Part of 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:39 pm on 31 January 2018.
Well, I completely agree with the Member that the information that is in the hands of the UK Government should be publicly available, should be made publicly available and easily available, not, as Anna Soubry, Conservative MP, said in the House of Commons today, in the farcical way that the UK Government now appears to be willing to make this information available to Members of the House of Commons in a locked room, whereas members of the public can read most of it on the internet any time they care to switch it on. She described it as a collective outbreak in the Government of a form of madness. And our call to the UK Government is absolutely that, where there is information that will help to allow people to make their own minds up about this very important issue, then there is an obligation on them—this is information that they have commissioned—to make that information available to others. As far as the Welsh Government is concerned, we routinely publish the information that we commission. In the joint paper that we published with Plaid Cymru a year ago, we included in that document an analysis by the chief economist and others of the state of information at that time. Within the next few days, we plan to publish the analysis carried out by Cardiff University of the impact of Brexit on major companies here in Wales, as we have already promised to different Assembly committees. As we get information, and as we publish documents, we always publish the independent analysis that we are using to draw the conclusions that we do, so that people who would wish to draw different conclusions have that information available to them to do so.