Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Trefnydd – in the Senedd at 2:52 pm on 23 September 2020.
I'm happy to provide that update. So, my colleague Lee Waters has been leading on some really important work in terms of the foundational economy, and, as part of that work, we commissioned the Centre for Local Economic Strategies to work with us to ensure that we can identify public services boards clusters across Wales and work with them to consider new ways of working and how they can maximise the procurement opportunities in local economies. Now, that work has been affected by COVID, but implementation plans will be agreed by the end of this month. And the underlying objective for that is to identify areas of procurement that currently flow out of the region or, indeed, out of Wales, and to ensure that that's used as the baseline then to develop those new approaches, to drive up the involvement of local suppliers in expenditure. So, a really important piece of work and a new way of working and, as I say, we should be able to say more about the agreement of plans to take that forward later on this month.