Llywydd, I thank the Member for some of those remarks. Let me deal with a small number of them directly. The report, which I have here, has quite certainly not been sat on my desk over those months. I have spent many, many hours reading the report and receiving advice on it, because that's what this report required. It did not require being put into the public domain without the necessary legal and policy advice that went alongside it. It's available to any member of the public who now wishes to read it, but the decision that I had to make required not simply a very close reading of the report, and more than one close reading of it as well, but extensive advice—legal and policy advice—in order to come to the decision that I have come to today. There's been no long delay. This decision has had, as I promised it would, the level of concentration and the level of consideration that a decision of this sort deserved, and that is what it has had.

The Member is wrong as well, Llywydd, to suggest that matters are just being pushed far into the distance. He asked when my colleague Ken Skates will make a statement. It will be tomorrow. He'll make it to this National Assembly. It will set out the short-term remit that we will put to the commission to come forward with a first set of immediate proposals that can be put to work to begin to alleviate the problems experienced at the M4.

The Member began by saying that the situation at Newport now needs action more than ever—needs 'now', he said. The M4 relief road would provide no relief at all for a minimum of five years. And he said to me that those problems will get worse in the meantime. I recognise the significance of those problems, which is why we will take action to alleviate the problem far sooner than the relief road would have done. And we will begin on that work immediately.

As far as money that has been spent in preparing the report and holding a public inquiry, and making sure that those hundreds of people who put their views to the inquiry and who participated in these proceedings are concerned, I think that spending has been proportionate to the task involved. And I think it is right that, when there was a decision of this level of controversy, we made sure that there were all those opportunities available to people to put their points of view and to have them properly considered. As finance Minister, I did have to be satisfied that that spending was properly being applied. I believe it was. It is the cost of living in a democracy. It is the cost of having a genuinely open process in which people are able to make their contribution, know that it will be heard, and know that the results of that will be properly considered.

Finally to the point that the Member makes about a foot on the windpipe of the Welsh economy—the future of our economy, Llywydd, is not dependent on one stretch of road. The future of the economy depends upon all those measures that we discussed earlier during First Minister's questions, and have led to an economy in Wales where, as I said then, we have a faster rate of business growth than anywhere in the United Kingdom, that those businesses last longer at one year and five years than they do across the whole of the United Kingdom, and where we have more enterprises alive and flourishing in Wales today than at any time in the past. That's the state of the Welsh economy, and it depends on far more than a single course of action of the sort and in the way that he described.