8. Will the Minister outline how the Welsh Government plans to assess the success of the Rural Development Grants programme? OQ55502

The Welsh Government has committed to a comprehensive evaluation plan for the rural development programme. Work is ongoing to assess the impact and outcomes from individual schemes, and the RDP as a whole will also be evaluated against each of its agreed priorities.

Minister, you'll be very aware that the 'Ensuring Value for Money from Rural Development Grants Made Without Competition' Audit Wales report, published in June, has damningly concluded that the Welsh Government awarded £53 million of rural development funds without ensuring the grants would deliver value for money. Amongst other findings, the report also found that the Welsh Government made individual grant awards without demonstrating enough consideration of value for money and gave additional funds to existing projects without finding out whether or not they were truly successful.

Now, on 8 September, the Welsh Government, very welcomely, made a further slew of RDG funds available. So, Minister, my question is: what faith can we have that the new wave of RDG spending will be effective when it remains clear that requisite checks and balances surrounding accountability do not appear to exist?

Thank you. Officials have acknowledged the approach to testing value for money for a number of historic RDP projects did not represent best practice and, as part of our ongoing review of delivery of the RDP, officials had already identified the issues that were described by the audit office Wales in the report that you spoke about, and had already taken action to remedy them. The report's conclusions provided helpful guidance to ensure that all the necessary actions have been implemented.

As the report made very clear, the issue is that value for money was not properly tested in the appraisal of projects, and all those projects have been reviewed to ensure they do, in practice, deliver value for money. Audit Wales included anonymised case studies, so I don't want to undermine the delivery of these projects by setting out exactly which projects they are. Though, of course I and my officials do recognise the need for appropriate scrutiny of them at the right time and in the right setting, and officials will be giving evidence to the Public Accounts Committee to provide evidence in respect of the approach taken to the assessment of value for money through the RDP. But as I said, that work had already started before the audit office report, which then helped us with the announcement as to what projects we would support in the next tranche of funding with the RDP projects.