A Prosperous Wales

People throughout Wales have faced unprecedented challenges this year. The pandemic has threatened the strength of our economy, the wellbeing of our communities and the livelihoods of people across Wales. At the same time, this year has underlined the resilience and bravery of people working in Wales, particularly in the everyday economy. Critical workers have helped to keep people safe; they have provided essential services and made sure our public services are available every day for everyone. This year has also shown how strong our communities really are – in villages, towns and cities across Wales, people have come together to protect and support each other and to care for the most vulnerable. We have built on our achievements to do everything possible to safeguard Wales’ prosperity against the greatest peacetime challenge in our history. We have continued to support our communities, our economy and our public services to ensure that we will emerge from this difficult time as a confident, prosperous and successful nation.

Protecting businesses and livelihoods

We have taken unprecedented action this year to support businesses in Wales through the pandemic, to ensure that once restrictions are lifted they will be able to trade again. Our £2bn business support package means companies in Wales have access to the most generous offer of support anywhere in the UK. This is in addition to the wage support schemes available from the UK Government during the pandemic. Our support builds on the foundations laid by the Economic Action Plan, published in 2017, which sets out our vision for inclusive growth and productive regions. More than 13,000 businesses have benefited from £300m of support from our Economic Resilience Fund, protecting 100,000 jobs which might otherwise have been lost. In October 2020, we provided a further £300m of support in the third phase of the fund. The Development Bank of Wales was launched in 2017 and has played a crucial role in helping firms grow, survive and thrive across the term. The Bank reported a record 457 investments totalling £103.3m in 2019-20, creating or safeguarding almost 4,000 jobs across Wales. To help grow firms and provide jobs faster, the Bank also launched an updated fast track loan this year – loans of up to £25,000 are now available with a decision made in just two working days. Including the Help to Buy Wales scheme, the Development Bank of Wales now manages over £1.2b of Welsh Government funds. Business Wales has maintained its crucial support to Welsh businesses. Business Wales’ schemes

have created 12,700 jobs since January 2016, helping to create 3,805 new enterprises and generating more than £33.7m of exports. This success has continued this year: the Accelerated Growth Programme created more than 1,660 jobs between October 2019 and August 2020. We are providing more than £230m of non-domestic rates relief to businesses and other ratepayers through our range of rates relief schemes. Since 2017-18 we have provided additional relief for retailers and businesses on the high street. Our rates relief schemes mean that three quarters of all ratepayers across Wales have received rates relief this year, with more than 70,000 businesses paying no rates at all. The pandemic has had a particular impact on the hospitality sector and we have taken quick action to support this important part of our economy. We have provided a total £450m of support for the sector – the most generous package of support in the UK. This includes 100% rates relief for retail, leisure and hospitality businesses with a rateable value of £500,000 or less and a sector-specific £180m fund as part of the Economic Resilience Fund. The food and farming sector is a crucial priority for Wales, directly employing 24,000 people and a further 229,000 people in the wider supply chain. Industry figures for 2019 show that we surpassed our target of growing the sector by 30% since 2014 with Welsh food and drink firms making a record-breaking £7.5bn of sales. We provided expertise and support across the term, including through our BlasCymru events. BlasCymru 2019 was a tremendous success, generating nearly £8m of potential new business opportunities.

