Yes, thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. Hefin David's opening reminded me of the remarks said of A. J. Cook, the trade unionist—that he didn't know what he was going to say until he started to say it; he didn't know what he was saying while he was saying it, and he couldn't remember what he said after he finished saying it. I'll go in the spirit that he has implored me to, and it's possibly one those debates for other Members to intervene on the Minister responding, so I'd be happy to take interventions from the few remaining Members, should they want to intervene.

I appreciate the spirit in which he's offered this subject up for discussion, because I think it is a ripe time to discuss it. And as it happens, I have invited the Bevan Foundation to attend the next meeting of the Valleys taskforce to debate this very paper. Because, like him, I read it and was engaged and convinced instinctively by much of it, and sceptical about other bits of it, and I really want them to come in, go through it and discuss it. I've also, by the way, issued a standing invitation for them to attend all future meetings of the taskforce, but explicitly with a mandate to challenge. I don't want to bind them into the taskforce and they're reluctant to do so, but there's a standing agenda item for them to come in and have a pop if they want to, because I think, just like Alun Davies before me in leading this, and Hefin David in the spirit of his remarks, we don't have a template here, exactly. We're trying to find a way against a tide that is pushing towns in a particular way, that's denuded them of much of their economic purpose. And even though, as Hefin said, people love their towns, sadly people are using them less and less, and that's the paradox of towns and the role we find, I think, as politicians in wanting them to thrive and doing a bagful of stuff to make them thrive.

The only bit of the civil service briefing note I shall use is just to very briefly touch on four things that we are doing to help towns. We've got a £100 million targeted regeneration programme. We've got a £54 million building for the future fund for the acquisition and redevelopment of unused buildings. We've got a £31.5 million town centre loan scheme, and we're spending £23.5 million on business rates relief. So, we are doing a lot. I guess the challenge could be is whether that is sufficiently focused, and are we clear what the vision is. This is often true of local authorities. Certainly, my own in Carmarthenshire has been very good at renovating old buildings, but it's not clear to me what the town centre strategy and plan is, and that's a point that the Federation of Small Businesses have made in their work.

So, I don't think we all have a clear answer about this yet, but the challenge is a correct one, and I want to continue in the spirit of dialogue in shaping the Government's approach to try and get that as right as we can. 

I think he slightly overplayed, if he doesn't mind me saying so, the differences between myself and Alun Davies on the role of the strategic hubs, and whether the previous conception is different to the current one and how does that fit with the Bevan Foundation's. I think there is some truth in it, in that in the original iteration the strategic hubs were a funding vehicle and they're no longer a funding vehicle, but they're still a very important part of the work of the taskforce and the work of Government, because they give a spatial focus to our work.