Item 5 is a statement by the Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Energy and Welsh language, our economic future. I call on the Cabinet Secretary, Jeremy Miles.

Thank you, Dirprwy Lywydd. The foundation of our economic mission is an economy that delivers a just transition to a sustainable future, with fair work at its heart. This includes providing good opportunities for young people, investing in the skills and innovation that we need to flourish in the future and working with our regional partners and others.

As we look to the years ahead, we must seek to grow our economy truly sustainably, creating more opportunities for well-paid work and greater levels of prosperity. This will enable us to increase living standards, improve health outcomes, respond to the climate emergency, tackle poverty and address inequalities—objectives that are at the heart of our broader goals as a Government. To enable us to be a more compassionate country, we must be a more prosperous country.

The Llywydd took the Chair.

We want our entrepreneurs, businesses and our workforce to thrive in all regions of Wales. To accomplish this, I want us to set ourselves the bold ambition to make Wales the best place to start, invest in and grow a business in the United Kingdom, and to communicate that clearly both within and outside Wales.

My first priority is to increase our productivity and economic dynamism, building on our interventions in skills, innovation, entrepreneurship and export support and the work of the development bank, ensuring that our business support provision is the most effective. Aligning the work of universities, investors, entrepreneurs, existing businesses and the Government around our key economic priorities will support this. And we must do this in the context of our clear commitment to fair work and to social partnership with unions and employers, if we are to deliver on our broader social goals. The levers to increase productivity are not all in the hands of the Welsh Government, but those that are will be used purposefully.

My second priority is to attract and encourage business investment in Wales, both in established businesses based in Wales and from new investors. This will create good new jobs and stimulate the growth of Welsh enterprises of all sizes, supply chains and value chains. Realistically, this cannot simply be about direct support from public funds, important though that can be. It will require a collaborative effort within and between all layers of government and a focused approach to sectors and priorities that align with our existing assets.

My third priority is to redesign our employability and skills support, helping our workforce and those seeking work, in the context of changing realities and our commitment to fair work. Skills are critical to improving productivity and crucial to delivering on the economic opportunities from our transition to a net zero Wales. Implementing our net zero skills plan will help deliver a just transition, and clearly defining our national skills needs across the economy for the future will ensure that we are best placed to realise the opportunities that will come. This includes aligning economic priorities, our skills and apprenticeship provision and our vocational education offer seamlessly. We face considerable labour market challenges. Economic activity is a persistent issue for us in Wales. The demand for employment and skills programmes remains high and continuing, so we must make sure that we are able to respond. 

We must lead the current industrial revolution in our energy system to bring a just transition to a low-carbon energy system, and to drive a circular economy to focus upon economic and environmental opportunities. Bringing the economy and the energy portfolios together will facilitate our work to do this, putting our green energy future at the heart of our economic policy.

All the above priorities come together in addressing those opportunities around this energy transition, with new investment in renewables and industrial transformation to secure the low-cost, low-carbon energy that will be essential for our businesses and wider society. The opportunities from floating offshore wind demonstrate the huge prize for Wales, and we will move swiftly and respond to this nimbly as a whole of Welsh Government goal.

Our ongoing financial constraints and the continuing political and economic uncertainty at a UK level and beyond make these aims challenging. The legacy of EU withdrawal, the pandemic and ongoing budgetary constraints have weakened the economy. The slowdown in UK productivity has impacted output, wages and household incomes, and these inequalities were already more acute in Wales before this time. This has resulted in additional costs to business, challenges to export and international trade, and new pressures on the capacity of the Government. This includes the failure of the UK Government's levelling-up policies and its broken promise to replace EU funds. Instead, it has bypassed the Welsh Government and this Senedd and has denied us vital funding to support strategic opportunities for growth.

The most high-profile concern at present, of course, is the potential job losses at Tata, and I will ensure that the Welsh Government will continue to support our workers and unions in doing all that we can to protect jobs and our steel industry in Wales. A UK General Election is expected within the next number of months, with the real possibility of a better and fairer economic policy from a new UK Government.

