Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 11:50 am on 24 June 2020.
Llywydd, thanks to Alun Davies for that important set of questions. He will be pleased to know, and I know his constituents will be, that the Gilwern to Brynmawr section of the Heads of the Valleys road is now 85 per cent completed, despite the real challenges, the geological challenges that there have been in that part of Wales. I'm concerned as he is, I know, about the festival park site in Ebbw Vale, and we're working closely with the local authority there to see what can be done to address the announcements of last week. We continue to progress our plan for the high-tech cluster on the nearby work site and to prepare other sites so that they are in a good position to attract jobs into the Blaenau Gwent area.
But to just respond for a moment, Llywydd, to the general point that Alun Davies made: we should—all of us—be concerned at the jobs impact of coronavirus. I'm thinking of the 30-year experience of some communities in Wales to recover from the 1980s and the deliberate loss of jobs in those communities then; coronavirus isn't a deliberate action of course, but its impact can be profound. And I want to give Alun Davies, and others, an assurance that the Welsh Government will be relentlessly focused during the rest of this Senedd term on doing everything we can to support employment in those areas, so the scarring effect on young people in particular, in particular parts of Wales, is avoided as much as we can possibly do, by harnessing our actions with those of others to support those local economies and those local jobs.