Supporting Businesses

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:35 pm on 5 October 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:35, 5 October 2021

The Welsh Government is committed to supporting town centres. The Transforming Towns fund has many tens of millions of pounds in it that we are investing across Wales to create the town centres of the future. That is the point that I always try to make—that if we think we will sustain town centres and, indeed, the retail sector by just trying to go back to the way things used to be, I think that effort is doomed to fail. There is a future for town centres, but it will rely on a wider range of activities than simply retail. It will involve leisure activities, it will involve residential purposes, it will involve things that bring people into the centre of our towns in a way that will make them vibrant places that people will wish to visit.

Now, there's a whole range of things we are doing: from one end of the spectrum, £200,000 to make sure that digital connectivity in some of our most disadvantaged town centres can be improved, to £15 million of investment to allow all local authorities to tackle those abandoned buildings that too often disfigure town centres and make it more difficult to make them the attractive places we wish them to be. When you add all of that up, Llywydd, as I say, it comes to over £100 million worth of investment for the purposes to which Jane Dodds has drawn attention.