We now move to the short debate. I ask Alun Davies to introduce the subject he has chosen. 

Thank you very much, acting Presiding Officer. I should say at the beginning that Dawn Bowden has asked to take a minute of my time, and I've agreed to that. 

I wrote in the Western Mail this morning that one of the certainties of political life in Wales is the launch of a Valleys programme by an incoming Government or administration, and in saying that I should also, of course, declare my own interest in that in that I was a Minister who launched such a programme four years ago. In doing so, I followed a line of Ministers, which was probably led by Cledwyn Hughes back in 1966 when he established the derelict land unit of the old Welsh Office. I can see at least one of our Members remembers that incident back in the 1960s. I don't want to fall into the trap of spending time attacking your predecessors, especially when they're not there to defend themselves, but I think since then we've seen a succession of Ministers launching programmes in the Valleys in order to address the obvious problems faced by communities there. Some of those programmes have been principled attempts to actually create change, and others have been more a PR exercise to obviate the need for fundamental change.

I certainly hoped when we launched the Valleys taskforce some years ago that that would be one of those principled efforts to make real change, fundamental change to our futures. The Minister responding to the debate this afternoon was a part of that, and I felt we worked well together. He will use this opportunity to tell us whether that is true or not, no doubt, but I felt we worked well together. But he will also recollect the fundamental flaws that we needed to overcome. As a Minister back in 2016, I had a tiny budget, a small group of civil servants and no opportunity to run or lead programmes. He will remember that I had to go to speak to him and his officials to seek his support and his budgets in order to lead any economic change and, in the same way, I had to go to another Minister and other Ministers to try to persuade them to use their budgets and their officials to provide resources for other parts of the programme. It was disjointed at best and flawed at worst. It'll be for others to determine how well we did, and I won't seek to take part in that vanity this afternoon.

Since then, since 2016, myself and the Minister stood in Ebbw Vale in 2017 and launched the Tech Valleys programme in my own constituency. We've seen the Cardiff and Swansea city deals progress uncertainly, I think is probably fairest to say. We've heard talk of a shared prosperity fund but, to date, I'm not convinced that any of us taking part in this debate knows what it is or where it's going to go. We can assume that the Valleys will be a part of that. But what we have seen is work refocused, priorities changed. We haven't seen the improvement that we needed to see, and we all know that through all of the decades of these programmes, the Valleys remain the parts of Wales facing the greatest social and economic challenges. And it's also fair to say, I think, that if committee resolutions, press releases and speeches could eradicate poverty, then the Valleys would be a modern utopia. 

It's clear to me now that we need to revisit the fundamentals of this debate and how we take this forward, and I'd like to start that debate this afternoon. The Valleys taskforce came for conversations that took place ahead of the last Senedd election in 2016. There were many of us then who were pushing for a Valleys development authority. For all sorts of reasons, it was felt inappropriate and a taskforce was, in many ways, a compromise. I'm not convinced that that compromise is going to deliver in the long term. I believe we need to revisit that debate today. I want to do that by taking about four Cs, if you like: consistency, capacity, coherence and commitment. 

We need policy consistency. The Valleys have suffered too much from Ministers who either have a plan or a need to experiment with an economic theory, and every new Minister, myself included, needs a new plan, new target, new objectives. But the consequence of that is start and stop. It's right and proper that we review and change an approach that is not working, and it would be foolhardy to do otherwise. But to chop and change without such a review and without such a reason for a review is foolhardy. To set out targets, strategies, objectives and programmes at the beginning of a Parliament, only to dump those approaches halfway through, is to invite frustration from the people we represent, and to guarantee failure for our own programmes. We need to ensure that we are able to have consistency over the long term. 

But if we have policy consistency, we also need a means of delivering on that debate. We need a significant increase in capacity. Outside of Rhondda Cynon Taf, it's difficult to see any one of the Valleys authorities with the capacity to deliver on the scale required to create the conditions for a fundamentally different economic future. The hard truth is that most local authorities in the Valleys are too small to deliver the sort of economic inputs that I saw in Flanders some years ago, when we were looking at the Valleys park. The scale of the ambition there—and Dawn Bowden is here from Merthyr; she and I discussed the Crucible project—was fantastic. It was brilliant to see. But she knows and I know that it'll never happen without the capacity to make it happen, and that capacity simply doesn't exist today.

The Minister knows that the Tech Valleys programme that he and I launched has fantastic objectives—objectives that I signed up to that I want to see. But we also know that in Blaenau Gwent, we don't have the capacity to deliver it, and we've got to accept that and understand that. We also know that the only organisation, if you like, with the capacity to deliver and the firepower to deliver change is the Welsh Government. But we also know, if we're honest amongst ourselves, that Ministers and departments and officials all have different and competing priorities. Certainly in my experience, too much time and resource is wasted on trying to co-ordinate these competing funding streams and priorities, and not enough time delivering on what we actually have to do. 

