It's always pleasing to start a debate with agreement, Cabinet Secretary, and on this occasion, it's a common interest in the success of the Swansea bay city deal. It may say 'Swansea' in the title, but the opportunities for Neath Port Talbot, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire's local authority areas are just as exciting. We're talking about almost 10,000 new jobs and £2 billion economic uplift for the area. So, what's not to like? It's not as if we are short of home-grown innovative ideas, but we don't have the best record of commercialising them to benefit the many, and this is a chance to show that we can.

Confidence is key to the success of the deal and a component of confidence in this context is the ability to convince multinational investors, as well as those within Wales, that the region is easy to get to and easy to get around. Some of us were surprised when physical connectivity featured not at all in the plans for the deal, and I hope that the fact that Mike Hedges and I, and others, keep raising this will ensure that this missing link is not lost from your line of sight.

Professor Mark Barry has, of course, produced an initial scoping idea for a south Wales metro—a South Wales West metro, I should say. It's not perfect, in my view, and Rob Stewart, the leader of Swansea council, confirmed, in a meeting with AMs about the city deal, that the professor's ideas were just a starting point. But its very existence at all underlines the point that, while world-leading digital connectivity is a core aim of the deal, and essential for its longevity, people will still need to walk, cycle, drive, catch buses, trains, trams in order to participate in the deal—directly as the workforce and indirectly as beneficiaries of increased wealth generated in the region. To be confident in the region's agility, investors need to be confident in its mobility. And I suspect, Cabinet Secretary, that you may want to raise electrification in your response to this debate—by all means do. But I'd really like us to think about the future that we can do something about, and a future that acknowledges that careful decisions about transport can be about successful regeneration and not just about faster trains.

The city deal includes 11 projects focusing on manufacturing, energy, life science and well-being and economic acceleration, as well as its core drive for digital—global domination is how I like to think about it. But I do want to focus on what could, and should, be the twelfth, and that is a Swansea parkway station. Unlike electrification, which is a huge investment designed to speed up journeys, a parkway is every bit as much about regenerating this large site in Felindre, which has failed to attract much interest since the tinplate works went; it's just as much about that as improving connectivity around the region as well as improving mobility within Swansea and the peninsula.