Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. I'm sorry I'm not in the Chamber with you; you sound like you're all having a very jolly time there.

The way that we use towns and our reasons to visit them have changed and our town centres are adapting to a new set of demands. Past reliance on retail has been undermined by the growth of online shopping. The trends were clear even pre pandemic, and COVID has accelerated that movement. We know that we need better jobs and services in town centres, where people can access them without needing to get in the car. We need to think differently about our towns. We need to focus on them as places where we meet, work and spend leisure time. If we can diversify what is offered in town centres, we will attract people back into them. So, the focus must be on rejuvenating, place-building and reinvention. And, of course, these challenges are especially difficult in some of our coastal towns, playing the dual role of the local centre alongside a dependence on tourism. Coastal locations rely heavily on tourism for jobs. In Conwy, Pembrokeshire and Anglesey around 22 per cent of employment is in tourism. Seasonality of work reduces the effect of local spend, resulting in under-employment, poverty and a lack of social well-being.

Research has shown how the pandemic is having a negative impact on the economies of coastal towns. Gareth Davies mentioned in an offhand way, in Darren Millar's phrase, 'the price-sensitive tourists', about the effect of pricing and flying to Alicante from Manchester versus catching a train to Rhyl. The way that we have allowed the price of public transport to go up relative to other forms of transport is a real problem, but that is a problem that lies at the door of successive UK Governments who've not sufficiently invested in public transport, and, as we noted in the debate last week, Wales is underfunded by £5 billion from the HS2 intervention, and, if we were to have our £5 billion, we could make a significant impact on both the price and reliability of train services across the north Wales coast, and I repeat again my plea that we work together to try and get the UK Government to change its mind on that.

We also need to maximise the potential of our natural coastline assets, whilst protecting local housing markets, local services, communities and the Welsh language. Dirprwy Lywydd, the UK Government stopped the coastal communities fund, but here in Wales we have continued specific support for coastal towns, investing a further £6 million last March, supporting 27 projects focused on job creation, protection, and high-street rejuvenation in coastal town centres. Our Transforming Towns programme provides a package of support for town centres worth £136 million, and this investment in supporting our town centres, delivering major capital projects to repurpose empty properties and land in town centres across Wales, is fundamentally based around enabling places to evolve and diversify. A great project I visited last September myself is Costigan's co-working space in Rhyl, where we have supported the transformation of a semi-derelict pub near the town's railway station, a prominent spot in the town, now into a high-quality business space for co-working—a great project.

Our 'town centre first' principle, embedded in Wales's national development plan, 'Future Wales', ensures that town and city centres should be the first consideration for all decisions on the location of workplaces and services, and we've recently published a set of reports looking at the future of our town centres: one by Audit Wales and another I commissioned from Manchester University's Professor Karel Williams, 'Small Towns, Big Issues'. Both reports highlight the need to work with communities to turn things around in town centres and to end car dependency. And we're doing just that. I've set up a group of external stakeholders to provide input and challenge and work through what is needed to enable change, incentivising town-centre development, but also disincentivising any out-of-town development that is inconsistent with that aim. So, I welcome this debate as an opportunity to look at ways to support and revitalise our towns and cities, understanding that the challenges and opportunities are dynamic and complex, and this includes our coastal communities. Diolch.