Thank you, Presiding Officer. There is a community of interest throughout the Swansea bay city region. Swansea was the largest city in western Europe to be a recipient of objective 1 funding. I have no pride in that whatsoever. Throughout the region, we have Port Talbot with steel, Llanelli with tinplate, Pembrokeshire with energy, Carmarthenshire with agriculture and Swansea with major Government services such as the DVLA. The area has Swansea University and the University of Wales Trinity St David on several sites. So, why is it relatively poor? The cause, as with everywhere that is relatively poor, is too many people working irregular hours on the minimum wage. 

I welcome the Swansea bay city deal, and I congratulate the councils, the Welsh and Westminster Governments for their support for this deal. While helpful, this will not transform the economy. If the Swansea bay region is to have a successful, vibrant and thriving economy, we need to concentrate on key growth areas and support those industries with grants, incentives and other help. We can no longer hope that offering companies more than anywhere else to bring a branch factory will develop our economy, especially as most of these branch factories close down in a very short time.

Although everyone will have different ideas on which sectors to support, it’s my belief that we must concentrate on supporting and nurturing the life sciences, ICT, creative industries, advanced manufacturing and professional services. The evidence also tells us that businesses in the life sciences sector can grow very quickly in a global market, with the rewards for success being huge. This means that a small number of successful businesses in the life sciences industry have the power and potential to generate great economic value for the city region, creating well-paid jobs.

Professional and financial services are, however, sectors where Wales, particularly outside Cardiff, remains weak or very weak. We need to develop our professional services and use the flourishing university sector to generate employment in the area. In the 1970s and 1980s, Swansea University was at the forefront of finite element analysis, yet Wales generated very little, if any, benefit from it. Professional services in finance and engineering can generate high salaries and also produce clusters of related activity. We have a major and well-respected insurance company in the area, but we desperately need to attract and support more high-value and high-wage employment in the financial sector. 

One key industry that is not geographically constrained, and has the ability to generate huge wealth, is ICT. There is a tendency for ICT companies to cluster, not just in Cambridge and Silicon Valley, but around other university cities, and around places like Leamington Spa. With the quality of ICT graduates being produced in the Welsh universities, it has to be a severe disappointment that Wales has a lower proportion of its population working for ICT companies than the rest of the UK. Developing an economy is about developing and promoting high-value economic sectors. We will not develop a successful economy and high gross value added on low pay and seasonal work. We, therefore, need a strategy for each of these targeted growth sectors.