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.