Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:56 pm on 14 May 2019.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:56, 14 May 2019

Llywydd, unlike the Member and, presumably, his party, we on these benches believe in investing in businesses here in Wales. I certainly don't apologise, for a single moment, for the fact that successive Welsh Governments have seen it as their duty to assist Welsh firms, to help them to grow to create work here in Wales, and if you're going to do that on an entirely risk-averse basis, where you're never willing to take a chance on a company that might turn out to be a really important part of our economic future here in Wales, then, of course, you can eliminate every possibility of something going wrong by never doing anything. If that's the policy of his party, he should tell us here. If he doesn't believe that we should ever be prepared to invest in a business that may, in the end, not turn out to do everything that both it says to us, our expert panels who review every single one of these cases and the decisions that Ministers make, then people in the future will know that were his party ever to find itself in a position to make decisions here in Wales, then they wouldn't be a Government prepared to do those things that allow businesses here in Wales to prosper.

The Member said to me that there was a lack of transparency and then proceeded to reel off a list of things that he could only possibly know as a result of information that the Welsh Government itself had placed in the public domain. My colleague Ken Skates says that he has no difficulty in publishing the report to which the Member referred, so there will be another report that he will be able to read, and we look forward to his views on transparency when another piece of information that is only available because this Government is prepared to make it available falls into his hands.