Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:33 pm on 16 October 2019.
I do find it curious that the thrust of the criticisms is that we haven't done enough to protect the company, and then he questions the support that we have given. The two pieces of support we've directly given—the £5 million grant was for a specific scheme to help them develop and become more resilient, and the food business investment grant, which was carried out in line with due diligence and all the grant conditions were discharged—the additional support was from the Development Bank for Wales, which was to help them with cash flow and other matters, and, clearly, along with the commercial investors, we have been not able to secure the full repayment of that. But if we can be accused of anything, it's certainly not of not offering enough support to the company.
But there are things that we can't control. We often hear the gentleman talking about the merits of market. Well, the markets are at play here, and commercial, individual companies make decisions, management make decisions, and there are consequences to those decisions. We remain confident that there is a good business to be run here, and we hope the administrators are successful in providing alternative providers. We'll work with them to continue supporting them. On the broader points that the gentleman makes about support for the industry, I'll ask my colleague Lesley Griffiths to write to him to provide a detailed response.