Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Trefnydd – in the Senedd at 2:13 pm on 21 October 2020.
I'm absolutely keen to work with Swansea council and with the health board to see what more we can do in order to ensure that local companies win those contracts. The data that I referred to in my response, of course, only referred to local authorities, because other public sector organisations, such as health boards and others, don't necessarily reside in a single area, so we haven't been able to include them in the analysis. So, it's worth just bearing that in mind as a bit of a health warning for that data.
But I absolutely agree that there is more that we can do, and we can do that through our approach on the foundational economy programme. We've engaged the Centre for Local Economic Strategies to work with clusters of public services boards across Wales to identify opportunities for localising procurement expenditure. That's really important and exciting work, which I think has the opportunity to be quite a game changer there.
We also, of course, have the foundational economy challenge fund, and Swansea council is delivering one of those projects, which aims to increase the proportion of construction contracts that are won by local contractors here in the area. So, again, that's an important piece of work, and the learning that we have from that we can spread across Wales as well. And I think that the pandemic has provided us with huge opportunities to support and engage with local businesses in a way that we haven't been able to support them before and engage with them before. There are some excellent examples of how local engineering firms and others are changing the way that they produce things in order to help with the effort by moving into production of PPE and so on. That's been fantastic in terms of supporting local business but also giving that certainty to other public services in terms of that supply chain of important goods during the pandemic.