I thank David Melding for the way he described the initiative, and it is exactly to do what he has described. It is to try and make sure that the talent, commitment and sense of enterprise that is absolutely to be found in those communities, and among those young people, does not become suppressed by the impact of the virus. That means we have to work harder to make sure that the help is available to them—help both in terms of the advice that they need and the mentoring that they may need, but sometimes in hard cash that they need in order to be able to move their ideas for new businesses forward.

I think it will be important to allow the scheme to have a run and to evaluate partly as we go along, but not to hold up the ambitions we have from it by trying to pause it too soon in order to assess its effectiveness. In the current, extraordinary circumstances, I wanted to see that scheme push ahead. I wanted to even take a few risks, in a way that Governments sometimes find difficult. Because if you are dealing with people who have new ideas and who want to try something that hasn't been tried before, if you are not prepared sometimes to back a young person or back somebody who has got that idea, recognising that not all those ideas will succeed, then you don't get the scheme off the ground. That's the spirit in which I would like the scheme to be taken forward.