Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:44 pm on 24 April 2018.
Thank you, Presiding Officer. Could I join the sentiments of the leader of Plaid Cymru in acknowledging the statement you made to the Labour Party conference, First Minister? There will be a time to pay tribute in this Chamber to your time in public life and service here as First Minister and Minister, but, without doubt, obviously, this will now form an election in the Labour Party to find a successor to your good self. But in that time that you remain First Minister, I wish you all the very best, and ultimately I do hope that you are able to keep the wheels of Government moving forward, because, as I've said many times in this place, I might disagree politically with you and the Members on that frontbench, but 3 million people depend on the decisions that you make in a whole raft of public services, and ultimately those public services are obviously the crown jewel of what we require here in Wales.
With that in mind, First Minister, I'd like to ask you about the economic action plan that was brought forward by the Welsh Government in December. One of the key planks, surely, of any economic action plan is to increase take-home pay here in Wales. Regrettably, we know that we have the lowest take-home pay of any part of the United Kingdom—£498 is the average take-home pay here in Wales, against a UK average of £550. We know for a fact that, since the start of devolution—a Welsh pay packet is £49 behind a Scottish pay packet, which, at the start of devolution, was exactly the same for a Welsh worker and a Scottish worker. Why, with 17,500 words in the economic action plan, are wages only mentioned twice if it isn't a priority for your Government to make sure we close that gap to invigorate economically our communities in Wales?