Employment Prospects

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:35 pm on 3 March 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:35, 3 March 2020

I thank John Griffiths for those important points. It was a pleasure to meet, with my colleague Ken Skates, with the whole of the CAF board when they came to Wales in the second half of last year. They came to our meeting directly from having met the workforce in Newport, and they were absolutely at pains to stress how impressed they were with the calibre of the people who'd been recruited to work for them in Newport, the commitment of those people to making a success of the new CAF enterprise there. But, of course, the point that John Griffiths makes is a more general one. We are making inroads into this agenda, Llywydd. When I met recently with Tata in Shotton, and with Airbus in Broughton, to meet their young apprentices, there were young women engineers in every group that we met. But they are still a minority. There are still far more young men who find themselves going down that route. We are committed to taking positive action to make those possibilities known to young women, accessible to young women, that there are role models there who they can see, and who they can follow, and to make it clear to them that careers in this part of the employment spectrum are as open to them in Wales as they would be to any other person.