Let's just look at some of the broad and important facts that have affected the economy in the past 20 years, and how we have been able to steer the economy of Wales in a very different direction to that which was taken back in the 1980s and early 1990s. In the last 20 years, we've seen the number of people in Wales without qualifications reduce from more than one in three to fewer than one in five. As a consequence, we now have a lower employment inactivity rate than the UK average. Could we have imagined that in the 1990s when our rates were almost double the UK average? 

Today, we have 300,000 more people in work than we did in 1999, largely because of the interventions of the Welsh Labour Governments over those years. And perhaps one of the most successful programmes that we have been operating during devolution is a programme that was based on one that was introduced by the Gordon Brown Government at Westminster, but then subsequently canned by the Cameron Conservative Government, and that was Jobs Growth Wales. Jobs Growth Wales helped thousands upon thousands of young people avoid long-term unemployment.

During the period of 2010-15, you can compare parts of Wales with parts of England. There are parts of England during that period that saw long-term youth unemployment rise by 2,000 per cent. The figure here in Wales was less than 100 per cent, still way too high, but across swathes of England and Scotland, we saw long-term youth unemployment rise by hundreds if not thousands of per cent. We saved the hopes, the aspirations and the careers of thousands of young people after 2008, and right up to today we are still operating a very successful scheme that is giving hope and opportunity to many young people.