Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:10 pm on 14 March 2018.
How many of us here remember the Llwybro-Routes project some years ago, which tracked young people and promoted opportunities for them to return to Wales? You would register with the scheme, and, if you had specific qualifications and had moved away, if there were opportunities that demanded those qualifications in the area where you were brought up, you would be informed of that and there would be an opportunity for you to apply for those posts and to return.
Now, I'm aware that, in India, where depopulation in rural areas with outward migration to the cities is a huge problem, there is a specific scheme there to retain those connections between someone who has skills—let's say you're an accountant working in the city, you retain that connection with your home community, where you can perhaps use some of those skills to help local committees with their annual audits and so on. There's a great deal that we can do, and that figure of 117,000 people having left the western region was very striking, and it brought to mind a scheme run by one local authority in the west of Ireland that responds directly to depopulation, where they proactively work to attract people back. They are almost a recruitment agency, but they are also a marketing agency that packages an offer: 'Come back to work in a green, healthy area, an environmentally friendly area where, with the rural schools, the classes are smaller and the pupil-teacher ratio is smaller'—it's a marketing campaign, almost, where they package the offer in a very attractive way to attract those people back to those communities.
Now, there are suggestions in the motion, but the foundation of the motion, ultimately, is that the Welsh Government has to be far more creative in tackling this problem, which is a very real problem within our communities.