Diolch, Llywydd, and thank you again. Just to reiterate really, you've been extremely helpful and co-operative to concerns I've raised with you, and I think it's fair to say I've raised plenty. But just taking you back quickly to the meeting that you came to where we had over a hundred people very concerned in the room, and one of the big things that came through was the issues with BT themselves in terms of their communications with our constituents and then them having to ultimately come to me, and one of the constituents asked and was supported by the whole room as to going forward—and I know it's a difficult one for you—but going forward with the tender processes, if there's this feeling, the lack of confidence in BT itself, how will this impact on a) you going forward in terms of having confidence in dealing with them again, but my bigger concern is in your statement today where you mention about,
'To date, we have paid BT £300 for every premises, however, the closure of the delivery phase means that we must now work together to balance the books',
and when it says 'work together', who with? And,
'ensure that all expenditure is eligible and fully evidenced. This process will take several months to conclude, but it is essential to ensure that BT does not benefit from any oversubsidy.'
That, to me, is a little bit vague, and in terms of audit processes, I just wonder how you can actually just give us a little bit more confidence that there will be a rigourous look at this, because I know in my constituency you were probably surprised by how many people themselves believed they were getting it, they were told they were getting it, they still haven't got it, and yet they are actually in this current roll out phase. So, there are still a lot of questions to be asked about BT's part in this, and I think you've probably taken a lot of flak over the past few months for something that's not actually been your fault, but it's what influence and what power do you have as a Cabinet Secretary, as the Welsh Government, against BT, because I think they're well aware of my concerns because I had them at the meeting as well.
Yes, the Member makes the points that many Members make all the time about the comms issue, and I won't rehearse it, Llywydd, we've been through it many times before, but we have learnt that lesson. So, going forward, it will be a condition of the new contracts, for whoever wins them, that the communication is direct with—and we will have named premises in those contracts; we won't have the fishing pond effect that we have this time. We will know who's in the contract and who isn't, and we'll be able to put a comms policy in place because we have learnt that lesson very much and, indeed, I have taken a lot of flak on that subject from around Wales, I think it's fair to say.
In terms of the grant claims, we would always go through a vigorous process at the end of any contract: it has severe financial penalties in it, so it's in our interest and the contractors to make sure that we're both on the same page about what's being claimed, why it's being either agreed or not agreed and what the processes for that are. And obviously they claim it, we say no, they say yes, we go back-and-forth quite a few times, and now we're going through the whole contract again at the end to make sure that we're all clear exactly on what basis we've paid for which claim, why, why we've said no or yes and so on. So, that's the process. I'm very happy that it's very vigorous. It has been informed by my tour of Wales where some people, I think, even in the Llywydd's constituency the other day, some people we thought were connected were saying that they weren't, so we've put our teams back out onto the ground to check, verify those claims once more and to just test the whole process one more time. So, I'm very pleased about that, and as I said, there are complex issues