Fair and decent work for all

This year has demonstrated the value and importance of our foundational economy – the everyday goods and services such as care, housing, food and high street retailers, which we all use and need. This year we expanded our Foundational Economy Challenge Fund, providing an additional £1.08m for innovative projects to help grow this important sector of the economy. The fund has provided more than £1m to social care providers, supporting 52 projects including an apprenticeship scheme in Monmouthshire and a specialised autism centre in Nantgarw. It has also bolstered the success of our Valleys Taskforce, providing more than £2.2m of funding to 27 projects in the South Wales Valleys. The supported projects including turning a disused department store in the Rhondda Valley into an enterprise hub to support local businesses and revitalising Tonypandy town centre. The Valleys Regional Park project showcases the very best of the Valleys, using our natural and cultural heritage to deliver sustainable social and economic benefits, including through a new education centre at Bryngarw Country Park. Funding to manage the regional park is now in place until 2023. Our partnership with unions and employers remains fundamental to our work as a government, helping us ensure that Wales remains resolute in its ambition of being a fair work nation. Building on the learning from the landmark Fair Work Commission in May 2019, we have established a dedicated department for Social Partnership and Fair Work. This year we consulted on proposals for a Social Partnership Bill, which will drive greater social equality for Welsh workers across the economy. We have involved our Shadow Social Partnership

Council throughout our response to the pandemic, working collaboratively to take action to protect the lives and prosperity of the people and businesses in Wales. The pandemic has highlighted the importance of ensuring people working in sectors of the foundational economy including social care, food and retail have access to fair, decent and secure work. To help achieve this we have established the Social Care Forum and Health and Safety Forum, which bring together social partners and expert stakeholders to improve outcomes for staff. In December 2020, we launched a workplace rights campaign alongside social partners to provide workers and employers with the knowledge, tools and support to ensure employment rights are respected. We have continued to deliver the Economic Contract, which was launched in 2018, to promote fair work and to drive social benefits through the power of the public purse. We have agreed some 480 full Economic Contracts with businesses, encouraging them to take a responsible and sustainable approach to jobs and the environment. A further 13,000 businesses have now committed to the principles of the Economic Contract through our business funding support.

Skills for the future

We published the Employability Plan in 2018, setting out the fundamental role of employability and skills in driving our economy. This approach is more relevant than ever before. In July 2020, we invested £40m to boost our Jobs and Skills Package and our Covid Commitment to ensure anyone over 16 in Wales can access advice and support to find work, pursue self-employment or to find a place in education or training. Our Community Employability Programmes, delivered in collaboration with local authorities and the Department for Work and Pensions, have supported more than 54,000 people since 2015 with training, essential skills and work placements, with more than 20,000 gaining employment. The programmes were adapted this year to provide continued outreach in our most deprived and vulnerable communities. Since April 2020, 6,620 people have been supported to improve their skills with nearly 3,000 entering employment. Working Wales has supported more than 20,000 people since April 2020 with advice, guidance and support across a range of programmes, including free online learning for workers on furlough. Apprenticeships are a crucial part of our economy, enabling people to develop skills while earning a wage. We have achieved our target of creating 100,000 high-quality apprenticeships in this Senedd term and continue to offer incentives of up to £3,000 to support apprenticeship recruitment. We have also piloted Degree Apprenticeships focusing on skills gaps in Digital/ICT and Advanced Engineering. Over this Senedd term we will have allocated £575m for apprenticeships and traineeships. Since 2014, we have helped 26,700 people into work and supported 112,800 qualifications through £861m investment from the EU structural fund programme. The Employability Support Programme, first launched in 2016, reached more than 1,800 participants over the same period, with 745 of those entering employment. The national rollout of the Personal Learning Account Programme, which launched in September 2019,

is helping workers access retraining and find new employment in areas of skills demand. Our ReACT scheme helps people who have been made redundant, or have become unemployed for another reason, through subsidised wages and job-related training. We expanded the scheme this year, and since April 2020 ReACT has provided nearly 2,000 vocational training grants for learners and awarded wage subsidies to almost 300 employers. In November, we celebrated 20 years of the Wales Union Learning Fund, which has supported more than 5,000 people with accredited and non-accredited learning, advice, and guidance on essentials skills and career progression since April 2020. The Flexible Skills Programme has delivered priority training to more than 2,000 employees to increase the digital talent base and support workforce skills in key sectors such as advanced engineering. This complements our £12m investment in the world’s first compound semi-conductor cluster in Newport, putting us at the forefront of world-leading technology and employing 1,500 people. Our In Work Support Service has been pivotal in supporting people to stay in work through physiotherapy, psychological therapy and occupational therapy. Since September 2015, the Service has supported 7,200 people including 3,800 with musculoskeletal issues and 3,400 with mental health conditions. Our Out of Work Service has also worked with more than 13,000 people, helping some 2,700 to achieve a work related certificate or qualification and 1,000-plus people into employment

