Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:36 pm on 23 February 2021.
Well, thank you for that and for the endorsement of an experimental approach. Just to take the final point first, I think it's a really legitimate point about businesses in the food sector falling between the food division and the economic development division, and one of the challenges of the foundational economy is it does cut across a number of different silos. And I think that also speaks to the fact that, in traditional economic development terms, a lot of these sectors have been seen as too mundane to bother with, really, because they're not glamorous, they don't produce massive gross value added or productivity gains, they tend not to be in the higher range of the salaries. So, in terms of the legitimate task we set officials working on economic development, it was to fix many of these problems we have. This is not the easiest part of the spectrum to start with, so they have, understandably, focused on other areas where they can get gains faster. And I don't criticise that; I merely observe it, and I think that this is something that we need to address and that we are doing through this work.
So, the work with Castell Howell is very interesting because that's a good example of where we can seduce ourselves with postcode procurement, as it's called. So, the Welsh public sector spends a significant amount with Castell Howell and, on paper, that's good news for Welsh procurement. But, actually, only about 10 per cent of the goods Castell Howell supplies are from Welsh producers. Now, there are all sorts of reasons for that, so we're sitting down, working with them, and they are as keen as mustard to address this. They've been—as Helen Mary Jones knows—keen advocates of local producers for their entire history. But there are real barriers in the way that make it hard for them to get up that figure from 10 per cent. But we're working with them to get that up to 30 per cent and then learning lessons for the rest of the distribution sector for how that can be done. Because often, it is through the buyers that we can make the greatest advances rather than just through the producers themselves. And one of the interesting things, speaking to the Hywel Dda health board director of finance, is that the directors of finance don't have visibility of the business sector. So, they may say, if they were to set themselves a target of increasing spend, for example, they're not connected into knowing what capable businesses there would be in their region who would be able to fill that opportunity. So, that's another thing that we're learning through this and putting right.
So, I think there are lots of exciting and huge potential developments in play, but it remains a fact that the NHS food bill is something like £22 million, whereas the Welsh supermarket household prize is something like 20 times that. If we can get Welsh food suppliers into Welsh supermarkets, that, really, is where the prize is, and, obviously, farmers have been making this argument for a long time. But we need to diversify the food that we grow in Wales and grow far more crops and vegetables year round and find a market for them locally. And that's absolutely on point with all of our agendas, not least the future generations agenda. So, I think we are learning and, as I say, it's frustrating in that progress hasn't been as fast as I would have liked, and COVID hasn't helped that. But we are getting somewhere. We're doing a major piece of work now, as I mentioned, on understanding the potential and the barriers.
Helen Mary Jones asked about the work we're doing with the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, and I shared a platform with them this morning at the NHS Wales Finance Academy conference, where we looked, with NHS finance directors, at these issues in detail to try and get them to see the role they have to play in economic development, not just in healthcare, and they are certainly very much up for that challenge. So, the ambition is, with all public services boards, to mainstream these learnings. We've started off with a smaller group to trial it, but the intention, as always, is to scale—and I'm talking to Vaughan Gething and Andrew Goodall about doing that, and they are very supportive as well.
And to finish with her first question on the community of practice and the barriers—. I mentioned in the answer to Russell George some of the barriers we've been facing. So, the community of practice, again, has been delayed because of COVID, but it has proven useful in the cross-fertilising between projects or the common problems they're having. I think the work we need to do now for the final period of their work is to really get into the guts to understand the barriers, and I am certainly working with senior officials from across different departments to look at the projects relevant to each department, so they know—. And, as I say, I'm as interested in what they've struggled with as what they've succeeded with, because that'll be a symptom of a broader problem.