There are some aspects of this economic action plan that are to be welcomed—the new focus on the foundational economy and decarbonisation, for example. But, in stepping back and looking at the economic strategy as a whole, I think it's important to benchmark it against the three key ingredients that we know, from across the world, make up successful economic strategies. A strategy needs to diagnose what is holding us back, it needs to identify new activities that we're particularly well placed to develop, and it needs to build institutions that have the co-ordinating capacity to leverage collaboration within and across sectors. Against all three of those benchmarks, it's difficult to see how this strategy takes us forward. Indeed, arguably, I think it takes us a step back.

Let's take one of them, that issue of: do we understand our unique competitive advantage, those areas in which we can grow and develop? The strategy here is, at best, unclear. I think it's unconvincing that the Government is binning the sectoral prioritisation approach first adopted in 2009 for a much broader one. Cabinet Secretary, you referred in your Western Mail article to evidence that shows that tradable services, high-value manufacturing and the catch-all category of 'enablers' offer particular opportunities to grow the industries of the future. I would be very interested to hear: are you talking there about global evidence or evidence that is particular to Wales? Because the sectors, or the broad themes that you're referring to there, are very generic. They could apply in almost any advanced economy in the world, and we know that that sort of cookie-cutter approach to economic development simply doesn't work. You need to actually understand where your competitive advantages lie.

Now, we did have that attempt, I think, with the sectoral list that we did have before. Indeed, it was partially successful. You actually say in the economic action plan:

'Since 2009, our approach has been to support individual sectors, many of which like creative industries...have become huge success stories.'

So much of a success story that it isn't mentioned again in the economic action plan. Life sciences, again, was a cornerstone growth sector, it was mentioned in the innovation strategy from only three years ago, but it has disappeared, apart from a desultory reference to 'refocusing the Life Sciences Hub' behind us here, which has been half empty since you created it.

You referred to innovation—very welcome as a theme, yet your Government is cutting innovation expenditure by 78 per cent next year. You demoted the post of director of innovation within Welsh Government. You're abolishing the innovation advisory council and you're going to replace it with a sub-committee of the new tertiary education body, even though research quoted by the Be The Spark initiative, which you support, points out that 97 per cent of innovation in Wales doesn't happen on the lab benches of our universities, it happens on the workbenches of our businesses. 

I think that's the area, Cabinet Secretary, where I think the strategy is weakest: it's an action plan with five calls to action but no clarity about who the actors are. Who's going to do the acting? You're abolishing the 48 advisory panels; it's a kind of mini bonfire of the quangos, mark 2. You're replacing them with a single ministerial advisory board. I don't understand the difference between that and the council for economic renewal. Maybe you can explain it to us. Just three regional officers across Wales, and underneath that tier, with the exception of the development bank, an institutional desert.

The problem, Cabinet Secretary, that small businesses face in a small nation is not so much being small, but being lonely, and it's the job of Government to build up that social capital to create the kind of economic institutions that other nations have at their disposal: a trade and investment promotion agency, a chamber of commerce movement on the continental model, regional development corporations, a national innovation body. We are facing the economic equivalent of climate change, and epochal challenges of global proportions from Brexit to automation, but I fear, Cabinet Secretary, you are leaving us naked in the eye of that storm.