Joint working initiatives, such as free ports, investment zones and city and growth deals, offer a better chance of success than the UK Government circumventing the Welsh Government, and working closely with local government and corporate joint committees is essential to making the most of the economic opportunities ahead. We've been working with the OECD on how we can work more collaboratively in regional development across different levels of government. Looking to the future, we will draw on this work to ensure that we are closely aligning funding initiatives, our national economic priorities and our commitment to regional partnership.

Finally, the inclusion of economic policy and the Welsh language within the same ministerial portfolio for the first time will support our economic development work in communities where Welsh is widely spoken. We know that the economic health of those communities is fundamental to the future flourishing of the Welsh language. We are already expanding the Arfor initiative and later this year the report of the Commission for Welsh-speaking Communities will help shape our future work in relation to the everyday economy, employee and community ownership and broader economic opportunities for those communities.

Delivering truly sustainable economic growth, and the capacity that it brings to contribute to our broader policy agenda, requires a co-ordinated cross-Government approach to translate policy into delivery, and in the weeks ahead I will be working with ministerial colleagues to this end. We will also refresh our approach to stakeholder engagement across the economy portfolio, with new arrangements in place so that we can ensure that we have access to appropriate external advice, and also to constructive challenge.

I welcome the new Cabinet Secretary to his role, although I do imagine that it would have been a different role that he would have chosen if he'd had that opportunity. I'm sure that you will be delighted that I am going to continue to be scrutinising you in your new portfolio.

The Welsh economy is underperforming, and the people of Wales are losing out because of this. There was even recognition of this in your manifesto, which said:

'There is no route to the more compassionate country that we want to be which doesn't pass through the more prosperous country that we need to be.'

And I would agree; we need change—change in the way we approach the economy in Wales, and change in the way that we skill our workforce. If we only look at some of the recent statistics published by the Welsh Government, then we see why we need change. This Government's own figures show a rise in unemployment equating to an increase of close to 3,000 jobless in the three months leading up to February. That's a rate around 60 per cent higher than that of the UK average—a worrying trend, despite unemployment levels remaining low.

What is concerning, however, are the rates of economic inactivity and employment. You rightly point out that economic inactivity is a persistent issue, but after 25 years of Labour, these figures are quite staggering. In Wales, the rate of economic inactivity is 26.2 per cent, up almost 2 per cent in just three months. The Prime Minister has outlined some proposals as to how the UK Government plans to address this problem, so I'd ask what plans you have to lower this high figure, bearing in mind that it is almost 27 per cent higher than the UK average, and rising three times as fast. Surely tackling these issues must be a priority. Economic inactivity hurts everyone: it doesn't generate wealth—wealth that we need to fund our vital public services—and it robs the potential of our young people that could otherwise be contributing to society and their own well-being, because behind each one of these statistics is a person.

One way to surely help our young people is to provide apprenticeships that are valued by employers. So, I ask you, Cabinet Secretary: where are we with regard to funding providers that offer vocational routes into industry? I spoke only last week to PeoplePlus Cymru, who stress the importance of skills training that is actually relevant to the workforce, ensuring that they are job ready. But when we talk about being job ready when they leave training, then they need an actual job to go to. Your predecessor never got around to having targets for job creation—in fact, there was only ever one job that he wanted to fill. So, Cabinet Secretary, can I ask that you introduce job creation targets going forward, because I believe surely this would be a measure welcomed in this Siambr, and across industries here in Wales?

You mention renewable energy and the opportunities that presents for Wales. The necessity is to ensure that we are training enough young people now to fill the skills gaps that will appear in the future. I agree when you state that skills are critical for our economic opportunity, so has the Welsh Government undertaken any assessment of how many welders, fabricators, engineers, planning officers or any other professions are needed to deliver the range of projects here in Wales? If we don't know how many we need, then how can we ensure that we're training enough to realise these opportunities?

I appreciate the mention of free ports and floating offshore wind in your statement, and I would hope that a positive working relationship can be forged on issues such as these, which straddle the reserved and devolved line. On Tata, I would ask if the Cabinet Secretary can confirm, unlike his predecessor, if any financial support or contribution is being made towards the transition board.

