Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. I’m grateful to the Conservative group for tabling this important motion today. Of course, as we move out, perhaps, past the first health crisis phase of the crisis that faces us all, Paul Davies is quite right to say that the economic crisis will come into sharper focus, and I’m sure that we will continue to debate this and to scrutinise the Minister as the response to coming out of lockdown proceeds.

There’s much as a group that we can agree with in the Conservative motion, and I think it is right to be fair to the UK Government—the furlough scheme, the job retention scheme, for example, has made a tremendous difference. It’s not perfect, as I know the Minister knows, and I would urge Conservative colleagues to use what influence they may have with the Treasury to look at some of the gaps in that scheme: the new starters who were not helped and could still be helped now, and some increased flexibility in the scheme, and perhaps extending it for those sectors that can’t immediately go back to work, as we were discussing in the earlier debate on the arts, would be welcome.

The idea of a COVID recovery fund is not one that we would oppose, but, as we set out in our debate two weeks ago—and I don’t intend to set those arguments out again, Dirprwy Lywydd; I had the opportunity to do so in that debate—we feel that we need to go further than that, because this is not about recovery, this is not about going back to where we were before. There was, as Paul Davies has rightly highlighted in his speech, so much that was wrong in our economy before for so many communities and so many people. An economy that leaves a third of our children living in poverty is not one that we want to recover our way back to. This is about, for us, renewal, transformation, doing things better, moving further, hence our second amendment, which would replace the call for a COVID recovery scheme with our request for an all-Wales renewal fund—similar in its intentions, I think, but more ambitious in going further.

We also believe that the Welsh Government needs the power to be able to take the steps necessary itself, and this is why we’ve proposed our third amendment, asking for more fiscal autonomy for Wales at this time. I will refer in a moment to the Government amendment, but I think we are mistaken if we believe that we can rely on the Westminster Government to do this for us. And, if they won’t, then they must free up the hands of Welsh Government to act.

With regard to the Government amendment, we would agree, of course, with the point about the European Union, and there are other things in there that we could welcome, but I come back to this point about whether or not we can rely on the UK Government to dig us out of this hole. We’re not at all sure that that is the case. We believe it is the time to take more power into our own hands here in Wales to enable us to build back.

Now, Deputy Presiding Officer, if I wished to be churlish, I could say that I wasn’t really very keen on taking lessons on the economy from either the Labour Party or the Conservative Party. When it comes to the Conservative Party, their decade of austerity has left our communities and our economy fundamentally weak—you could say holed under the waterline—and they need to take some responsibility for some of the problems that Paul Davies has outlined. And when it comes to the Labour Party, of course, well, they could have reformed the Barnett formula decades ago when they had power to do so and chose not to, and they have been running the economy of Wales, alone or with others, for 20 years. But be that as it may, this is not a time for sniping, and I found much to support in Paul Davies’s contribution. This is a time when we all want and need Welsh Government to succeed. I think we are all, right across this Chamber, as one in that. The question is how best to do it. We can only respond effectively to this crisis, to build an economy that isn’t just greener and fairer, but green and fair, if we are able to borrow to invest and take the powers into our own hands to make that possible.