The next item is the debate on the Public Accounts Committee report on the Welsh Government's initial funding of the Circuit of Wales project. I call on the Chair of the committee to move the motion—Nick Ramsay. 

Motion NDM6766 Nick Ramsay

To propose that the National Assembly for Wales:

Notes the report of the Public Accounts Committee, 'The Welsh Government's initial funding of the Circuit of Wales Project', which was laid in the Table Office on 22 May 2018.

Motion moved.

Llywydd, thank you for the opportunity to speak today about the Public Accounts Committee inquiry into the Welsh Government's initial funding of the Circuit of Wales project. The proposed Circuit of Wales was a unique and significant project, which appeared to offer the possibility of regenerating an economically deprived area. As a committee, we agreed that the Welsh Government was right to explore possibilities of making this project work, and quite properly it was not the committee's function to comment on the merits of the Cabinet's eventual decision not to provide the requested public finance support. We are deeply concerned, however, at the way this project was approached by the Welsh Government. We want Wales to be a first choice for investment, and to achieve this the decision-making processes followed by those charged with the expenditure of taxpayers' money in this way need to be both coherent and properly documented.

The Auditor General for Wales published his report on the initial funding of the Circuit of Wales in April 2017, which highlighted significant shortcomings in the Welsh Government's handling of the project. This report provided a firm foundation for the basis of our inquiry, which expanded beyond the scope of the initial funding into the Welsh Government's decision-making processes for the final proposal.

We found the approach from the Welsh Government to this project to be one of two halves: the Welsh Government made some inexplicable decisions during its initial funding of this project, such as authorising payment for the purchase of FTR, a motorcycle company in Buckinghamshire, as part of the property development grant intended to buy land in Ebbw Vale. Then, having made the initial decision not to provide the requested guarantee, the Welsh Government chose to focus its justification for this on a technical accounting matter rather than citing the comprehensive due diligence that it had commissioned. This led to public confusion and did little to promote confidence in the Government's ability to handle public money wisely and well.  

The general feeling we had, as a committee, was that initially the policy decision had been taken to support the project and this had to be achieved through any means. Our role, as a Public Accounts Committee, is to make sure that the enthusiasm of politicians to achieve whatever policy goal they have doesn't lead to the cutting of corners, because that leads to bad decision making. 

As we moved into the second half of our inquiry, we examined the processes leading up to the final decision of not agreeing the Welsh Government guarantee, which was essential to making the project happen. Now, we fully appreciate that governments can and sometimes should change their minds on decisions, but it's important that processes are not fixed around the policy. Processes for good governance are there for a reason: to protect public money and the reputation of good government and probity. We have serious concerns that the Welsh Government was not as transparent and comprehensive as they could have been in explaining their decision to perform what appeared to be a u-turn on the Circuit of Wales project. It's important to remember that the Welsh Government maintained its position of positivity about the project and it set its own certain criteria by which it would determine its ultimate decision. It therefore came as a shock when the Cabinet rejected the project at the eleventh hour.

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.

It's a pleasure to follow the Chair in presenting, I think, very comprehensively and cogently, what is, I think—we all have to accept—a pretty damning report. And, indeed, it's hard to think of a more damning committee report or, indeed, a more damning auditor general report, which accompanied it. On the face of it, as he said, the Government accepts all our recommendations, but when you delve into the detail, of course, doubt remains as to whether the truth that lies behind the criticism has hit home and will change the practices that we have laid bare.

I'm confused. The £100,000 in the escrow account, I mean, what, the Government didn't know? They forgot? One possibility, of course, is that it was a non-refundable deposit, effectively an option, seeing as the option then was null and void because the Government decided to pull the plug on the project. That's possible, but they would have known, surely, because that would've been drawn up in the papers at the time. So, maybe the Cabinet Secretary can illuminate us on that point.

What, I think, the report lays bare, really, are some fundamental failings in the way that the Government conducts its decision making, and the transparency, bordering on opacity, bordering on—to use that phrase—a reckless disregard for the truth at times. It has to be honest about that. This poor decision making is there, right at the heart of the way the Government has approached a whole host of investments, small and large, which, of course, have been very much at the heart of the work of the Public Accounts Committee.

I'd like to just concentrate on one of the responses to the recommendations because, as the Chair has said, what's crucial, really, is what happens now, in response. If we continue to make these same mistakes, then we will never get out of the kinds of travails that we have found ourselves in in relation to this project.

