I thank the Member for those remarks. By and large, I think he was endorsing some key aspects of the policy I set out this afternoon. I understand the point he made about the word 'promise', but when the leader of the Conservative Party in Wales says to people in Wales that there is an absolute guarantee that Wales would not lose out by a penny, I wonder what more has to be said to make that a promise. It sounded like a promise to many people in Wales and many people in Wales voted on the basis of what they regarded as a promise. 

I thank the Member for what he said about a sensible proposition that the Welsh Government should take the lead in making decisions about the way such funding should come to Wales in the future, and I share what he said—it is a mystery to me as well why a Government that has enough quarrels on its hands, surely, and enough difficult issues to sort out, cannot make a straightforward decision that would be simple to make and simple to execute, and simply say, as people in Wales were promised, that the money that came to Wales under the European Union would come to us the other side of it. 

I listened carefully to what the Member said about hypothecation, because as a finance Minister I tend to start from a point of view of being uneasy at hypothecation as well. We took a very conscious decision in the Welsh Government to say in advance that money that came to Wales today for regional economic development purposes would be retained for that purpose the other side of the European Union. We did so because there is a real confidence issue out there in the sector, amongst people who are running projects, bringing forward plans, that the things that they have been able to rely on in the past may not be there for them in the future. The commitment I made in today's statement, to say that that money would be retained for regional economic development purposes, and we would guarantee it over a multi-annual period, is designed to sustain confidence in the sector that the long-term plans that they have put in place will be honoured through this Government.

Where I think the Member made an important point is that we will have some additional flexibilities in the way that money can be used in the future. Whether it stretches all the way to using the same money to sustain or to create lower energy prices, I probably doubt, but I do think that there will be opportunities to use that money in a way that avoids some of the rigidities of the previous set of arrangements. In that sense, we might get the benefits both of hypothecation in terms of its confidence building but also to be able to use that money more flexibly, as Neil Hamilton said in his closing remarks.