Alun, thank you for taking my name in vain, but in a praiseworthy way there for a moment. But I would say that report is still there and it's still valid, I have to say, and it was put together—. I'll turn to this report in a moment, but that report on the future funding, regional funding, within Wales, I have to say set the benchmark for what we should be doing throughout the UK, and it was OECD reformed, as Llyr actually said. It was supported not only by industry, trade unions, third sector, civil society, post-16 education and so on, and it's there on the shelf, and, to be honest, it did actually have as one of its key elements how we could work cross border with the UK Government, and on a trans-European basis as well. So, I would say to the UK Government still, as well as to Members who may not have seen it: have a look at that report, dust it off. There is no better model for regional funding, not just here in Wales, but across the EU, currently, and the UK Government could take that and turn it into a partnership with the Welsh Government and the way forward.

But let me turn to this report. I think it's brilliant. I've really enjoyed reading it, which might surprise the committee chairman and its members, but the reason I've enjoyed it is because it's very well informed and it also reflects what I and others must have been hearing from businesses and others within their own constituencies. But also, that group that I mentioned that put that piece of work together, many of them are now part of the strategic forum for regional investment in Wales, which is trying to work through some of the difficulties highlighted in this report.

Let me just pick up some of the areas that they've picked up on which are reflected in this report. In the preparation of these bids by a local authority, the immense time burden that it put on—so, it didn't suddenly simplify and reduce burdens, it put the burden firmly and squarely on local authorities to produce bids in a competitive process. Not only that, it put time pressures on them, and those time pressures meant that sometimes they didn't pick the best, they didn't look around and liaise with others—they did their best to do it, but they had to actually say, 'What have we got on the shelf that’s ready? We've got a better project down the line, if we only had a little bit of time to work this up, and we could do it with the neighbouring two or three authorities, but it's not ready, so we're going to have to pick that one, and pick that one and throw it forward.'

And then you've got the fact that it's not that it's just this place that has been bypassed, or that Welsh Government has been bypassed, and—[Inaudible.]—but the idea that, in parts of these funding streams in the early days, you've actually got MPs who were being asked to put forward schemes that had their names on it—not MSs, not local authorities, but MPs. Now, this is quite interesting, because this is good, old-fashioned American-style pork-barrel politics: ‘Here’s my pet project. Minister, I’ll support you. Give me this project here. It may not be the best one for my constituents, but it's the one I want on it.’ Now this is wrong. All I say to colleagues here to my left on the Conservative benches is: you should not do this. One of the lessons from previous ranges of European funding was the criticisms of complexity and the time it took and so on. But the one thing you could say: they were accountable and they were driven on good analysis of need, and it was also informed by bottom-up approaches by communities who said, 'This is what we want.' Now there could be a different model. [Interruption.] I will indeed give way.