5. What assessment has the First Minister made of the impact of Brexit on young people in Wales? OQ56249

I thank the Member for that question, Llywydd. Thanks to the fantastic—. I do beg your pardon, Llywydd; I'm turning over too many pages here. It's shameful that our young people will be excluded from the Erasmus programme, the largest international exchange programme in history, will no longer be able to live and work easily in the EU 27, and will suffer from the economic fallout of the UK Government's approach to Brexit.

Thank you, First Minister, and, as you know, I've spoken before in the Senedd about how, as a young person from a deprived community who'd never even had a foreign holiday before, I was able to study at the University of Paris thanks to funding and support from the Erasmus programme. There seems to be little doubt that the Turing programme will be a very inferior successor, and there are real fears that, thanks to the UK Government's spiteful, self-defeating and totally unnecessary decision to withdraw from Erasmus+, many young people in Wales will lose out, especially those who are most disadvantaged. Now, there has been some speculation that a way can be found to enable young people in Wales and Scotland to continue to participate in Erasmus, which is something I wholeheartedly welcome. Can the First Minister update the Senedd on any discussions in this regard, and can he assure me that he will pursue every possible avenue to enable Welsh young people to continue to participate in this life-changing scheme? 

Llywydd, I entirely agree with Lynne Neagle—it is a life-changing experience to go abroad to work, to study, to meet other young people with different experiences, and it is one of the most awful decisions of this UK Government to deny those opportunities to young people not just in Wales, but across the rest of the UK. The Minister for Education received a letter on 19 January from the Minister of State for Universities in the UK Government. This is what the letter said: 'You raised the possibility of Wales joining Erasmus+ as an independent participant. You do not have the competence to enter into any such agreement'.

So, not only are they determined to deny opportunities by their own actions, but they seek to frustrate the efforts that we would make—and we'd certainly make them alongside the Scottish Government, if that was possible—to find other ways in which those opportunities could be made available. That is not to say, Llywydd, for a moment that we do not go on thinking of every way in which we can to find opportunities for those young people. I met the German ambassador recently. It was a very positive meeting in which he talked about bilateral possibilities for exchanges between young people here and young people in Germany. I discussed the whole Erasmus business with the foreign Minister of the Republic of Ireland recently, again looking to see whether there are any avenues that we might be able to explore there.

We want young people from Wales to be able to visit, to work, to study, to get all the advantages that Lynne Neagle pointed to, and we want young people from other parts of the world to come here to Wales as well—a possibility completely ruled out in the Turing scheme. At the weekend, Llywydd, I gave myself a small treat and listened for half an hour to the World Service. It was an interview with a very distinguished epidemiologist, leading a team at London university, and during the interview the interviewer asked him, 'How did you come to work in London?' and he said, 'Well, I was brought up in Germany, I went to Belfast on an Erasmus scheme, and I've stayed here ever since.' That's what we are turning our back on by the small-minded approach of this UK Government to what has been one of the jewels of the European Union.