Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:54 pm on 6 May 2020.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Jeremy, for your statement. I admire your ambition to continue to have agile government going forward, and I, obviously, hope that we will continue to have the appetite to make bold decisions for doing things differently to better meet people's needs.
Just turning to the state of the economy, and the deliberations you've been having with these round-tables, clearly at the moment, we've got the vast majority of our companies on life support with Government-backed loans and 80 per cent wage subsidies. We clearly can't go back to doing things like we did before, so I'm very keen to understand what is our strategy for supporting companies going forward when so many organisations are going to be dependent on injections of capital to get back on their feet. And we clearly can't afford to be giving loans to organisations that then decide they want to move out of Wales and transfer their businesses elsewhere. That simply isn't going to be affordable. So, I wanted to understand, when we're looking at really important sectors like strategic manufacturing, food production and the technology that is going to deliver the cleaner, greener Wales as well as making it more productive, what thought you've given to instead of providing loans, taking equity stakes in businesses so that we, the taxpayer, can share in the success as well as the risks of these firms going forward in future years.