Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:14 pm on 26 November 2019.
Yes. Was it: how is local procurement defined? As I said, we're looking to move beyond Preston's model, which tried to define it within spending within the local postcode, to taking a relational approach. So, in Carmarthenshire, for example, there's a very exciting project to get local food into local schools and local hospitals. Now if, for example—I'm just using this for illustrative purposes—they weren't able to source all of their produce in that project or any other within their local postcode, but could source it within a grounded firm in another part of Wales, that would be a good thing. So we shouldn't be too narrow in simply looking at postcodes, because that can have distortive impacts. The example we've mentioned in the Economy, Infrastructure and Skills Committee, for example, is were a local authority to spend money in Kwik-Fit to buy some tyres, that could look good as a local postcode procurement, but the money wouldn't stay in the area—it would go out of the area to Kwik-Fit. So it's possible to manipulate these figures to flatter, to deceive, and so we want to take a more intelligent approach, and that's why we want to take time working through how that works in practice.