Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:16 pm on 14 January 2020.
Well, if the vote by MPs changed nothing, Dirprwy Lywydd, then why did his Government defeat it? If their intention is that everything we have now should be continued into the future, they had a way to guarantee that that would happen. He asked me what I fear, and here's my fear: that when the UK Government come to design their own system, it will be a slimmed-down system, it will be a less generous system, it will cut out of participation the sort of young people that Lynne Neagle highlighted in her question.
There was a very simple, direct, unambiguous way in which the Government could have sent its message about continuing participation in Erasmus+: it could have allowed that amendment to go through last week. It didn't, and there must be a reason for that. The reason is that they don't intend to replace Erasmus on a like-for-like basis in future, and young people in Wales will be worse off as a result.