Thank you to my colleague Jack Sargeant for tabling today's motion on pensions divestment. I'm really pleased to speak in support of this important issue, and indeed it's something I've long agreed is essential. For example, I hosted a drop-in with Friends of the Earth Cymru for Senedd Members a few years ago, and the specific purpose of this was to generate consensus behind divesting the then Assembly Member pension scheme. I was delighted when the pension board agreed to do this at the start of 2020, and I'd like to thank Members of the board for delivering on this important issue.

This was a really important step, as we put our money where our mouth is. I believe we were the first UK Parliament pension scheme to take this action to commit to invest in our pension scheme in a sustainable and ethical manner. But this was an intervention that was no less important symbolically, as we sent a clear sign that pensions can be and should be divested. Rightly, the focus of our Welsh Government, and much of our public sector, has been on our response to the coronavirus pandemic in the time since, but we cannot lose sight of a climate emergency that is no less critical. And as this motion argues, now is the time for Welsh Government and our public sector to agree a strategy to decarbonise pensions by 2030.

A report published last year under the aegis of grass-roots movement UK Divest gives a stark picture of the scale of council investment in coal, oil and gas. Many of these figures were on a UK basis. However, Welsh local government pensions were noted to have invested £538 million in fossil fuels, which works out at just over 3.2 per cent of the total value of the schemes. No Welsh pension fund is amongst the top 10 highest investors in fossil fuels, but one, Dyfed, as was previously noted by my colleague Cefin Campbell, was the second highest investor as a proportion of their fund's total value. Just under 5 per cent of their fund was invested in fossil fuels. 

Another important point is that, in these funds invested in fossil fuels, £2 out of every £5 are invested in just three companies—that's BP, Royal Dutch Shell and BHP. Familiar names, but also companies that have been identified as making massive profits from oil and gas. For example, Shell boasted profits of over $9 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, and that was three times the value from the same period the previous year. These are companies that are harming our environment, profiting from global destruction, and making their shareholders rich while squeezing ever more tightly the people we represent as household energy bills rise exponentially. It's important that we divest from an environmental perspective, but it's equally important that we do so from an ethical perspective too. And if we can deliver this, not only our Welsh Parliament, but our country as a whole, will be taking an important lead.