My Lords, I had not intended to intervene in this debate, and I am going to do so not from a particularly Welsh angle but from a general one. I identify with Amendment 6 and the comments of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, with regard to the practicality of any Act like this being interpreted by the courts. We are going to create a monster if we are not careful, and it may well fall down because of its own inertia.
Three areas of experience spring to mind for me in addressing this question. The first is the old—am I allowed to say it?—Chinese saying that if you give a man or woman a fish then you feed them for a day, but if you teach them to fish then you feed them for a lifetime. Therefore, any long-term economic strategy must be geared towards enabling that to fulfil itself, so that we are not just providing subsidies for the day but providing a basis on which to build.
The second experience that comes to mind is writing an economic plan back in 1970 with the late, great Phil Williams, whom some colleagues here will remember from the National Assembly. We did an analysis to find winners in terms of industry and in terms of geographic location. Most of them worked out. In fact, they were fairly common-sense things—electronics, chemistry and so on—and I suspect that they would have fulfilled themselves had there been no grant mechanism, because they were doing what there was a momentum towards.
My third and final point concerns our experience in Wales with regard to European funding; I have no doubt that similar experience will have been obtained in Cornwall, South Yorkshire, Merseyside, parts of Scotland and wherever such funding was available. The funding went not just to narrow projects but to areas of investment with a long-term payback, such as work, even blue-sky projects, in our universities. These would not create immediate jobs but provided a basis on which industry and commerce, and those who were going to invest in them, could look to the future.
The scheme of grants that was available then through the European Union was very broad; we should not ignore that dimension. We need mechanisms that enable that to happen. If we can get this right, it could be very valuable. It may well be that this Bill has that potential in it, but there is a lot that needs to be clarified at the moment. Some of these amendments may help tease that out.