The Government, in response to recommendation 13, about the outstanding debt to the Government from the Heads of the Valleys Development Company, says that it is aware of a number of proposals to resurrect the project, and it's aware, particularly, of a new promoter that, it says, has asked that the Welsh Government releases them from the liability connected with that £7.3 million loan. Now, I think we need to know more about that, don't we? 

I think the Cabinet Secretary should use this opportunity to tell us more about that proposal, because, as I understand, it's a proposal from the US-based real estate investors or developers, Rocksteady Partners—a curious name, I think, for an investment company. Methinks they protest too much, possibly. Rocksteady, which lists supercasinos as one of its key areas of experience and, indeed, has one of its many offices, it's fair to say, in Las Vegas, Nevada, is promoting a proposal that combines the race track with the development of a leisure resort and includes a casino as part of its proposal.

The Government, in its response, is saying that, in return for releasing them from the liability, the quid pro quo is that the Welsh Government gets an equity stake. Is the Welsh Government seriously saying that it's open to any proposal that would have it, and therefore the Welsh public, holding an equity stake in a casino in one of the poorest parts of Wales? I mean, that is entirely unacceptable that even that could be entertained as a proposition. So, can the Cabinet Secretary, when he gets up to contribute to this debate, confirm that the new promoter that he is talking about is Rocksteady Partners?

The bigger truth, I think, laid bare here, is how appallingly bad we are at dealing with major projects. We lurch, really, from one game-changing project to another and very few of them come to anything. LG Semicon, Legend Court, Valleywood, Pinewood, now, of course, St Athan and the tidal lagoon—different reasons for the failure of these projects, but the map of Wales is becoming littered by a junkyard of broken dreams, and we have to break that cycle. There are a few exceptions: Swansea bay innovation campus, Celtic Manor, the new compound semiconductor centre. The difference is when we decide to create something ourselves instead of relying on external actors, whether they're based in Nevada or not. It will always be the same unless we put ourselves in the driving seat. Unless we do that, then we will get nowhere, and I would appeal to the Welsh Government: we need to look at building up our ability to deliver major projects, because what was laid bare in this one is that the Welsh Government, currently, neither has the skills nor the experience to do so.

Our distinguished Chairman, in, I thought, a measured and matter-of-fact speech, exposed with deadly accuracy the failure of this Government to support what would have been a visionary project that could have transformed the whole of south-east Wales. When the Circuit of Wales promoters started out on their melancholy journey to obtain Government support for this project, I don't suppose they thought, at the end of the day, that they would be the only ones who would be given the run-around on the circuit, but that is exactly what happened. It's a shocking catalogue of political myopia, administrative incompetence, evasiveness and even duplicity. And, I agree with Adam Price in what he said, that the auditor general's report, and, indeed, the Public Accounts Committee's report could not be more damning of a Government in the way that it's handled this, or indeed, any project.

This was going to be a major game changer for the northern Valleys and for the whole of south Wales, bringing in a huge amount of private sector money—£410 million—on the basis of a limited guarantee by the Welsh Government, which had a maximum commitment of £8 million a year, admittedly for a potential 30 years, sometime in the future, but, a guarantee that would be secured on assets, which, by then, would already be built. So, it would not just be money down the drain; there would be something in return. And, assuming the project were successful, the Government would actually get paid £3 million a year for its guarantee. So, given that the objections that have been produced by the Government at different stages have all been different themselves and have ended up with something that was never even thought of at the start, but ought to have been known in relation to the classification of the private sector debt as effectively on the Government balance sheet for reasons that still remain obscure, then I do think that this is a disgraceful story that requires to be the subject of a major apology by the Government, not that I'm sure we will get anything like that.

There isn't time to go into detail about every criticism that is made in this report, but let's just look at the £9.3 million of project finance that was put in, right at the very start, to establish the development potential of this project. I supported that decision on the grounds that this was well worth a punt, but I would never have supported that decision if I had known, at the end of the day and two years' extra work and £50 million-worth of development costs that had been assumed by the private sector promoters, that the Government were going to pull the plug on the scheme because of an accounting device in the Treasury rule book. The Treasury rule book was there at the start. If there was a possibility that the project was going to be classified as Government debt, and obviously the Government could not assume a potential debt of £400 million, given the limitations on its borrowing powers, that ought have been on the table right from the very start. We've still had no explanation, even after all this, as to why it was that that private sector debt might be classified as on the Government's books.

