Hon Chairperson and hon members, the framework agreement was put together by a structure that is representative of all sectors - that is communities, organised business, organised labour and government. The training element in this structure was primarily aimed at addressing the challenge of job cutbacks in those companies that would have been in distress.
About R6,2 billion was set aside to assist companies that were in distress. Some of them took advantage of the availability of this fund in order to avoid retrenching workers. However, in other industries it was not that easy to avoid job cutbacks precisely because those industries were directly affected by the decline of demand on a global scale.
Therefore the design of the training programme was adequate. In my view, it's something that would be useful even beyond the recession period. Technically, we are now out of the recession. However, as we all know, the process of economic recovery continues to be affected by other economies. We know that in Europe now PIGS - that is Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain - are sinking deeper into an economic crisis which will impact on other markets that would also have a slowdown effect on our recovery possibilities. Thank you.