Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:01 pm on 16 January 2018.
Cash flow is all to a small business. It's not clear yet what the extent of Carillion's collapse will be on small businesses in Wales. I know that the Cabinet Secretary is looking to obtain information on that, but of course what we can't do is govern the way in which large businesses fund themselves. There are many issues there that the leader of UKIP has rightly highlighted—moral issues. It seems to me that quite often, in some businesses—not all, of course, and not even most—bonus payments are made regardless of performance, and also that people are paid off with substantial sums of money in order to go away even where performance is well below the standard expected. There are issues there.
There are issues in terms of how empowered shareholders are. They hold the board to account, of course, but in terms of knowledge and expertise, it's not quite as easy as that. I think there are, as a result of what we've seen from Carillion, lessons to be learned in terms of looking again at company law and the way in which companies govern themselves. Is there sufficient governance in larger companies to ensure that this kind of situation doesn't happen? We've seen from Carillion that the answer to that is 'no'.