This next point—and it really does pain me to say this, and it should be a sense of shame for this Welsh Government—is that Wales is now last in the UK when it comes to median salary, having fallen behind Northern Ireland only last year. You say that it is the result of a UK slowdown that wages have been impacted, but Welsh workers have long taken home less money than their counterparts anywhere else in the UK. You also say that you want Wales to be the best place to start a business. So, can I ask, Cabinet Secretary, what plan do you have to attract and deliver higher paying jobs to the Welsh economy and more businesses in general? Here in Wales, we signed the first ever £1 million cheque, yet, today, we currently only have one FTSE 100 company.

So, Cabinet Secretary, will you be sticking to your personal manifesto pledge that we need to be a more prosperous nation? Because the opportunities in Wales, across a range of sectors and industries, genuinely fill me with excitement of what Wales could look like, what Wales's future should look like. Repeating the same mistakes as ministerial predecessors will see Wales continue to have unrealised potential, will see Wales continue to lag behind the rest of the UK, and will see Wales continue to underperform, when, in fact, it should outperform. Diolch, Llywydd.

I thank Samuel Kurtz for a very wide range of questions, and welcome him to his new responsibilities. I very much look forward to our discussions across the Chamber, and perhaps outside the Chamber from time to time as well.

The premise of the Member’s questions seemed to be that Wales is an independent country with entire control over all the levers that influence the economy. The pattern that he will have noticed in relation to economic inactivity is one that is replicated right across the UK, as are a number of the other statistics that he referred to. We need to have a Government in Westminster that has the same commitment that we have in Wales to growing our economy sustainably and delivering fair work in all parts of our country.

He talked about economic inactivity. I identified as one of my three priorities in my statement a refresh of our employability and skills support that will go to the heart of supporting those individuals who are furthest from the labour market with the support that they need in order to be able to get back into work and build flourishing careers for themselves. I think that is a much better approach than the cack-handed approach that the Prime Minister outlined to fit notes and sick notes this week, which is a very much more brutal way of approaching a very complex challenge, and he will have heard me talk about that in my statement.

We are absolutely proud of our work in the Welsh Government to support apprentices right across Wales. We have ambitious targets in relation to that. They have been challenging to fulfil, but our commitment to having an apprenticeship programme across Wales that delivers both for individuals, but also for the economy, is undimmed. We’ve made a set of reforms in relation to how we will take forward apprenticeships in the future with a new Commission for Tertiary Education and Research. That will help us have a nimble, flexible approach, a responsive approach, to apprenticeship provision in the future.

He’s right to say that having the right blend of skills for the future is essential to our being able to take advantage of those opportunities and, crucially, connecting those opportunities to the lives of people in Wales, making sure that we are giving every person in Wales the opportunity to share in that future of prosperity. And I think it is important that we are able to map the needs of our economy in the future, so that we can tailor our provision today for that purpose, and there’s an opportunity for us to work with our regional skills partnerships to have a national picture of how we do this. There’s a good example that will be close to his heart in relation to floating offshore wind, where we are already mapping the supply chain and the skills profile required in order to do that.

He asked me toward the end of his questions, in relation to the situation in Tata, what support we are providing. Let me be clear: the Welsh Government has supported, both through capital investment and skills support, the steelworks in Port Talbot for many, many years. We’ve been pressing for 14 years for a UK Government to take seriously the future of steel and to plan for a transition to greener production, and that has only borne fruit in the last few months, despite us having advocated for that for over a decade. Part of the reason why we aren’t able to be very specific at this point about the level of demand that we will inevitably face on the employability support that we provide is because we don’t have the detail of the deal struck between the UK Government and Tata. That has not been provided to us. So, the mapping required for us to be able to specify that closely has not been shared with us. I hope that will change, but we have employability support programmes that will be made available to employees of Tata, and we will still fight to support those jobs and work with our colleagues in the unions and the workforce there to make sure that those jobs are protected as far as we humanly possibly can, and we will step in to support, as we have in the past.

Thank you for your statement, Cabinet Secretary, and for setting out your priorities. At face value, there isn’t much I would disagree with here, which is a bit frustrating as an Opposition spokesperson. To be fair, there’s little in here that anyone could disagree with. It is essentially a list of economic goods the Government would like to see in Wales, but there’s no substantive plan on how those goods will be delivered, no road map, no waymarkers and no precise sense of the final destination. Sectors across the economy have been calling out for a comprehensive and meaningful industrial strategy for years now, so I do hope we see this soon.

