Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:21 pm on 26 November 2019.
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.