7. Will the Minister make a statement on the support available to small businesses in Mid and West Wales? OQ57672

The Welsh Government remains fully committed to supporting micro, small and medium enterprises in all parts of Wales. SMEs can access a wide range of information, advice and support through our Business Wales service and, of course, the Development Bank of Wales.

Thank you, Minister. Small and medium-sized enterprises, as you have said, account for 62.4 per cent of employment and 37.9 per cent of turnover, worth around £46 billion for the Welsh economy. Just last week I spoke to a restaurant owner in my region who is actively considering closing their doors because of not being able to recruit staff. Could I ask what the mechanism is for how the young person's guarantee will tie in with those small business that are facing those recruitment challenges, both enabling young people to access work and gain skills and to support small businesses to grow? Diolch yn fawr iawn.

Well, there's a range of strands within the young person's guarantee that may help, but there's a range of other challenges that businesses may face. So, for example, there's a job matching service in understanding how you match people to job opportunities that exist; there's the work of the ReAct+ service, which is going to be a new, bespoke service, again looking to wrap around what individuals need to help them get themselves into employment opportunities; and as I've previously discussed, in answer to Luke Fletcher, the opportunities that the new Jobs Growth Wales+ will provide for people to get into the world of work.

There are other challenges, though, that fall well outside the young person's guarantee. Those do go back to some of the challenges we've got on access to finance and the difference in the way that European funds were used and are being used now—for example, they're certainly part of how we fund the Development Bank of Wales, so there's a challenge there about its future finances. There's also the challenge over skills as well, because in every area of the economy, businesses are interested in continuing to be able to invest in skills. The current design of the way that shared prosperity funds are supposed to work means it's very, very difficult to find a way to have a properly comprehensive skills support package, bearing in mind that a third of our skills and apprenticeship packages in the past have been funded from former European moneys. And of course you have some of the challenges about some people having left the labour market here in Wales and the UK—older workers and, of course, European workers, many of whom returned to their home countries and are unlikely to return. There's a range of challenges to look at, and those are exactly the challenges I do discuss with small business representatives in my regular conversations with them, and I look forward to being able to do more of that face to face in the future.

And finally, question 8, James Evans.