I’ll turn now to the substance of the statement. The challenges and opportunities in Wales’s green economy will be governed by two things. Energy production and grid capacity is one of them, and that's why I welcome seeing energy come within the Cabinet Secretary's portfolio. The second one, of course, is skills and workforce planning, and it is welcome that he recognises that.

Organisations like the Federation of Small Businesses and the Institute of Physics have been clear for some time about the clear skills shortage in the green technology and related sectors. This means that we need to get to grips with the issue and that means understanding clearly where the Government's ambitions on this are. I know the Government will point to the net-zero action plan, and whilst this lays the foundations, if you speak to the further education sector, they remain none the wiser about what exactly the Government wants them to do—what courses to offer, and so on.

We heard from the Conservative spokesperson about a conversation he had with an FE provider. Well, one FE provider said to me that it's currently a case of them putting their finger in the air, seeing which way the wind blows, and hoping for the best. That doesn't fill me with much hope that we are getting to grips with the increasing lag in the green skills agenda. It's one of the reasons why I think we need an annual skills audit, and I got the sense from what the Cabinet Secretary was saying that he's thinking along the same lines here—a skills audit that looks at where the gaps are, where the relevant courses are available and where they aren't, and then uses that data as the basis for action. If that is the case, then that is very much welcome. 

Now, you've mentioned targets and ambitions for apprenticeships. Well, if we couple what I've just said on direction and workforce planning with the announcements that came from the budget around apprenticeship funding, the picture is even worse. We've already rehearsed the arguments enough around the loss of EU funds. That doesn't take away from the scale of the challenge and our ability to meet it without sufficient capacity to create more apprenticeship places. We've touched previously on the challenges posed by the apprenticeship levy as well.  

So, can I ask for some clarity, please, on where you seen an apprenticeship strategy heading? I believe you might have already had an invitation from the apprenticeships cross-party group to come to one of our meetings. If you haven't then I'll make sure you do, and take this as an official invitation. There's a lot of goodwill across this Chamber when it comes to apprenticeships to get this right. From the questions asked by Sam Kurtz previously, I hope that's very clear. We're all willing to pull in the same direction here; we just need to know what direction we're pulling in. 

Of course, Tata Steel remains and will remain one of the biggest challenges faced within this portfolio, and just this afternoon myself and fellow Members received a petition to save our steel industry from Unite the Union workers. And I'll declare for the record, Llywydd, that I sit on the Port Talbot transition board. I know, like a few of us here, that he is more than aware of the situation. I know he also knows people in the workforce there as well. How do we as a Senedd, not just the Welsh Government, but how do we as a Senedd continue to support those workers, as he sets out in his statement? Is there anything that he needs to do differently to his predecessor, for example? Has he considered some of the ideas put forward by members of Plaid Cymru, like the idea put forward by Adam Price about using the planning system to protect the blast furnaces? Some comments would be very welcome from him on that.

To close, Llywydd, I'll return to how I opened and the fact that there is very little to disagree with in this statement. What he says on prioritising productivity I think is important. Reference to outside advice, working with the Office for National Statistics, again important. We know that Wales-specific data on the economy is hard to come by. What is lacking here, though, is a problem common to almost all Welsh Government statements and particularly those that we have become used to in the economy portfolio, and that is how we measure success. I was very critical of the economic mission set out by the Cabinet Secretary's predecessor because they were vague. They contained no specific or measurable targets. There was no sense of how the Government would seek to deliver on them. They were just a rehashing of previous statements, strategies and frameworks. So, can I therefore ask the Cabinet Secretary to break with that tradition, to be ambitious, to be specific and, finally, outline how he will look to measure success against the vision he's outlined this afternoon?

