Diolch yn fawr, Llywydd, and I'm very pleased and privileged to be able to move the motion tabled in the name of Siân Gwenllian, and commend it to the Senedd.

It has become almost a cliché to talk about the fact that we are living in unprecedented times, and indeed we are. The comparison is sometimes made with world war two, but when our parents and grandparents were fighting that war they could see their enemy, they knew who it was, they knew what the fighting was about, and they could be with one another. We can't do that, of course.

We've known from the beginning that COVID-19 posed a grave risk to lives, but also to livelihoods. And as the immediate risk to health recedes somewhat, though we have much to do and a long way to go, the focus is increasingly now around people's concerns about our economy and about our livelihoods. We've also heard much talk about building back better, but there's less clarity about what that means. We know that for many in Wales and across the world, indeed, our pre-COVID economy was not delivering. And these fellow citizens, of course, are often those who have been the worst impacted by the crisis: people from black and ethnic minority communities; women; lone parents and disabled people. One third of our children in Wales before the crisis were living in poverty, and we must not go back to that normal. This is an opportunity to reset; to build an economy that works for everyone; that creates wealth to pay for the world-class public services our nation needs; that accelerates our road to decarbonisation, and leaves a better world for future generations. We believe that we need a broad debate about how that will be achieved, and my colleague Delyth Jewell will say more about the need for a citizens assembly to drive that work forward and to help us chart the way ahead. And in that context, we must reject the Conservative amendment 4. Although we welcome the opportunity for more cross-party working, and indeed the Welsh Government has been prepared to do that, we need to go further than that. The answers to our crisis are not all in this Chamber held by one party or more.

Now, in parallel to that longer term debate, we will need an immediate response, and the bulk of the motion before us today suggests a way forward. We're calling for an employment guarantee scheme for all young people. We know how hard they've already been hit in this crisis in terms of job losses, and we also know that if young people are out of work for more than six months at this stage of their life, it's likely to have a long-term impact on their careers. Many never catch up and are even poorer as pensioners as a result of missing out on work at this crucial time. Of course, there are existing Welsh Government schemes on which we can build, but we need to be much more ambitious, and we need a comprehensive plan, and we need it quickly. Instead of leaving our young people to rot on the dole, let's use their energy, their passion and their commitment to support things needed for the immediate recovery. For example, we could send graduates into our schools to support teachers to help our children catch up with the learning that they've lost. We could enable our young people to support our care sector, which will be under severe pressure for a long while to come, and we could pay them properly to do so. And we could create an army of skilled young people to retrofit our homes, beginning with social housing, with the insulation and with microrenewables, tackling climate change and poverty at the same time. And we will need a massive national programme to enable workers to train and reskill.