Great, thank you for those questions. You're right that this is significant spend within Wales. It's around £7 billion that's spent through the Welsh public sector every year on procurement, and in Wales we have 267,000 businesses, of which 99.4 per cent are small and medium-sized enterprises. So, huge opportunities for us to be supporting these businesses. Our business support agencies in Wales, such as Business Wales and Sell2Wales, are there to help SMEs adapt to and meet the special requirements of the public sector, and also changes in procurement—because of the large amount of reform that we have at the moment, they need to be actively engaged to help them win more contracts. So, one of the things that we are doing is looking very much at our digital systems, and we have a digital action plan for procurement that is now in its delivery phase. One of those important strands of work is to upgrade the Sell2Wales system to support the open contracting data standard work that I've mentioned previously in response to another colleague, and to improve transparency. And I think that that will be important in terms of helping small and medium-sized enterprises engage better, because I think that there's work for both sides, really—there's work for the public sector to do to be more accessible and make its systems easier to navigate, but also work for the private sector to do, then, in terms of engaging.

And I mentioned the public policy notices previously, and one of them, which looks at small and medium-sized enterprises, does give advice to Welsh local government and other contracting authorities in terms of what they can do to help engage more small and medium-sized enterprises. Examples of the advice include cutting down on admin that is needed to tender, simplifying documents, providing very clear briefs that identify all of the requirements and using plain language. You'd think that would be a given, but, actually, procurement is so complex that if it could be broken down for businesses that perhaps haven't navigated public sector procurement before, I think that that will make a difference.

And then we also recommend adopting e-procurement tools, so those would be including, but not limited to, e-sourcing, dynamic purchasing systems, e-auctions, e-invoicing, electronic catalogues and purchase cards, and then packaging large contracts into separate elements to make use of regional lots, if that's possible and appropriate, to ensure that SMEs aren't excluded from contracting. And then we also ask that potential SME suppliers are given the opportunity to discuss in person procurement in order to understand if they are suitable for that particular lot.

So, I think that there's good advice that we've provided recently in our new procurement notes, but I'm very happy to have further discussions with the WLGA as to what more we can do in this space to support them to procure locally.