Digital infrastructure, access and strategy

The pandemic has highlighted the essential role of digital in our lives – it has provided a crucial lifeline to many during the challenges of lockdown. Digital infrastructure and services have played an essential role in helping people across Wales live, work, and learn this year – as well as staying connected with each other and accessing health care services. We launched the Centre for Digital Public Services in June 2020 to act as a catalyst for learning and transformation based on user needs. This is helping us build on the transformational shift we have seen in response to COVID-19. We have also drawn on experiences from the pandemic in our Digital Strategy for Wales, which we are developing using an innovative crowd-sourced approach through our Digital and Data Blog. The Digital Strategy will help ensure that we provide modern, efficient and streamlined public services, stimulating innovation in the economy and supporting outcomes for future generations. We have invested more than £120m in education technology, transforming infrastructure in schools and providing 133,000 laptops for children in the past 12 months. In response to COVID-19, we committed up to £3m to support digitally excluded learners in maintained schools where there was no existing provision in place from the school or local authority. We have funded 10,848 MiFi devices, as well as 9,717 software licences to repurpose existing school devices across Wales. A report by the Education Policy Institute highlighted how Wales “led the way” in providing IT and online learning to pupils at home – including using our relationships with local authorities to deliver laptops and internet routers faster than anywhere else in the UK. Never has access to fast and reliable broadband been more important. We invested a further £30m this year to increase the number of homes and commercial properties, which can access superfast broadband, despite broadband being the responsibility of the UK Government. This builds on our Superfast Cymru programme, which has provided more than 733,000 homes and businesses with access to fibre broadband since 2012. We have also launched the £10m Local Broadband Fund to deliver new and innovative ways of connecting whole communities, working with local government and social enterprises. The Superfast Business Wales programme provides free support to help businesses make the most of online technology. The programme has already supported more than 5,500 small and medium enterprises, helping them to adopt digital technologies, reach more customers and improve their finances.

Creating strong, supportive communities

Our communities are a key part of our prosperity, and this year people have come together to support each other like never before. Volunteering

Wales, which launched its new online platform in 2018, has continued to raise the profile of volunteering and has played a crucial role during the pandemic – including supporting work like the Friend in Need scheme we launched with Age Cymru to help vulnerable people find support and friendship in their community. In April 2020, we provided £24m of support for the voluntary sector as part of our initial response to COVID-19 – in recognition of the ongoing crisis we provided an additional £2.5m in December 2020.

We launched the Voluntary Services Recovery Fund in August 2020, helping charities and the third sector to expand and adapt their services to meet the challenges of the pandemic. This builds on the support we have delivered across the term to make town centres as prosperous and vibrant as possible, including investing £800m in town centres since 2014 and adopting the Town Centre First principle that ensures town centres are the default for future government funded sites. In January 2020, we announced our Transforming Towns initiative with a package of support for town and city centres which is now worth nearly £110m. In response to the pandemic, we announced £5.3m to help adapt town centres, support traders and improve public safety. The Deputy Minister for Housing and Local Government established a Ministerial Town Centre Action Group, providing independent and comprehensive expertise so that we can take decisive action to support the prosperity and vibrancy of town centres in both the short and long term. We have also invested £3m of Valleys Taskforce funding to enhance small town centres in the Valleys region. These short-term actions will have a lasting positive impact on the look and feel of town centres in the area.

