5. What discussions has the Welsh Government had with UK Ministers regarding the future implementation of the proposed shared prosperity fund? OQ55821

Llywydd, minimal opportunities have been offered to discuss the shared prosperity fund with UK Ministers, despite requests to do so. We do not now expect this to be made good between now and the comprehensive spending review on 25 November.

Thank you, First Minister. I recently met with ColegauCymru to discuss the importance of the shared prosperity fund to the future funding of skills and apprenticeships, with, as you know, European funding having been a key driver of the skills agenda. There's real concern within the sector that without the same replacement funding it will be increasingly difficult for colleges to support local economies and wider society. We know that this is just one example of the harm caused by the lack of clarity and commitment from UK Ministers. First Minister, will your Government raise with your UK counterparts the concerns of the FE sector here in Wales?

Thank you, Vikki Howells. We will certainly do that. We do this at every opportunity. It falls on very deaf ears, Llywydd. The Welsh Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, chaired by a Conservative Welsh MP, said themselves that they were

'disappointed that the UK Government appears to have made negligible progress in developing its replacement for ESI funding and that its repeated promises of a consultation have failed to materialise, demonstrating a lack of priority.' 

Our colleague the Counsel General wrote to Robert Jenrick, the member of the Cabinet responsible for the shared prosperity fund, on 12 October, asking for a meeting to discuss matters in relation to education and all the other things that have been supported by EU funding in Wales. We're yet even to receive a reply, let alone to have a meeting.

And Vikki Howells is right, Llywydd, to point to the importance of this funding in our further education sector. And there it is not simply a matter of the quantum of money, but it's the fact that, under European funding, you had a seven-year multi-annual funding framework, so that if you're going to bring apprentices through the system, you can't do it in a single year, you need to be able to plan over years ahead, so that you can employ staff, you can develop facilities, you can offer guarantees to those young people. We don't know even how much money we have coming from next year, let alone the opportunity to have that guaranteed over the sort of period that we'd previously been able to enjoy with all the benefits that Vikki Howells noted.