Regional Investment

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:39 pm on 29 September 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:39, 29 September 2020

Well, Llywydd, I think Huw Irranca-Davies makes a very important point, and he does so with all the authority of someone who has chaired our regional investment steering group, who chairs the European structural funds monitoring committee and chairs our European advisory group. So, the things that he says to the Senedd come with all the authority and the information that he has been able to draw together in those very important jobs.

Now, the plans for future investment in Wales that he has drawn up with those colleagues, a made-in-Wales arrangement reflecting international best practice, meeting the specific needs of different sectors and parts of Wales with greater delegation of decision making to regions, that is an approach that has been endorsed not simply by the Senedd, but by the all-party parliamentary group chaired by our colleague Stephen Kinnock at Westminster, the Welsh Local Government Association, Universities Wales, the Financial Standards Authority, the Confederation of British Industry, the Wales Council for Voluntary Action and independent think tanks like the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

The danger is now that, in pursuit of narrow sectional party political advantage, the UK Government is engineering a position where they will take decisions away from the democratically elected Senedd and put them in the hands of an unelected—as far as Wales is concerned—Secretary of State for Wales, and I'm afraid all the warnings that Huw Irranca-Davies has made this afternoon are very likely to turn out to be true unless we can stop those plans in their tracks, and we will be working as hard as we can to achieve exactly that.