Well, Dirprwy Lywydd, I thank Julie Morgan very much for those remarks. They reflect the experience that she has chairing the programme monitoring committee under the current round of European funding, where the benefits of partnership working and the ability to call on the advice of experts in the field are very much part of the way that we have done things here in Wales. And, in that sense, Julie Morgan is absolutely right that we need to maximise the lessons that we can learn from our experience so far to make sure that we go on doing things in ways that have proved successful, while taking opportunities to do things better still. I want to thank her and all those who sit on the PMC for what they are doing to make maximum use of current funding.

Here let me say, as I try to every time, that we have always welcomed the decision that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has made to guarantee those funds and the more recent announcement he has made about extending that guarantee to the very end of the current round. In the sense of what I said earlier about confidence in the sector, that has been a helpful announcement, and I'm happy to recognise that this afternoon. We will be using European funding up until 2023 under the current round, and we'll be accounting for it up until 2025, so making good use of that is really important.

And Julie Morgan is absolutely right: we cannot wait for the UK Government to move on all of this. We have pressed them time after time to make sure that we have an ongoing relationship with the European Investment Bank the other side of our membership of the European Union; we have contributed some expert advice from officials here who have real understanding of the way in which that could be brought about, and we're still waiting to hear anything about the way in which that relationship can be formed for the future.

Part of the reason why I am pleased to be able to announce today funding to draw on the advice of the OECD is that that will give us here in Wales a new set of avenues into those European union networks that Julie Morgan mentioned, so that we are able to sustain the benefits that we have had from regional working, from learning from other parts of Europe, and for making sure that the way we do things here in Wales is informed by the very best practice from elsewhere.