4. Will the Minister make a statement on Welsh Government investment to support economic development in the Heads of the Valleys? OQ56186

Our strategy is to lay a strong and positive foundation for change across the area. To date, the Tech Valleys programme has made commitments of over £27 million, which will facilitate at least 600 sustainable jobs. The Transforming Towns programme, too, has a strong Heads of the Valleys focus as part of its £110 million investment.

I'm grateful to the Minister for that response. We've seen a number of different reports published over the last few days, and without spending time listing them all, they all say essentially two things: first of all that the depth of the economic challenge facing us post COVID and post Brexit is far greater than, perhaps, we would have recognised some time ago, and the second thing they say is that the depth of this challenge is also not borne equally, that we're seeing equality across different communities and different parts of the country having an impact whereby the poorest communities are affected far more harshly than richer communities. One of the issues that's facing the Heads of the Valleys, of course, is that an economy requires support and needs continued investment. We've seen the UK Government respond to this by cutting back on the European funds that they promised us—not a penny less—and also breaking their promises over the shared prosperity fund and other things. How is the Welsh Government going to make good the broken promises from the Conservatives? How will the Welsh Government look towards the investment to take forward the Heads of the Valleys in the future to ensure that the reports we're seeing this week do not become a reality for the people that we all seek to represent?

I think that's an excellent and timely point. I was just reading earlier the report from Sheffield Hallam University by Steve Fothergill and Christina Beatty on the impact of coronavirus on older industrial Britain. I believe that they are soon to speak to the cross-party group on industrial communities that Vikki Howells chairs. They were making the point in their report that the downturn has wiped out 10 years' progress in the economy of older industrial Britain. So, clearly, there is a challenge here right across the UK in communities facing similar challenges, which the European structural funding, of course, was designed to address. The UK Government does now have a moral obligation to replace those to make sure that its successor programmes are attuned to the needs of those communities. So far, they have not done so, but there is still time for them to keep their promises. 

On top of that, the Welsh Government is doing a number of things. Obviously, the project I mentioned in my earlier answer—the Tech Valleys and the Valleys taskforce project—has made a number of very practical and useful interventions in Alun Davies's own constituency, and we've got some further announcements due on that soon. But allied to that, touching on the interventions from Darren Millar and from Helen Mary Jones, it's about what we do for the grounded communities, essentially—for those young people in Kidwelly and in Blaina and elsewhere who want to make a future where they and their families have grown up. That's where our everyday economy project really is tightly focused: how do we make use of the money we're already spending through the public sector to make sure that as much of that does not leak out of the community as possible. That can make real tangible impacts.

I know Alun Davies and I have discussed before the opportunities for food processing and production along the Heads of the Valleys road in particular. In NHS Wales, we know from our own analysis that 49 per cent of the money we spend on food goes outside of Wales. Now, we can shift some of that back into Wales, and in every part of Wales there are food producers that could be supplying their local health boards. That will make a real, everyday impact to our economies and communities. And food is just one example. So, that is part of a reform programme that I'm leading work on and that we have early progress on, but there's much more to do.