The one thing that we never ever got out of this project was any clear statement from the Government as to why they thought that this was a project that was not viable. The Cabinet Secretary, in various statements, has said that it didn't stack up in commercial terms, but there has never been any information emerging from the due-diligence process that the Government engaged in that was able to demonstrate that. Of course it's a speculative project, it's a project that starts from scratch with a bare site, but an exciting project that could have transformed the whole of Wales, actually, both as a tourist attraction and with the automotive park that the developers hoped to attract on the basis of the circuit. Instead of which, the risks that I've just alluded to were too much for the Government, but they found in the back pocket, when the scheme was murdered by the Cabinet decision—they found in the back pocket £100 million from nowhere to build a series of empty sheds for which there are no known customers. Now, that seems to me to be the most extraordinary paradox—that they weren't able to accept £400 million of private money to build a project for which there was a commercial rationale, but they were able to find £100 million of public money to build something for which there is, at the moment, at any rate, no demand. So, that is a pure speculation.

So, this, I think, is an appalling example of Government mismanagement for all the reasons that are laid out in glorious Technicolor, or inglorious Technicolor, in the course of the report. But what a shocking indictment of the Government—what an appalling advertisement for Wales as a potential home for private sector investment. We desperately need to reduce the dependence of Wales on the public sector and to get private money in, because we need to increase the wealth-creating potential of the economy to raise the level of income in this country. Without that, we will carry on the story of poverty and decline over which the Welsh Government has presided for the last 20 years, extending what we've gone through in the last 100.

This report from the Public Accounts Committee highlights significant shortcomings and, in some cases, inexplicable decisions regarding the Welsh Government approach to funding the Circuit of Wales project. This project was widely welcomed, presenting, as it did, an opportunity to regenerate one of the most economically deprived areas in Wales. The Welsh Government was right to explore the viability of the proposed Circuit of Wales, but, in their eagerness to bring this project to fruition, officials made basic errors, omissions and exercised poor judgment.

The fact is that the Circuit of Wales project was handled appallingly. Millions of pounds of taxpayers' money were wasted, and the people of Blaenau Gwent first had their hopes raised and then dashed by the Welsh Government's botched handling of this project. The cornerstone of any effective democracy is ministerial oversight, yet, in this case, it was lacking. This report paints a picture of a department in chaos. Officials were, effectively, running the show and taking key decisions without ministerial approval, and among the glaring errors made by the officials was the decision to approve the purchase of a motorcycle firm in England. This company, FTR, was bought with funds supplied from the Welsh Government property development grant—a grant that can be used to fund the purchase of land and property by the private sector to stimulate economic development. The Heads of the Valleys Development Company used the £300,000 grant to buy FTR, which has now gone into liquidation. The Welsh Government has failed to explain how this purchase was approved when none of the stated reasons aligned with the approved objectives of the property development grant scheme. Indeed, there is no evidence to confirm that, then, the Minister was even aware of the decision. When this matter was raised by the Member of Parliament, an incorrect and misleading press statement was issued, saying that no Welsh Government funds were used to buy FTR—a press statement that originated from the same team of officials responsible for agreeing the eligible expenditure and authorising the grant claim payment for the acquisition.

This is just one shocking example of many concerns raised by the committee about the robustness of the decision-making process—concerns about the rationales for various decisions made by officials, poor record keeping, and evidence, both orally and verbally, judged by the committee to be evasive. All this points to a department out of control. Effective action must be taken to ensure that this cannot happen again.

The committee calls for robust and effective governance and internal communication channels to guarantee that such issues do not recur again. However, there appears to be a culture of rewarding failures. Instead of clear and robust action from the First Minister, he failed to give any assurance that sanctions would be taken against officials found to have been responsible for failures identified in this report. Presiding Officer, this report clearly demonstrates that the Welsh Government failed to give proper oversight to its investment of public money in the Circuit of Wales project. They failed to demonstrate value for money of this investment. In doing so, they let the people of Blaenau Gwent down, and down badly; they have let the taxpayer down; they have let Wales down. Thank you very much.

I call on the Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Transport to speak—Ken Skates.

