It was never made clear to us, as a committee, why this decision was taken. Was it because of the technical issue of whether or not the project would be on the balance sheet? Or was it something else? Our probing found there to be several more issues at play and there still remains an air of mystery as to how the Welsh Government, which had spent considerable time and money on the project, ended up pulling the plug on the basis of what appears to be a 20-minute Cabinet discussion. These questions still remain unanswered.

So, what can be learnt from all of this? Well, it's essential that the Welsh Government demonstrates effective management of Welsh public money and maximises the opportunities for investment in Wales. In response to successive reports in recent years from the auditor general, and from this committee and its predecessors, the Welsh Government has provided various assurances to us that lessons have been learned. But we remain unconvinced. Our scrutiny is intended to be constructive and our goal is to secure better service delivery that benefits everyone, especially the taxpayer, but the Government must learn and develop from our reports for our scrutiny to be effective.

We certainly do not expect to see any recurrence of the basic errors, omissions and poor judgment on the part of officials that have come to light as a result of this report. Unfortunately, the sorry story of the Circuit of Wales highlights the shortcomings of the Welsh Government in terms of large-scale investment projects. This particular project took seven to eight years to develop before being brought to a halt. The Welsh Government needs to be much smarter at making decisions. It needs to be quicker and it needs to be more agile. Otherwise, there is a risk to Wales more widely as an investment location. Our criticism is not directed at individuals, but instead at a wider system failure and the Welsh Government needs to address that. Wales needs investment and we need the internal capacity to be able to make quick decisions on large-scale investment projects.

The Public Accounts Committee made 13 recommendations in its report, including that the Welsh Government strengthen their controls to ensure value for public money in relation to understanding relationships between funding recipients and their contractors and suppliers; that the funding of the purchase of FTR Moto Ltd is utilised as a case study for internal training purposes by the Welsh Government, given the highly unorthodox decisions made at official level, the accompanying lack of documentation and the apparent failure of officials to seek and obtain the requisite approvals from their respective Minister; and that all Cabinet Secretaries, Ministers and all Welsh Government senior civil servants are reminded of the requirements within the ministerial and civil service codes to ensure the accuracy of all information that is released.

We welcome the Welsh Government's acceptance of the committee's recommendations. However, in places, this acceptance appears to mask the Government's intent and, hidden in accompanying detail, it appears that the recommendations have not been accepted in the spirit in which they were made. This has been a consistent theme with regard to Welsh Government responses to our recommendations, and we've raised these concerns previously and consistently. 

In relation to the recommendations made in our report on the Circuit of Wales, we believe that the Welsh Government's response falls short in a number of key places. In accepting recommendation 1, the Welsh Government has only accepted that, in specific circumstances, it needs to strengthen its controls to ensure value for money. We feel that more needs to be done to ensure that officials exercise professional judgment, and our recommendation centred on the need for an improved understanding of the relationships between funding recipients and their contractors and suppliers. We wanted to see an end to the Welsh Government's repeated commercial naivety, and this is not addressed in the response to our recommendation, or, indeed, responses to previous Public Accounts Committee reports that have called for lessons to be learned.

The committee is also concerned about the Welsh Government's response to recommendation 3 of our report, where we recommend that the Welsh Government confirms to the Public Accounts Committee that it has since recovered the £100,000 from the escrow account. The response does not make it clear as to when action to recover these funds commenced, or, indeed, whether there was any intent by the Welsh Government to recover the funds until prompted by our recommendation. This is a good illustration of the Welsh Government's seeming commercial naivety. Once the decision not to invest had been taken, then retrieving this money should have been a matter of course, and the response to our recommendation should have been simply, 'We have retrieved this money.'

Finally, with regard to recommendation 6, the Welsh Government's response expresses that it already has in place robust processes for dealing with concerns about instructions from authorising officers to make payments: they're able and confident to raise those concerns with the senior independent manager. We are not convinced, and would welcome further information from the Welsh Government on how many instances there have been in recent years where concerns such as these have been raised, and some explanation of how these processes have proven to be robust. I look forward to listening to the debate today. Diolch.