4. Statement by the Minister for Welsh Language and Lifelong Learning: Progress Report on the Employability Plan

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:33 pm on 18 September 2018.

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Photo of Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan Labour 4:33, 18 September 2018

Yes, I'm also looking forward to receiving the results of the Brown report. I have written to the regional skills partnerships to ask them specifically: will you consider digital in your next reports? And I'm expecting them to report in their next annual commitment, so that should be published very, very shortly, and I'm expecting to see a change and a response in that. So, that is something that we very much push them on.

In terms of where we are at on targets, well, our unemployment figures, you'll be aware, dropped last week to 3.8 per cent, which is actually below the UK rate, and we've got 42,000 more people in work than this time last year, but we've got to be careful—these are volatile figures. But I think we can be happy that it's going in the right direction. It's the same thing for economic inactivity, but that's a mountain to climb, and we are hoping that our Healthy Working Wales programme will help us. What we've done now is to really break down those figures to work out what exactly—how many people do we need and in which areas to get into work in relation to economic inactivity? It's going to be difficult, but we are confident now that we have the right programme to see if we can make a dent in those figures.

On Healthy Working Wales, we have set up now a target, which is 40 per cent. I think that's something—. I think we are at about 36 per cent now, and obviously the easy fruit has been picked already so this is going to be much more difficult, so that will be a target by 2020 as well.