And we are having some successes, but there are also frustrations, there's no doubt about it. And I think Jenny Rathbone was right to challenge the public services boards in this. The thrust of the comments so far have been directed at the Welsh Government, but this is a whole-system approach that we need, and all public bodies have a responsibility to make sure they use their spending to benefit their communities. But let us not be under any illusion as to how difficult this is. Again, as Helen Mary said, this is a cultural shift that is needed. We have baked into the system the idea that we should always be delivering at the lowest price, and to shift that to a sense of social value is not a simple or quick thing to do, and I think Russell George, in challenging us, saying, 'Why hasn't it been possible to achieve this in 20 years of devolution?'—well, I've got to tell him, it hasn't been achieved anywhere else in the UK either. And that's because it is going against the grain of decades of practice—practice, it must be said, pursued by his Government too.

But I think there are opportunities through the crisis. So, just to give the Senedd one example, and that's the procurement of PPE through the pandemic. Well, we have been able to use the crisis to cut through some red tape that might normally slow things down to secure at least 20 per cent of PPE from Welsh suppliers, and the pandemic has also shown us that, when it comes to well-being-critical goods—and that's what the foundational economy, the everyday economy, is about; it's about well-being-critical services—we need not just supply, but we need resilience. Because, when the pandemic hit, it was all very well buying things for the cheapest cost in China, but, when we couldn't get it out of China, we were in trouble, and it was Welsh manufacturers who helped us out of a tough spot there. And we need to make sure, as we rebuild out of the pandemic, that resilience and local supply and shortening those international supply chains are at the front of our minds as we build new systems. And that is something that we are working on.

But, just to give you an example, we've been working with an engineering firm in Pontardawe who have transferred their activity to producing masks. But it's not as simple as being able to produce the masks at a competitive price—competitive with China—they also need to make sure that it can be procured within the regulations and that it meets the certification standards. You can't simply do any old thing and call it a mask and sell it into the NHS; it has to meet regulatory standards and there's a long process to go through to get those certificates. Now we've been working very intensively with these firms to get them through those barriers, and we're hopeful of getting a successful outcome. Where you simply wouldn't be getting another factory to open in Pontardawe, we can use what's there through public spending to make sure value is achieved within the Welsh economy. But I give that as an example to Members, just to understand the process that has to be gone through—all the ducks in the row that need to be lined up to pull this off. You need the willingness from procurement policy and from the professionals to procure locally. You need to be able to get a price at a point that is within the appetite of the public sector to spend. You need to make sure that the regulatory and the certification measures are all there.

And that's equally as true with food. I met yesterday with Castell Howell, as it happens, with officials, to go through an understanding of how we can encourage more food to be purchased within the Welsh economy. The work that has been mentioned by Russell George in the beginning, by the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, has done an analysis for us on food spend within the Welsh economy, and we know around half of all the money spent on food in Wales through the NHS goes to Welsh suppliers, but about half leaks out of Wales, and, in nearly all of those cases, there are Welsh suppliers that could take up those contracts. So, what's stopping us shifting that into the local economy? Well, there are a number of things, and that's what we're systematically working through now with clients, with public services boards, and we have made progress. COVID has slowed things down, it has interrupted us—understandably, I think, because the public services boards have been focused on dealing with the day-to-day crisis, and not what comes the other side of it. But we've picked that back up; we are now making progress with five PSB clusters.

To address the point of Jenny Rathbone on this food point, I think she's absolutely right about making sure that we have horticulture produced in Wales that can be supplied into Welsh schools and hospitals. We have a project through the experimental challenge fund in Carmarthenshire of getting local food on local plates, but also, in terms of the horticulture, we have funded—she mentioned small amounts of money, but we've funded just shy of £0.5 million in a project using controlled environment agriculture for three sites across Wales to try and grow crops in a non-conventional method, which we think has real potential, and that work has started, and I'd be happy to update her further on what's going on there.FootnoteLink