I thank Luke Fletcher for those comments and for the initial welcome, at least, that he gave to the statement and the common ground that he identified. I would take issue with him in relation to his opening remarks. You can see in any number of the approaches that we've taken over the years a clear approach to the priorities that we will bring to bear in the economy in Wales. So, the manufacturing action plan, he mentioned himself the net-zero skills action plan, which is still in its early stages, and I was at a college in, I think, Sam Kurtz's Constituency very recently—Paul Davies's constituency, in fact, forgive me—when I was discussing with the college the close relationship they have with the local renewables sector, which supported apprenticeships and skills provision, and they were demonstrating a very detailed and sophisticated understanding of the needs of the sectors that they are prioritising in that part of Wales. That kind of close working between the sector and FE providers is essential in order to be able to make progress in what is, after all, a very rapidly changing sector. And sometimes, it isn't about a new qualification, it's about adapting existing skills to a new context, making sure they can be applied in that way. That's part of the reason why the personal learning accounts have been tailored towards net-zero skills and digital skills in order to encourage provision through FE colleges to support those sectors.

There is good advice to the Government in the Lusher review, which looked at skills provision into the future, in the way that Luke Fletcher was suggesting that we should take forward. We've responded to that in a very welcoming way. I think there is an opportunity to align economic priorities, skills provision, apprenticeship provision, which he talked about, and how we deliver vocational education and training, so that it's a seamless whole. I think that becomes increasingly important in those sectors of the economy that are rapidly evolving, as this is. But I think it is right to say that being able to do that is essential to being able to take advantage of those opportunities in the future.

I don't think one can dismiss—perhaps he wasn't dismissing it—the significance of the impact of the loss of EU funding on our approach to supporting skills and supporting apprenticeships; it has made a huge difference to the pressures on the Government. And our ambitions are still as they were; they're undimmed, as I said in my earlier answers to questions. So, the challenge that we face is making sure that that is funded to the fullest extent possible. We have had challenges in the budget, but the Member will also know that we found additional money to restore some of those cuts, because we set such high store on apprenticeship provision.

I would like to acknowledge the petition that was presented today by Unite on behalf of steelworkers in Port Talbot. I think it is absolutely critical that we do everything we can as a Senedd, in addition to the work that we will do as a Government, to make sure that this remains very clearly on the agenda for the public in Wales, and for people to understand, in Wales and right across the UK, the impact of the loss of primary steel-making capacity as a foundational sector in our economy. It will be an extraordinary act of economic self-harm for the UK Government to allow this to happen, and it will touch the lives of all of us in a way that perhaps I'm not sure everyone understands quite yet. So, I think a collective effort to remind people of the impact, not solely on the workers and on their communities, but on the economy of Wales and the UK, I think, would be a significant contribution to that.

I'm grateful to the Cabinet Secretary for his statement this afternoon and his comments in particular around the steel industry and his ongoing support for the steel industry. Cabinet Secretary, my community is proud of our manufacturing heritage. We continue to attract high-tech manufacturing because of factors like the highly skilled workforce and the competitiveness of the supply chains. We also have research and development capability at the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre in Broughton, which is vital to work like Airbus's Wing of Tomorrow project. However, we can take nothing for granted. As we look towards a carbon-neutral future, large employers are looking at the supply chains and their ability to decarbonise. For suppliers, their ability to decarbonise will come down to the support available. Cabinet Secretary, what support do you envisage being available, and what support is needed in this particular area? Diolch.

Thank you to Jack Sargeant for that. He's right to say this is an essential part of our competitive advantage in the future, our ability to make sure that all parts of our economy are decarbonised and that we have a truly sustainable economy into the future. Leading the way on that, wherever we possibly can, will give us that advantage. He's right to say that investors in sectors that we care a lot about, in sectors that we want to expand in Wales, will look to that. I've been struck, in reading into the finer detail of the portfolio, just how much of the support that we provide—through the development bank, through Business Wales and beyond—comes through the lens of sustainability and ensuring that employers and businesses are decarbonising. There's a piece of work under way at the moment that will provide further, I hope, very useful guidance, very practical guidance, to businesses right across Wales in the kind of supply chains that Jack Sargeant is talking about, which will provide that additional practical support as well as the funding that we provide. And we will look to provide, through the development bank and others, increasing funding, as resources allow, in order to support businesses to do that.

Can I also welcome the Cabinet Secretary to his new role? As Chair of the Economy, Trade and Rural Affairs Committee, I look forward to scrutinising him and his officials going forward. In fact, the Cabinet Secretary will be joining the committee tomorrow morning to give evidence to the committee's inquiry on the Development Bank of Wales. 

