Thank you, acting Presiding Officer. I'm very grateful to the Senedd Business Committee and to those that supported this motion allowing our Senedd to be part of the growing conversation around a universal basic income. The universal basic income is not a new idea, but it is an idea that is starting to make its voice heard. As always, there is resistance to change and some will always insist that looking to improve people's lives just isn't possible. These voices have been raised before in the cause of resisting change, saying we can't afford to do better: when children stopped being sent down the mines, when the introduction of the welfare state and pensions were mooted and, of course, when our magnificent NHS was brought into being.

In making the case for a UBI trial in Wales as a first step to Wales adopting the policy, I thought I would share with you what sparked my own interest in the subject. It was initially a very basic question: how do we avoid the ills of poverty in a world that is so chaotic and changing? How do we create a platform of security that allows people to grow, to learn, study and to fulfil their potential in an age of increasing uncertainty? What COVID has shown us is that we can and we should intervene to ensure everyone can be an actor in a market economy. As always, the people in the forefront of my mind are the amazing residents of Alyn and Deeside. My community has seen economic calamity before. My generation grew up in the shadow of the huge job losses at Shotton steel, and it is still the single biggest redundancy in western Europe. This devastating event could be repeated again across a whole range of industries due to automation job losses. This time, the Government needs to be working for us and not against us.

Artificial intelligence is set up to take even more jobs, and we could even make it serve humankind and embrace it, or we can allow it to create a wave of job losses that are not replaced. Alyn and Deeside has been identified as the constituency with the most to lose. It is not just manufacturing, retail and transport where changes have happened; thousands of white-collar jobs in the legal profession, accounting and healthcare will soon be done by AI. There are other huge changes that we are already going through or that are hurtling towards us that mean we may need to intervene to ensure people have the stability of a genuine safety net and springboard.