. It isn’t the be-all and end-all, we understand that. Getting a balance is absolutely crucial, and that’s exactly what the economic action plan will do.