And brings me to another C: coherence. It's been a fact of life, since the abolition of the Welsh Development Agency, that the key policy levers required by policy makers have sat in different places, with different leaderships, different priorities, and different objectives. The need of the Valleys for a coherent programme has never been greater. But the confusion of different structures, and the crowded field of competing priorities, mean that we have little in terms of coherence. We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to strategies and management, but we don't have the ability to deliver coherently. I've been campaigning for a train station in Abertillery, as the Minister knows only too well, I'm sure; we share nightmares about these things at different times. The Cardiff city deal proposed a compromise of a new stop in Aberbeeg. Now much as that would be appreciated, it's not a station in Abertillery, and it's never going to be. It's never going to deliver the step change that we require. But why is the Welsh Government, and why was the Valleys taskforce at that time, and why is the Cardiff city deal working in the same place according to different priorities, with different ambitions? We need to find ways of addressing that.

So, we need a commitment and a focus to our future, which is razor sharp and enduring. We know that things are going to get more difficult and not less difficult. The UK Government, I believe, is trying to politicise the way that the shared prosperity fund will work, and it will not deliver coherence with any of the other programmes we have in the Valleys. We're not going to see more coherence in the future, but less coherence. So, I want to see and I want to open up the debate on where we go in the Valleys. I believe that we need a Valleys development authority. I believe we need to bring together local government, and the resources of local government, with Welsh Government. I believe we need to involve the businesses in the Valleys, and the communities of the Valleys. And we need to do that on a statutory basis, with statutory powers and the ability to direct development into the future. We need to be able to do that at arm's length, I believe, from Government, where a Minister will set the priorities and will set the objectives, but where the authority itself will be responsible for delivering.

I hope that we can have this debate, and I hope that we can have a debate that is a rich debate and a positive debate, because I believe if we can get these things right in the Valleys, where things, I think, are potentially most difficult, then there's no reason why you can't get this right—I see Rhun ap Iorwerth is with us—in Anglesey, and in other parts of the country as well. And I know that the Minister has worked hard to ensure that we do have that focus in different parts of the country. So, I hope we can have this debate, I hope we can do it together, and I hope that we can have a debate that has a focus on what we want to achieve for the people that we all seek to represent. Thank you very much. 

Dawn Bowden. Can we unmute please?

Apologies for that, Llywydd; I am now unmuted. Can I thank Alun Davies for giving me a minute of his time in this debate? I hear the case that he's set out on behalf of his constituency and the wider Valleys communities. Alun, of course, draws on considerable experience, both as the constituency member for Blaenau Gwent, and as a former Minister who grappled directly with the deep-seated problems of our Valleys communities. 

Having now served almost one term in this Senedd, and, more recently, as a member of the Valleys taskforce, I'm clearly of the view that all that we have achieved so far—for example, the twenty-first century schools provision, new health and care facilities, transport and communication improvement, skills and apprenticeships, caring for our special Valleys environment, heritage and culture—has not yet gone far enough to turn around some of those deep-rooted economic, social, health and well-being issues described by Alun.

Of course, these problems are too often rooted in the experience of poverty, which the policies of successive UK Tory Governments have only exacerbated. However, unlike Alun, I'm not at this point making a case for a specific structural response to these matters, although, as always, he makes many salient points in his contribution. But in this Senedd term, I have noted the use of the Valleys taskforce, the North Wales Economic Ambition Board, enterprise zones, like the Haven Waterway and the Cardiff capital region. And in the case of the Valleys, I do hope that we now pull together the best of these lessons that these different models have provided, so that we keep improving the outcomes for our constituents in Valleys communities in the next term of this Senedd.

I call the Deputy Minister for Economy and Transport to reply—Lee Waters. I beg your pardon, I'm sorry, we have the boss—I call the Minister for Economy, Transport and North Wales, Ken Skates.

Thank you, acting Deputy Presiding Officer. It is a pleasure to be able to respond to the debate this afternoon. I'd obviously like to thank Alun Davies for bringing forward this debate, and also thank Dawn Bowden for contributing to it. Because there is no doubt that the last few months have been some of the saddest and most challenging that any of us can remember. And while we look at the work of combating coronavirus, which is not at an end, we must also focus on the future and on the work of the recovery, and in particular as to how we can give areas across the Heads of the Valleys the hope and the opportunity of a new economic future—a break with the past, a greener, fairer and more prosperous future.