Diolch, Llywydd. I am very grateful to Members for the report by the Public Accounts Committee and, in particular, can I thank the committee's Chair, Nick Ramsay, for providing an opportunity for me to respond to the recommendations? I think it's fair to say that, despite a huge amount of effort and work on all sides, the Welsh Government was not in a position to support the Circuit of Wales with public finance. We worked incredibly hard with the project promoters to support the project through a significant period of time as we fully recognised the potential positive economic impact that a sustainable project of this type could have in a deprived area. It was a large undertaking. The committee and Members in this Chamber can see the lengths that the Government went to to explore its viability. However, we were always clear that any support provided by the taxpayer needed to be both proportionate and fair. Despite the time and support provided, the project promoters were unable to provide a proposition that met the Welsh Government's stated criteria, and the final project proposal was assessed to be very high risk, with most of the risk, in effect, being borne by Government, and therefore by the taxpayer.

It was also assessed that the benefits claimed for the project, in particular the jobs created, were at best very uncertain. Because of all of these factors and the fact that, despite years of effort, the project promoters had been unable to come up with a compelling proposal with an appropriate balance of risk and reward for the taxpayer, the Cabinet concluded that it could not provide further support. Overall, the final version of the project did not represent good value for money for Welsh taxpayers.

The Deputy Presiding Officer (Ann Jones) took the Chair.

Now, we have accepted all of the committee's recommendations on the initial funding of the Circuit of Wales, and hopefully I can demonstrate to the Chair today that I take those recommendations very seriously indeed. I'll identify a number of the recommendations that the Members have already touched on, and hopefully I can offer some further assurance.

First of all, the Chair pointed to recommendation 6. I would happily provide figures from within Government that were requested by the Chair of the committee. In terms of recommendation 13, let me put on record that we are not open whatsoever to the presence of a casino in one of the most deprived parts of the United Kingdom. There are a number of project promoters, as I think the Member is aware, many discussions have taken place—they are commercial in confidence—and the Rocksteady proposal is not the only proposal that is being considered.

Recommendation 3: now, the provision of the contract accords with common commercial practice, though officials will report back to the Public Accounts Committee once legal advice has been provided and we are able to ascertain the position of the escrow account. We have already recognised that there are lessons to be learnt from elements of the Welsh Government's handling of the project, that is for sure, and we have put in place new processes to address those issues.

We accept the need to strengthen our controls to ensure value for public money. Actions must be proportionate to the risk involved, as well as be clearly documented. For example, we have already implemented changes to the business finance grant application process. Applicants must— must—now clarify whether Welsh Government funds are to be paid to related companies for goods or services. An exercise is also being undertaken to consider our controls to ensure value for money in more detail, and consideration will be made of the processes that can be put in place to ensure that complex projects demonstrate value for money where activities are procured. It must be noted that appropriate proportionate due diligence will be undertaken on any related companies identified at the application stage. And, with the launch of the new economy futures fund, all guidelines for officials have been refreshed, and the risk guidelines have been updated. We've also updated our internal guidance to ensure that all relevant information that might be considered novel, contentious or repercussive is included in ministerial advice provided as part of the approval process. We also accept that more work could have been undertaken at the appraisal stage of the project before including the purchase of FTR within the property development grant's eligible costs. In order that lessons are learned, the purchase of FTR will be developed into a case study for use at internal training sessions.

Now, guidance on risk weighting of projects of this nature is set out in Eurostat's manual on government deficit and debt, produced by Her Majesty's Treasury and the Office for National Statistics. Now, I recognise that there is merit in this guidance being made clearer. So, to that end, we will engage with others in the UK and with the statisticians to urge them to continue the process of clarifying and simplifying the classification rules. Formal decision making on classification clearly rests with the statisticians at the ONS and Eurostat. The ONS process is a process we have used successfully on a number of occasions, when Ministers have been minded to proceed with a particular course of action. While I believe that our internal processes are robust, I recognise that these processes could be improved. I also recognise that relationships between officials in Wales and their devolved and UK Government counterparts could potentially be better leveraged. I'm happy to commit to actions that will clarify those working relationships and processes.

Dirprwy Lywydd, Nick Ramsay warned during his contribution that corners risk being cut when the enthusiasm of politicians for certain projects becomes too intense. Some politicians remain strangely wedded to the proposal that was sadly rejected. But I would just have one final thing to say about major projects delivered in Wales: saving Cardiff Airport; the arrival of CAF; Aston Martin Lagonda; the Advanced Manufacturing Research Institute, with a contribution of £4 billion to the local economy; the £5 billion new rail franchise, which has been lauded across the UK; the compound semiconductor cluster; the International Convention Centre Wales—all of these are huge projects being delivered by this Welsh Government.   

