Well, Dirprwy Lywydd, I think, for too long, the debate around the Valleys has been a bit of a Punch and Judy show, with people rightly pointing out the impact the deindustrialisation has caused and the impact that the Thatcher Government has had, and I've always been reluctant to go there, but that contribution really did take the biscuit, I must say. For Laura Anne Jones to point to a 67,000 jobs gap in the Valleys and blame the Welsh Government for it, I think really is stretching credibility beyond its limits. And the so-called £5 billion that Laura Anne Jones has pointed to that the UK Government has so generously given us barely covers the cost of the NHS uplift and leaves our public finances in a very real stretched position; not least, we're not getting the proper Barnett share for rail schemes and for HS2, which, if we had them, then we could spread further investment into the Valleys. So, I find these sort of glib observations really unhelpful, given the scale of the challenge before us. So, I shall not go any further into that particular Punch and Judy show, but there's plenty of script there if I wanted to.

To turn to some of her more sensible points, in terms of how do we make the empty property programme self-sustaining, given, as she rightly said, the scale of the challenge in the Valleys—Rhondda Cynon Taf, for example, has the second highest level of empty homes in all of the UK—I think one of the clever things about the scheme that Councillor Andrew Morgan and his colleagues developed in Rhondda Cynon Taf was that this would be self-sustaining. We've made sure, as we've designed this with the authorities, that they've put investment on the table to match ours, that, following the RCT example, they've been requested to increase council tax on empty homes, so they're generating some revenue that can then fuel the next round of grants that can go out. And of course, these are grants that are repayable should people sell their properties or move within five years. So, what we hope is that, by getting local authorities to co-operate like this and to collaborate, we will open their eyes to the possibility of what RCT has done and spread that, and that they will then put their own resources into it and see the benefit to their own communities. After all, RCT started this because they found a problem with public health officials being called to rats at houses. So, there was a problem they had to deal with, and they came up with an innovative solution, which we have scaled.

I don't accept the critique that there's a lack of ambition behind the project. It was never going to be possible to reverse generations of challenging economic circumstances in such a short period, but what I hope my statement has shown is that, through trial and different place-based approaches, collaboratively with local authorities—so, it's not people coming in with solutions; it's coming up with solutions together—we will kick start a regeneration that will have a dynamic beyond the time of the taskforce.