Diolch, Llywydd. I'd like to give a minute of my time to Peter Fox, James Evans, Janet Finch-Saunders and Samuel Kurtz.

I'm pleased to bring forward this debate today, 'Regenerating town and city centres in Wales: More of the same will simply not work'. It is now more than ever important to discuss these issues after the past two years inflicting untold damages to our towns and city centres. It's crucially important that we discuss the key issues facing our towns and city centres and offer workable solutions to safeguard our constituents and communities going forward.

The challenges facing Wales following COVID-19 are similar to the regeneration of 1945 post-war Britain. National and local government need to deliver integrated solutions and make brave decisions going forward, providing honest, strong and dynamic leadership. Sadly, in my patch of South Wales East and the rest of Wales, the outlook for many town and city centres is bleak. Newport is thought to have the most closed shops in all of Britain, with more than one third in its centre permanently closed. This shows the scale of the challenge that we're facing here in Wales. 

Worryingly, COVID-19 has cost businesses in cities and large town centres more than a third of their potential takings, and shut down thousands since March 2020. The Centre for Cities 'City centres: past, present and future' report highlighted that cities like Newport have suffered significant challenges due to lack of investment over the years from high-skilled businesses. These firms increasingly prefer a city centre location as the dense business environment allows them to share ideas and knowledge easily. If a city centre is failing to attract these types of firms, the city as a whole will lose out on this investment, in turn affecting wage and career progression and opportunities locally. 

The lack of inward investment has had a devastating knock-on effect for the local and Welsh economy as a whole. Opportunities have been missed to attract high-skilled and higher-wage jobs to the area, which feeds back into the diversification issue that I mentioned previously. This is a prime example of why free ports, in partnership with the UK Government, should be promoted and brought to places like Newport, to encourage that inward investment. The report also shows the drastic scale of how bad it's now become in my own patch, with Newport having a 24 per cent shop vacancy rate, compared to Brighton and Birmingham, which have a between 8 and 10 per cent vacancy rate.