2. How is the Welsh Government planning to support the recovery of Welsh towns following the effects of Covid-19? OQ55467

We will have a values-led reconstruction guided by principles of social justice, fair work and environmental sustainability. Towns across Wales will continue to benefit from interventions, building on a range of transforming towns programmes that follow the £90 million further package of support announced in January.

Thank you for that response. One does accept, in the circumstances that we face, that it's inevitable that jobs will be lost. But what we are seeing now, and what I've noticed recently, is that we are seeing companies choosing to close sites in rural or coastal towns—the more peripheral communities—and to centralise jobs where there are headquarters, or where they have a greater presence or footprint. In my region alone, Mail Solutions in Llangollen has announced that they are closing the site there and moving the jobs to Telford. We also have Northwood Hygiene Products in Penygroes, near Caernarfon, which is also relocating posts.

Now, the impact of those job losses on those more peripheral communities is relatively worse, in terms of the impact that it has on those communities. So, I want to ask specifically how your strategy and how your approach to economic recovery in the post-COVID period is going to take particular account of that. What are you doing to encourage and to give reassurance to companies that are moving out of those areas to try and actually keep them there? 

I won't repeat what we've already heard in the Chamber today from the First Minister and the Minister for the economy talking about the interventions that we have proposed and offered to date in the context of a swift response to COVID. But the question that the Member poses is also relevant to the long term, as it highlights. I will refer him to the statement from the Deputy Minister Hannah Blythyn, talking about further investments in towns that are in parts of his region, and the Valleys taskforce in south Wales, which is looking at reprofiling some of the investments there to be able to support towns in that part of Wales too.

Work is ongoing, and has been ongoing, to ensure that we have specific responses to the challenges in town centres across Wales—that is, pressure on the retail sector, shops, and small businesses—and there have been a number of interventions focusing on that, in addition to providing advice on how towns can look at their public areas to support businesses to be able to operate in the post-COVID period. That advice has already been announced.

As a report by the Centre for Towns has highlighted, many Welsh coastal towns are facing down both short- and long-term effects from COVID-19. Leaving the EU provides an opportunity to boost our struggling coastal towns—for example, the Rt Hon Rishi Sunak MP, Chancellor, is preparing to introduce sweeping tax cuts and an overhaul of planning laws in up to 10 new free ports within a year of the UK becoming fully independent from the EU.

It has been indicated that the UK Government will open the bidding for towns, cities and regions to become free ports in the autumn budget later this year. What steps is the Welsh Government taking in conjunction with the UK Government to help promote coastal towns in north Wales as, indeed, very serious contenders to become free ports after we have left the EU? 

Well, I think the benefits of free ports are not as the Member, in her question, provides. The unalloyed advocacy of free ports I think needs to be questioned. However, the Government will look at any opportunity to support coastal communities right across Wales, whether they are port towns or not, and actually some of the funding available from the transforming towns funding will be available to coastal towns.

I do recognise the challenge that the Centre for Towns outlined in relation to the impact, in particular on some of our coastal communities, of COVID. I fear I don't quite have her optimism that Brexit provides the opportunity to resolve those questions. I think there are plenty of risks ahead for towns as a consequence of that, unless the UK Government does what it has said it will do all along, which is make sure that we have an economic settlement leaving the transition period that supports the economy. Actually, its current approach to negotiations doesn't suggest that will be possible, but we hope that it may change its approach in order to support exactly the kind of towns that Janet Finch-Saunders in her question refers to.

Minister, business improvement districts are supporting businesses in our town centres at 16 different locations across Wales, including in Aberdare in my own constituency, where a BID was established early this year. I note the statement made by the Welsh Government on 6 May that it will support BIDs in Wales with their running costs for up to three months. In Aberdare, I know this funding has, for example, helped the BID to provide social-distancing floor stickers and COVID-safe checklist posters free of charge to all businesses within the town centre. Moving forward, in what way do you think that BIDs can help our town centres to bounce back, to build better, and to boost the local and foundational economies in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic?

I thank Vikki Howells for that question. I echo her support for the measure to alleviate some of the costs that BIDs have faced over the past three months. BIDs play an important part in sustaining our town centres, and in my own constituency I've been in close contact with them in relation to some of the challenges specifically posed by COVID. Some businesses are able to respond quite nimbly to that, but others obviously will face particular challenges as a consequence of the restrictions that our response to COVID has necessarily brought into effect. As I say, I would encourage BIDs across Wales to take advantage of the safer public spaces guidance that the Welsh Government has issued in order to understand how best to configure town centres in order to maximise the opportunities for those businesses that can take advantage of these increasing easements.

And I think also I'll just refer her to the announcements made today, some of which will affect communities that I'm sure are close to her heart, in relation to support from the Valleys taskforce, but also the interventions that the Deputy Minister Hannah Blythyn has made from the transforming towns funding, which is a reprofiling and a repurposing of that funding in order to enable local adaptations to be made in towns in Wales to cope with post-COVID circumstances.

I'm with you, I'm with you. [Laughter.]