Helping culture and the Welsh language to thrive

We have made substantial progress on our goal of a million Welsh speakers since launching Cymraeg 2050 in 2017. Our Cymraeg 2050 Annual Report 2019-20 sets out achievements including progress on teaching and education as well projects to increase the use of Welsh in our communities. This year, we published Cymraeg. It belongs to us all, our new internal strategy for the use of Welsh, which sets out a vision of achieving a bilingual Welsh Government organisation by 2050 and the actions we are taking to achieve this. We established Prosiect 2050, a new language planning unit to co-ordinate our route towards a million Welsh speakers. It is driving an integrated approach to Welsh language across our work, creating initiatives which will double the use of Welsh. We took part in UNESCO’s International Year of Indigenous Languages, raising the international profile of Welsh as a modern and vibrant language. We also provided funding to the Urdd, the Eisteddfod Genedlaethol and Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod, supporting them through this difficult period. Innovative events such as Eisteddfod T and AmGen have helped to bring together Welsh speakers from all over the world despite the challenges of the pandemic. The cultural sector is an essential part of both our economy and our society, and support for this sector is crucial both now and for the future. In January 2020, we launched Creative Wales to drive the growth of the creative sector in Wales,

build skills at all levels and promote equality and diversity across the sector. Building on this, we launched the Cultural Recovery Fund as part of our response to the pandemic and extended it to £63m in November 2020. This fund provides support for institutions like music venues, libraries, museums and heritage organisations, as well as including a dedicated £10.5m fund for 4,200 freelancers working in the creative sector in Wales. Across this government term, our Major Events Strategy has supported events like the 2017 UEFA Champions League Final, matches in the 2019 Cricket World Cup and the Focus Wales international showcase festival in Wrexham. In 2019, the last year where data is available, Event Wales supported events generating £33.35m for the Welsh economy as well as boosting our international profile. This year, the Cultural Recovery Fund is supporting venues to help ensure they are ready to host major events once it is safe to do so. We have invested £40m in the sports and leisure sector since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, including the £17.7m Spectator Sports Survival Fund announced in January 2021, recognising the importance of sport to our culture, economy and wellbeing.

An outward-facing, globally responsible Wales

With the end of the European transition period, Wales’ place in the world has fundamentally changed. It has never been more important for us to build on our growing international reputation as an outward-looking nation ready to work and trade with Europe and the rest of the world. In January 2020, we launched our International Strategy for Wales, which set out how we are raising our international profile in a post-Brexit world, establishing Wales as a globally responsible nation and growing the economy through exports and investment. It also highlights sectors of our economy such as cyber security and compound semi-conductors where Wales is recognised as a world leader. We have continued to build on the award-winning Cymru Wales brand to promote Wales as an authentic, creative and vibrant nation, including through launching the Study in Wales website and publishing our Welcome to Wales tourism plan. We have now launched a series of international action plans showing how we will deliver on the goals of the strategy, taking account of the challenges of both COVID-19 and Brexit. This includes our Export Action Plan, which sets out the comprehensive support we are putting in place for exporters to recover, rebuild and adapt. Since September 2019, we have provided support for firms, which has resulted in £33m of new export orders as of January 2021. This year we have adapted our support in response to the pandemic, including through virtual trade missions and a new online Export Hub. We have expanded our international office network by opening new offices in Montréal, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Paris and Doha, increasing our engagement with these regions, such as our Wales in Germany 2021 programme. Our overseas networks have also played a crucial role in the pandemic. Our China offices helped to secure manufacturing equipment for a firm in Cardiff, which now produces up to a million surgical facemasks a day, as well as securing supplies of PPE for Wales at the start of the pandemic when the world was experiencing global shortages. Our Wales and Africa programme has continued to build mutually beneficial partnerships with communities in more than 25 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. This year we launched the Wales and Africa Action Plan for 2020-25, which includes an ambition to plant more than 3m trees a year – one for every person in Wales – as part of our Mbale Tree Planting Scheme in Uganda, building on the 10m trees which have already been planted through the scheme. In June 2020, we provided 26 grants to help the African partners of Welsh groups respond to COVID-19, including PPE, handwashing stations and training for health workers.