Promoting Digital Inclusion

Part of 2. Questions to the Leader of the House – in the Senedd at 2:35 pm on 16 May 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:35, 16 May 2018

Yes, we've asked Innovation Point to look into exactly how we can best exploit the 5G technologies and, actually, a large number of different pots of money that have come available in a number of different configurations, and Llywydd, yesterday, during my statement, I discussed some of those. I won't reiterate all of them, but we absolutely need to make sure that we are on top of the technology, that we assist small and medium-sized enterprises to exploit the technology, that we have the spectrum sales done in a way that allows us to access those technologies and doesn't cut them off, and that we also encourage the automotive industry in particular, but other digital-enabled industries, to come here to exploit the skills that we're producing.

So, we have a number of innovations going on at the same time, including things like the National Software Academy, which we fund over in Newport, which has a very innovative degree programme based on solving industry problems directly and which are then rolled out into the industries, and Innovation Point itself. There are a number of discussions that we have ongoing with our industries here already in Wales, because there's a big issue about upskilling the current workforce, as well as attracting in innovative, digital technologies. So, there are a large number of different ways that we're supporting those developments around the tech hubs, in the Valleys in particular.