Today's statement sets out the Cabinet Secretary's economic priorities, and he tells us a bit more about the direction of travel over the coming months. As has already been said by my colleague Samuel Kurtz, the latest labour market statistics for Wales have revealed a significant rise in economic inactivity and a significant fall in employment compared with the rest of the UK, and these statistics are, indeed, very worrying. The Cabinet Secretary has told us today about some of his plans for his department going forward, but like Luke Fletcher, I'd be grateful if he could tell us how he'll be monitoring his policies to ensure they're working and actually delivering real outcomes. Policies must produce outcomes, and their effectiveness must be reviewed and tested, so perhaps he could tell us more about how he specifically plans to do that in his new role.

I actually agree with what the Member said. I'm not a great one for inputs; I'm much more interested in outcomes from the policies that we bring forward. I would prefer to be measured on those rather than the inputs, so I take the Member's point to heart.

In relation to employability specifically, there is very good data about the effectiveness of the range of policies that we've supported in Wales for many years, and that has, as you will know from, I'm sure, looking over the trends in the ONS data for a number of years, shown very positive results in terms of employability, but there is a continuing demand at a time of increased financial pressure. That is a challenge for us as a Government, but our task in redesigning and refreshing that support is to make sure, as all governments need to do, that the support we provide is appropriate for the needs of our economy at any particular time. He's right to say that the data that he's referring to in his question will be an important part of the evidence base for how we take forward that programme of support, and the reform of that programme. I hope, over the coming weeks, that we will be able to discuss more of that in detail in the Chamber as that work comes to fruition.

I'm delighted that you mentioned the Welsh language in your statement, something the First Minister didn't do when he made his priorities statement last week, and that was noticed by many people. Whilst agreeing with your comments on Welsh-speaking communities, clearly the Welsh language should be intertwined into all of the Government's economic priorities. So, can you outline how you will ensure that that is the case, and will you be making a similar statement outlining your priorities in terms of the Welsh language?

There will be an element of consistency, in terms of priorities for Welsh language policy, with what has been seen in the past, but I'll be very happy to accept the Member's invitation to make a further statement, if the Llywydd would accept it.

What I wanted to note in terms of the Welsh language and the economy is how important it is to have those two portfolios together to ensure, as Heledd Fychan said, that we dovetail the Welsh language in all parts of the economy. Arfor is important, the work of the commission is important in terms of supporting the communities that are heartlands, as we used to call them. It's important that this is an element throughout the economy. There are very robust elements of that in the skills provision and the apprenticeships provision, and working with the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol and so on. And it's more integrated now that it's in the same portfolio, and I think there will be important opportunities from that.

The Welsh economy is underweight in high-wage sectors such as life sciences, ICT and professional services, which is one of the reasons for the low gross value added and low median salary. Both Belfast and Edinburgh are in the UK's top 12 cities for ICT, but Swansea and Cardiff are not. Smaller English cities such as Bath and towns such as Reading are also in the top 12. What our economy needs is greater involvement of Welsh universities in developing employment in those sectors, especially life sciences; an ICT growth strategy to ensure Wales has its share of ICT jobs; and the further relocation of civil service jobs, at all levels, from London and the south-east of Wales. The Minister, like me, is very well aware of the crucial importance of the DVLA, the pensions agency and the land registry to our economy in the Swansea bay region, bringing relatively highly paid jobs. We need the continuation of iron and steel making to ensure the continuation of an integrated steel industry in Wales. Does the Minister agree with my analysis and suggested solutions?

I thank Mike Hedges. Can I just take up the point that he started his question with in relation to those key sectors that he spoke about? Actually, a feature of some of the successes that we have had in those sectors is the relationship between the founders of some of those businesses and having studied at Welsh universities—either coming back to Wales to establish a business or establishing a business on graduation. They have been in, as he described them, I think, high-value sectors. This is the point I was making in my statement. I think there is significant potential in the way that we have shown in relation to compound semiconductors, where there is a strong success story in making sure that there is a close alignment between Government, universities, businesses, investors and entrepreneurs around a small number of key economic priorities. There is strong evidence that that enables companies that can offer good well-paid employment to grow, and they will be Welsh success stories. So, that's the rational behind promoting that approach, and I think that he would agree with that.

