Can I thank Lee Waters for bringing forward this important debate today? These debates are a valuable opportunity to look at the bigger picture and also, occasionally, to scan the far horizons of an issue, which I hope to do in these remarks.

The advance of technology presents opportunities for our economy, and that’s doubtless. The city deal for the Swansea bay city region is predicated on supporting my region to become an internet coast with serious investment in our digital capacity. The recent economic forum I hosted in Neath looked forward to some of these economic and work opportunities, and—as we’ve heard this afternoon—how we can equip ourselves for those opportunities. But it also recognised some of the challenges that lie ahead.

One of the challenges—as we’ve heard from many speakers—is the potential that automation has to eliminate jobs in all parts of our economy. And not all people doing the sorts of jobs we will lose are going to be able to take advantage of the new jobs that are created, and that is a reality that we need to address. Generally speaking, technology is cheaper for business than labour. Some of the extra profit which that creates for a business may be passed on in lower costs to the consumer, but much of it, obviously, accrues to the business owner.

The challenge for our society is how we capture some of that surplus value from technology and harness it for the public good, not solely as financial return. Why do we need to do this? Well, because with every job lost to automation we may lose a wage which sustains a household and which is spent in the local economy and, of course, which generates tax revenue. Bill Gates recently advocated a robot tax—a levy on technology to fund public services. This has been, unsurprisingly, attacked as unworkable in some quarters, but it’s not hard to see that even if it did work, this would make up only a fraction of the lost value that we potentially face in the wider economy from lost wages, again, spent in local shops, not to mention the heavy potential individual costs. So, we may need to think bolder, and I think David Melding has acknowledged some of these points already in his contribution and I thank him for pointing out the role of Henry Mackworth from Neath.

But we may need to look again at how work is distributed in a future economy. Previous periods of automation led to a reduction down to a five-day working week. Will there come a time when a three- or four-day working week becomes the norm, or perhaps longer periods spent in statutory education, delaying the start of working life? All of which we should reflect upon. But for many, of course, involuntary early retirement or reluctant part-time work already means this, and their experience will tell you that this means more or less the same outgoings for less pay. Most people need to work for the basics. So, the fundamental challenge is how we harness technology to drive down the cost of everyday basics, for housing, energy, transport and food, which form a large proportion of most people’s monthly outgoings. How do we use technology to help us reuse and maintain our assets, as we heard in an earlier debate, rather than discard or even recycle, so that a decent life is sustainable with less work?

Governments have a major role to incentivise developments in these sectors and in devising an innovation policy that defines high-value activities not just in terms of economic growth, but also in terms of more affordable living. Others—less optimistic of a sustainable model—have called, again, as David Melding mentioned, for a universal basic income, paid to all, regardless of work, to help with the costs of sustenance. At the moment, I can see many more obstacles than opportunities, but it’s right that we should explore and pilot some of these options. In my opinion, any new system of support should reflect the principle of contribution, and yet an expectation of contribution solely through work can no longer apply in that environment. So, maybe the time has come to devise a means of accrediting individuals for the unpaid caring; the civic activity; the volunteering; the charity work that so many people do and upon which our society fundamentally depends. We fail to value that kind of work in our economy, as we fail to value what we might call the economy of personal relations—those jobs where care, empathy, and the human connection are all; jobs in health, well-being, social care and so on; areas where there is ongoing demand and which tackle some of the most enduring features of our modern world—changing family structures, mental ill health, living longer, independence and physical inactivity. So, in a rational world they’d offer growth in employment, and in a compassionate world growth in decent, properly paid employment. Perhaps the main legacy we should hope for from automation will be the rediscovery of time to connect, of a communal impulse, where technology removes back-breaking work, where it’s driven down the cost of living, and where it enables a more mutually supportive sustainable way of living. Perhaps that’s a vision that we can all embrace.