The response made by the Government to the seven recommendations of the report were set out by the First Minister on 12 April, and they're shaped by this context. The Chair of the committee stole part of my speech by going through all seven recommendations, but it's been a wide-ranging debate, Dirprwy Lywydd, touching on a series of really important issues. I completely agree with what Mick Antoniw said on the operation of the JMC and the need for far stronger inter-governmental machinery for the United kingdom to prosper on the other side of our membership of the European Union.  

Jane Hutt and others draw attention to the shared prosperity fund. Let me make it completely clear once again, Dirprwy Lywydd: the Welsh Government is entirely opposed to the shared prosperity fund. It is yet another example of a power grab back to Westminster. The responsibility for regional economic development belongs here, and everybody who has reported on it independently makes the same argument. It is vitally important that regional economic development is aligned with those organisations that have a presence on the ground here in Wales, that are able to be responsive to our partners, able to deliver the services on which economic development relies, and a shared prosperity fund put in a manifesto for which no majority was secured at an election, and in which the Government proposing it went backwards rapidly here in Wales, lacks both intellectual coherence and a democratic mandate. 

Jenny Rathbone got to the heart of a series of Brexit preparedness issues in relation to trade barriers that Welsh businesses will face if we are beyond full participation in the single market and outside a customs union. She and Leanne Wood identified a series of specifics there: aviation—the real prospect that we will not be able to fly out of this country in the way that we are able to today; access to new and to nuclear medicine—vital public health arrangements. We are part of a European-wide set of arrangements that protect the health of people here in Wales every single day, and if we don't have access to that surveillance, to that information, to the threats to public health that we know can take place anywhere across the continent, we will be poorer as a result. 

Dirprwy Lywydd, I want to focus just for a minute on one key theme in the recommendations of the committee—that of scenario planning. Already, we have produced scenario planning material costs to the Welsh economy, the results of the scenario planning workshops of the Brexit round-table group, the differentiated scenarios we have published for the future of the fishing industry, the detailed paper setting out possibilities for the future of regional economic development, the work of the Cardiff Business School analysing different post-Brexit options for large and medium-sized firms in Wales, the work of the Wales Centre for Public Policy into the implications of Brexit for agriculture, rural areas and land use in Wales—all of this demonstrates our determination to go on planning, preparing and shaping the future, a future we face on the other side of our membership of the European Union. But, Dirprwy Lywydd, as I said at the start, there are real limits to which reliable and definitive advice can be provided when so much uncertainty remains. The report asks the Welsh Government to issue clear and accessible guidance on the implications of various Brexit scenarios. The problem is that so little clarity exists.

Imagine if we had produced such guidance on the basis of the Prime Minister's Lancaster House speech of January last year. We would have told the many interested out in the report to plan for a Brexit based on no to a transition period; no to paying any exit bill; no to any role for the European Court of Justice; no to continuing participation in EU institutions, and no to a deal for citizenship rights. By the end of the same year, and the agreement at the December European Council, we'd be issuing a completely different set of guidance. Now, we will be telling Welsh interests to prepare for a transition period, for a financial future, and we will, quite rightly, pay our bills in billions of pounds, lasting up until 2064. We will be telling people to prepare for a guaranteed role for the European Court of Justice, undiminished through the transition period and continuing far beyond it. We'll be telling them to prepare for continued involvement in key institutions where we can persuade the EU 27 to allow for that to happen, and for a set of citizenship rights that, thankfully, go far beyond anything that Mrs May was willing to contemplate less than a year earlier. Little wonder that the Caerleon health professionals told Mr Isherwood that scenario planning was problematic.

The point I make, Llywydd, is simply this: of course we want the best possible advice to citizens in Wales, but we have to do so in the inevitable circumstances of uncertainty. No-deal Brexit simply cannot be planned away, no matter how sophisticated the analysis or how granular the sectoral insight. That's why we are determined to go on working together with others here in Wales, closely following the work and the advice of the committee, so that we prepare together for a very different future and a future that works for Wales.