The Deputy Presiding Officer took the Chair.

I, like you, will be looking forward to a UK Government that has an industrial strategy, which is not what we've got at the moment. It seems to me handing money out to lose jobs without ensuring that you're going to get them back and firm commitments to make them stick is really not a strategy about anything.

Tony Blair was famously going all down to education, education, education. I hope you, Cabinet Secretary, are going to be focused on skills, skills, skills, because they are critical to all your other priorities, it seems to me—improving productivity, inward investment, and delivering on the opportunities from our transition to net zero. I heard you say that the net-zero skills plan is in its early stages, and I welcome your commitment to outcomes, not inputs.

Great work has been done by places like Coleg Llandrillo on apprenticeships, sadly disrupted, unfortunately, in the celebration of the graduation of many, many skilled people earlier this year. So, how do you plan to align your economic priorities, skills provision, and our vocational education offer seamlessly? My understanding is—

Jenny, you need to conclude. 

—that there are only three approved frameworks for degree apprenticeships: construction, engineering, and IT. These are all important, but are all very male dominated.

Jenny, you need to conclude, please.

Is it the case that you need to legislate to develop a degree in care, a degree in public service administration, or a degree in skills required to redesign our roads to better meet the needs for all users?

Thank you, Jenny.

These are crucial to improving productivity in our public services.

Thank you to Jenny Rathbone for that. I think, previously, I've said that I think that education is the best economic policy. I think it's absolutely at the heart of giving people those opportunities throughout life. There are other degree apprenticeships, by the way, but I think there's always a case for making sure that we are using that policy Intervention to address the needs of our economy, so we'll keep that under review.

As I was saying, one of my ambitions in this portfolio—having come from the education portfolio, I understood some of the dimensions of the policy from that perspective—is that there is more potential for us to align the pre-16 education offer with the skills and the economic priorities. I will be looking forward to doing that, with my colleague the Cabinet Secretary for Education, over the coming months. I mentioned the Lusher review earlier, and at the heart of what Sharron Lusher was recommending to us as a Government is that we have a national approach to that, and I think that there’s a lot to commend that approach.

You mentioned Coleg Llandrillo, and I was there a few weeks ago with Carolyn Thomas, talking to the young apprentices there about their hopes for the future. They were working on renewables and wind turbines and so on, and the excitement that you get from talking to young people starting their careers in a sector that will be there until the end of their working lives and beyond is absolutely exciting, and that's why we are so committed to making sure young people in Wales have access to those apprenticeships.

And finally, Vikki Howells.

Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd, and thank you, Cabinet Secretary, for your statement today, which touches on many issues that are key to driving our economy forwards. I note your reference to the need to provide more opportunities for well-paid work, and this chimes closely with two recent high-profile reports: the Industrial Communities Alliance report, 'More Jobs, Better Jobs, Closer to Home'; and the 'State of the Coalfields 2024', which was commissioned by the Coalfields Regeneration Trust. Cabinet Secretary, what analysis might you have made of these two reports, and how might their findings assist you with the strategies you intend to develop for the south Wales Valleys in particular?

Secondly, I note you reference to how joint working initiatives offer the best chance of success. This month the Cardiff capital region launched its northern Valleys initiative, a £50 million investment programme focused on businesses with high growth potential, in an effort to help transform the northern Valleys. So, how can Welsh Government engage with this programme to help ensure it dovetails with Welsh Government priorities and delivers the very best results for those communities?

I thank Vikki Howells for those important questions. I have not yet read the two reports that she referred to, but I know of the work that she does in relation to former coalfield communities, so I will make sure that I do read those. I think that a place-based approach to some of our interventions, in particular around some of our Valleys communities, is essential, and I do think that she is right to identify the work of the Cardiff capital region. I think that, working hand in hand—Welsh Government, local government and UK Government—is the best way of being able to deliver on our economic ambitions. We're very proud of the work we do as partners in the Cardiff capital region, and indeed in the other growth deals across Wales. I think that is the best way of making sure that we can communicate to people, both in Wales and outside Wales, our ambition to make Wales the best part of the UK to invest in and to work in as well.

I thank the Cabinet Secretary.