Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:58 pm on 5 June 2018.
The Member makes a number of points, which these pilots aim to look at. And I do emphasise the 'pilot' point here. I don't want to overemphasise the barriers that we faced in getting to this point, but it has not been simple to construct four separate pilots using different procurement and Government spend leverages in order to do this. I do pay tribute to the team that's managed to do it.
But I absolutely emphasise that what we're looking at here are genuine pilots, because I completely take the point that the Member makes: absolutely this is about better jobs closer—the 'closer' word is just as important—to home, for exactly that reason. We do not want people to have long commutes. Even where we're facilitating that, we still don't want that. And actually, what most of the communities in the more rural parts of Wales, and sometimes the inner cities—I also represent an inner city area that has similar problems—what people want is the ability to have a good job around the corner from their house so that they can have a work-life balance and they can have their caring responsibilities taken into account and their children can attend local schools and so on.
So, these pilots are very much designed to see whether they work and whether, as I said, we can then pick them up and put them down in other communities, perhaps as linked hubs, perhaps as a single business with multiple outlets—a number of possibilities. And we've worked closely with a whole range of stakeholders across the Government to get to where we are, and I'll certainly be looking forward to reporting back on the pilots and this whole issue of scalability and whether they're placeable and all the rest of it in about a year's time, when we've got some data from them.