As Alun has so eloquently made clear, the legacy of deindustrialisation across the Heads of the Valleys over the last 40 years has been significant, but we must overcome it. It left a mark on the environment, it left a mark on the health of the people of the area, and it requires a complex set of interventions to address. We don't have time this afternoon to run through all of them, but I'd like to just touch on a number that Ministers and Welsh Government are leading on, to help to shape that brighter, sustainable and fairer tomorrow for people in communities such as Blaenau Gwent and across the Heads of the Valleys.

The first and perhaps the most important is the opportunity that we have to re-energise and redesign many of the town centres and high streets that we have across the Valleys, to bring back pride in those towns. Often, they've felt too remote from centres of intense urban activity, they've felt too far away and left behind from the fruits of growth during the course of globalisation. We need to rebalance the way that the economy works in Wales, and across the UK, and in so doing we must promote the interests of towns.

COVID is a tragic event, but it's accelerating a significant shift in the way that we live, the way that we work, and the way that we structure our lives. And the growing use of digital technology and of more flexible working, away from large urban centres, does open up the opportunity for us to put new footfall and, by definition, new energy back into the hearts of many of our smaller Valleys communities. And that's why we've agreed the 'town centre first' approach right across Government. And the starting point for all Government policy is now: can this be done in the town centre? Can this building, can this function, can this new service be done on a high street or a town-centre location—from further education to care, from remote working to new forms of supported living, from Welsh Government activities being decentralised and deconcentrated into towns within the Valleys, from local government activities being located on the high street and in town centres? The opportunities are only limited by our own imagination and willingness to change. And we only need to look at some of our recent new further education buildings that have done so much to help re-energise areas in which they are located.

But, of course, I recognise equally that this is only one part of the answer. The story and the rich history of the Valleys, and the ongoing strength of the regional economy, lies in production, in the manufacturing, the development of high-quality, industrial goods, products and services, as can be seen in sectors like automotive and advance manufacturing, which have been so important in the communities that Alun Davies and Dawn Bowden represent and serve. And that's why our Tech Valleys programme, and its commitment to investing in new digital technologies to create a sustainable regional economy, is so vitally important, as Alun said. A £100 million of Welsh Government commitment to Tech Valleys over 10 years will create 1,500 sustainable jobs, and we remain absolutely committed to providing the expertise and the capacity needed for it to succeed.

Through the investment made by companies such as Thales, we're already seeing the potential of new opportunities arising from the fourth industrial revolution and from cutting-edge industries, such as 5G battery technology and research into future autonomous vehicles. But as I've mentioned, many of the challenges facing the Heads of the Valleys are not simple in nature and so require responses that are themselves highly sophisticated and wide-ranging—things that go much wider than simply the economic portfolio, again, as Alun said, taking into account the need to align economic development with spatial planning with transport policy and delivery.

To build a resilient, green and fairer economy of the future in the Heads of the Valleys requires interventions across the gamut of transport, housing, regeneration and health. And, acting Deputy Presiding Officer, of course, infrastructure is key to the success of any regional economy, alongside skills. In June of this year, we announced the appointment of Future Valleys as the preferred bidder for the next stage of work on the transformational long-term plan to dual the A465. And construction, I'm pleased to say, will start in earnest in early 2021. We expect that project to deliver £400 million of direct spend in Wales, with gross value added generated for the wider Welsh economy at over £670 million, with £170 million spending within the local supply chain. 

And, of course, metro is another piece of infrastructure that can support the Heads of the Valleys economy, with upgrades of the Ebbw Vale and Maesteg lines very much part of our planning work. And we have to ensure that those services for trains are ultimately delivered for those areas that lie outside what we describe as core Valleys lines at the moment. These investments are going to be critical as the Heads of the Valleys economy recovers from challenges of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic over the next few years.

I read with interest Alun Davies's promotion of the Valleys development agency, not least because I was determined to create a place-based decentralised approach to economic development when we published the economic action plan. And part of that plan saw challenge and guidance from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development with regard to how to best deliver regional economic development—how to create the right institutions and vehicles to ensure that you have strong and powerful regional economies. And, of course, in its recent report, the OECD promoted the creation of regional development agencies, which align perfectly with Alun's argument and which I'm very, very sympathetic to.

I'll leave my contribution there, but suffice it to say that both myself and every Minister in the Welsh Government remains fundamentally committed to supporting the Heads of the Valleys to succeed. It's played a pivotal and rich role in shaping our history and it can play a central role in our proud and vibrant future—a brighter and a greener and a fairer future that can support individuals in communities right across the region. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister. That concludes today's business.

The meeting ended at 18:38.