Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:23 pm on 9 July 2019.
Llywydd, it certainly is a Welsh Government policy to support the development of a community bank for Wales. Those who have promoted it are very clear that it has to be a community bank. In that sense, ownership of it has to belong to those communities where we hope new bank branches will open. Hefin David is completely correct that conventional banking is deserting communities right across the country—250 or more bank branch closures since 2015. A community bank of the sort that we are designing—. And Hefin David and other Members who have taken an interest in this topic will want to know that there was a visit yesterday from a delegation from Wales, including a representative from my office, to Bicester, where there is a demonstration unit showing how all the technologies and user equipment needed to support the new idea of a community bank can be there for people to go and see it in operation. They came back from that visit with a renewed confidence that it would be possible to design a community bank for Wales that will focus on Welsh citizens and SMEs, not on large corporate customers, and will focus on providing those savings and loans services on which individual citizens and small businesses rely.