6. Statement by the Leader of the House and Chief Whip: Update on the Better Jobs Closer to Home Programme

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:54 pm on 5 June 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 5:54, 5 June 2018

It's a very good point, and absolutely, we have a number of—. One of the reasons I'm the lead Minister for this is that it's a cross-Government working arrangement. I'm looking at my colleague Rebecca Evans who has been very involved in large parts of it as well. There are a number of Cabinet colleagues who've been involved in setting it up.

Absolutely, one of the reasons I was praising the team who have been instrumental in this is because their cross-Government working is excellent, and that's exactly what we're trying to do. We're trying to make sure that we have four distinct pilots that allow us to trial distinct interventions in the procurement market so that we can evaluate the strength of those interventions, their efficacy and how they work and that we can then spread them out as appropriate, or not—if we can grow them where they are. One of the things I'm very interested to know is whether they're place specific or whether we could pick the model up and put it down somewhere else in Wales and it might work.

So, there are a lot of things around. If you take the one that you mentioned at Bryn Pica with the paint re-engineering, one of the great things about that is that it reduces the carbon footprint, because the paint is travelling much less distance and so on, but it may well be that doing that once for the whole of Wales in that location isn't the best outcome and that another one in the north or in the west might be a better carbon footprint. There could be linked factories so that you have shared skills and all the rest of it. But I'm very interested to see how we can do that.

While we're on the subject of the Bryn Pica eco park, it's also good to see what a cluster can do. We've got the big anaerobic digester there, which is part of the Welsh Government's very successful food recycling programme. That generates electricity and heat, and of course, that gives us the opportunity to run factories and other things in that locality that benefit from that already generated recycled electricity and heat. So, there's a real virtuous circle to be had, and what we're looking to do here is have an intermediate market model that allows people to experience all of the skills and employment opportunities that such a cluster might bring, with two expectations for that: (a) that it will be able to grow and we'll be able to recycle far more items—paint in this instance, but a number of other items that Members, I know, are very interested in—and (b) that those people will gain very valuable high-level skills that will enable them to move into other jobs in our communities and increase the skills level overall, which, after all, we all know is one of the holy grails of life in the twenty-first century.