Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance – in the Senedd at 2:04 pm on 6 December 2017.
Llywydd, I hear the case that the Member has made. He will be aware that others make a very different set of propositions. Other people would say that taking a very small amount of money from people who are clearly not short of money—they're coming to stay in the Celtic Manor—that a very small addition to their nightly stay would create a pool of money that could be further invested in enterprises like the Celtic Manor and other tourism possibilities that would attract more people into Wales in the future, and that investment of that sort, delivered by people who, after all, are enjoying the benefits of all the investment that the public purse has made in that sector—that that is not an unfair thing to ask of them, and actually creates a benign cycle in which small amounts of individual contributions are aggregated and allow significant new investments, that benefit the industry, to be made.
Now, I am not saying that the Welsh Government has come down on either side of this argument. All I'm saying is that in this area, as in all others, there are many competing analyses of what would work best, and the point of having a debate is to allow all those arguments to come out into the open, and then to be properly weighed up.