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.