Thank you. Can I call on Nick Ramsay to reply to the debate? 

Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd, and can I thank everyone who has contributed in today's debate?

If I can just refer to some of the contributions—firstly, Adam Price. Adam, you identified that there is a poor decision-making process at the heart of the Welsh Government, and that has been evidenced by what we've seen in the Public Accounts Committee looking at the evidence from the Circuit of Wales process and problems. And, yes, you're right: we have to get out of this mess. I think that's been the overriding message coming out of the committee. We are where we are, as is often said, and it's necessary now to look to the future and make sure that the problems that have happened in the past—the mistakes, if you want to call them that, that have happened in the past at many different levels—are put right so that, in the future, if this sort of project does come along again then the same mistakes are not repeated. You used the phrase, 'a landscape of broken dreams', and we mustn't forget at the end of all of this that there is an area of Wales that is very deprived, which is in need of regeneration, where the people look to the Welsh Government for hope for the future, for regeneration, for redevelopment, and they did look to this project as a possible way to lift themselves out of the problems that they are in and that they have been in for a very long time. And you cannot help but understand that those people do feel that an opportunity has been snatched away from them after there was a long build-up with them thinking that that project would go ahead.

Neil Hamilton, you described the Circuit of Wales as a visionary project and you spoke of a shocking catalogue of incompetence along the route that has been taken. As you said, potentially the Circuit of Wales was a major game changer and, yes, you're right, the committee couldn't get its head around why the project was eventually kicked into the long grass, why the plug was eventually pulled, as a result of an accounting device that is in the Treasury rule book. And as you said, of course, that accounting device wasn't a new addition to the Treasury rule book. It has been there from day one of this project, from very early on in this project. So, we couldn't understand—and I think at the end of our deliberations the committee couldn't understand—why it was that that accounting device hadn't been cited much earlier on as a reason not to proceed with the project, as a reason to go to the developers and to say, 'Look, this is something that the Welsh Government simply cannot afford.' We could not understand that. Due diligence, which was carried out, didn't then seem to feature at the end in the final decision-making process. So, it raises the question: 'Why did you do the due diligence?' Well, of course, you have to do the due diligence; that is all part of giving permission to a project. So, clearly something had gone wrong in that instance.

Mohammad Asghar, you referred to the 'inexplicable' decision-making process—and that is a term that appears throughout the Public Accounts Committee's report—which led to the waste of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money. And, yes, there did seem to be, from our point of view, a lack of ministerial oversight or, at the very least, a lack of a paper trail to determine whether or not there was a ministerial oversight, and that, I think, was one of the most concerning things of all. We couldn't actually work out whether—and it wasn't you, it wasn't the current Minister; it was the previous Minister who'd been involved in this. We couldn't determine whether or not she'd signed off the decision to fund the FTR part of the scheme. There was no paper trail. For a sum of £300,000, that cannot be allowed to persist in the future. Maybe there was a word-of-mouth agreement, but that cannot be enough. We have to be able, as a Public Accounts Committee, to show that, when projects and money are signed off, there is a legitimate reason for doing that. So, that was clearly a poor part of this process.

Can I welcome, finally, the Cabinet Secretary's comments? You made a number of very good points, and I'm pleased that you have listened to the issues that I've raised and the issues that other Members have raised and that the report has raised, and that you are looking to put some of these—all of these things—right. And let's be clear, some Members here have been very vocal in support of the Circuit of Wales for a long time and continue to be so. Some Members have not been keen on this project from very early on in its creation. That was not the purpose of the committee. We were not looking at this to say whether this is the right policy decision for the Welsh Government or not. We are there to say that, along the line, when decisions were taken and when funding was made available, that was done for the right reasons. I'm very sorry to say that the Public Accounts Committee could not say that value for money had been gained during the spending of money on this project at different avenues, and we seriously hope that, in future, the Welsh Government will learn the lessons of what's happened here. I know that the Cabinet Secretary said that those lessons had been learnt. We are not entirely convinced that they've been entirely learned yet. We do hope that, in the future, those lessons will be learnt and there won't be a future public accounts chairman standing here in the future, saying about a future project, 'Isn't it a shame that those lessons weren't learned?' We need to do this for the Circuit of Wales. Let's put this right and make sure that, in the future, these mistakes aren't made.

The proposal is to note the committee's report. Does any Member object? No. Therefore, the motion is agreed in accordance with Standing Order 12.36. 

Motion agreed in accordance with Standing Order 12.36.