Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:25 pm on 16 October 2019.
Thank you for those questions. I share the Member's concern and frustration, but one could be forgiven for thinking, from listening to the tone of his contribution, that this was somehow the fault of the Welsh Government. This is a commercial company. The Welsh Government has bent over backwards to help this company, as have the company's own commercial lenders. The majority of the funding given came not from the Welsh Government or the development bank, but from the banks—the banks who, we can only assume, did their own due diligence and made their own commercial judgments about whether or not investing multiple millions of pounds in this business was a sound judgment to make. They judged it was. Both the commercial lenders and the Welsh Government and the development bank reached the point towards the end of last week where clearly we thought that providing more and more credit to a company that is racking up debts and that is yet to produce any recent accounts was no longer a prudent thing to do.
Now, you asked for evidence of our support, and I can assure you that, as the local Assembly Member, Ken Skates, and Lesley Griffiths as the Minister, have ensured that Welsh Government have been paying close attention to the company. We have been in constant dialogue with them. You mentioned some of the practical support we've given them—a £5 million grant in 2018 that they fully discharged. We helped them to divest themselves of a bottling plant, which they were able to sell for around £6 million. We helped to release some of the grant obligations in that site to help give them the best possible chance of survival. The development bank themselves provided loans, not all of which have been repaid. So I don't think you can reasonably say that the Welsh Government hasn't done everything within its power to help what is a commercial company.
Now, you're right to be concerned about the impact on the industry at what is already a difficult time for the industry. Our view remains that this is a sound business if properly run, and we are hopeful that the administrators will be able to find a buyer who will be able to continue to run this facility on the site and to re-employ as many local people as possible. We have, I think, reason to be optimistic about that: GRH Food near Porthmadog was taken into administration some six months ago, and is now back functioning. So I think, in terms of the capacity of the food industry and our strategy, we can have confidence that that is in the right direction, but we can't micromanage every business nor be responsible for every management decision they make. We can do our best through our offices and through our partners to support and help, and we are confident we've done that.