7. How is the Welsh Government supporting Welsh businesses? OAQ54736

I thank the Member for that. In line with our economic action plan, we remain committed to supporting Welsh businesses through Business Wales and the Development Bank of Wales, both offering bilingual advice, support and finances to businesses in Wales to start and to grow.

Diolch. Small and medium-sized businesses in Wales make up, as you probably know, 99.3 per cent of all businesses, almost 65 per cent of employment, turning over £46 billion a year, £126 million every day. But, sadly, a high proportion don't survive more than five years, and beyond survival also face considerable challenges.

The Small Business Saturday campaign exists to support, inspire and promote them, and the next Small Business Saturday is on Saturday 7 December. I know you'll wish to join me in wishing them well. However, the Federation of Small Businesses identified key megatrends affecting towns in Wales and made a series of recommendations to ensure their future success and sustainability. How do you respond to those recommendations, which include—I'll give two examples—publishing town strategies in every town, ensuring the ownership is local and that businesses and the voluntary and public sectors are engaged, and rethinking the role of business rates in towns, replicating the recently announced English relief for high street businesses, and then better consideration of the impact of rates on our towns in the longer term?

Llywydd, first of all, to acknowledge the point that Mark Isherwood made at the start, on the importance of SMEs to the Welsh economy, and anything that we can do to point to that importance and to their success is certainly to be welcomed. Business birth rates in Wales exceed business birth rates across the United Kingdom, and one-year survival rates of Welsh businesses exceed the UK rate as well. So there is a great deal to celebrate in Welsh SMEs, which I'm sure this weekend will play it's part in doing.

I welcome the report that Mark Isherwood referred to, because it tells us that, in order to make the high street the success that we want it to be, we have to reimagine it. It is not enough to take the model that we have had over the last 20 years and to try to run harder to prop it up. The world has moved on. The way that people go about their shopping and other things isn't what it was back then, and the report of the FSB, I think, helps us to see some of the elements that there could be there that would allow that reimagining of the high street to happen.

It is very important that it does. People's attachment to their localities and to the towns in which they live is often rooted in the town itself. In the town that I grew up in, people always referred to 'going down town' if they were going out, and they meant they were going into the centre of Carmarthen, indeed. So I welcome the report. We will look at it carefully, and I'm glad to see that it has moved on from just trying to find ways of sustaining a model that no longer, I think, will stand us in completely good stead.

Finally, question 8, Vikki Howells.