Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Economy, Transport and North Wales – in the Senedd at 1:51 pm on 11 November 2020.

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Photo of Helen Mary Jones Helen Mary Jones Plaid Cymru 1:51, 11 November 2020

I'm grateful to the Minister for that. If I can take us in a slightly different, more medium-term direction, we were very grateful for the Minister's input to our discussions in committee this morning, and one of the areas that we touched on was the way in which—. Equality organisations have been saying to us as a committee that equality considerations, fairness, haven't always been easy to mainstream into economic development policy. There have been specific initiatives, but it's not necessarily been mainstreamed.

The Minister, I'm sure, will acknowledge that, in order to discover whether any future initiatives are working, there needs to be an effective monitoring system, but also that we don't want to make that too bureaucratic for businesses to respond to. So, can I ask the Minister this afternoon if he'll give consideration to working with partners who are experts in this field, both in terms of sex equality, race equality and thinking of the disability movements as well, to see if we can generate a simple system whereby he will be able to monitor, and therefore those of us on the appropriate committee will be able to monitor, whether his intentions with regard to mainstreaming a fair work agenda, really addressing some of the disparities between men and women in the job market, disparities between black people and people of colour—? Is it possible, and will he give consideration to creating a really robust and clear system that isn't too bureaucratic but whereby we can actually see what's happening when it comes to building back better in this regard?