Category Archives: Conservative Party

It is a huge pleasure to be speaking to you on such a beautiful spring day in the brand new city of St Asaph.

And what a pleasure it is, too, to be here at OpTIC Glyndŵr – one of the most extraordinary buildings in all of Wales.

Its great glass wall, at 1,000 square metres, is the largest photovoltaic installation of its kind in the whole of Europe.

But there is much more to the OpTIC than the PV array.

In this very building, scientists from Glyndŵr University and University College London are working on a project to produce mirrors for the European Extremely Large Telescope, which will be the largest optical telescope in the world.

The level of engineering accuracy that the project calls for is astonishing.

Only a few feet from where we are sitting, Glyndŵr engineers are polishing mirrors to an accuracy of one billionth of a metre – or one thousand times less thick than a human hair.

And the advanced work that Glyndŵr is carrying out in this building is matched by a cluster of other companies in this area.

Close by is the Qioptiq plant, manufacturing hi-tech military optical equipment, which is exported around the world.

A couple of hundred yards in the other direction, we have TRB, a supplier of advanced automotive components; and a mile or two down the road we have the Honeywell factory, making computerised environmental and combustion controls.

So the proud new city of St Asaph is home to a number of world-class industries, which have chosen this beautiful corner of North Wales to establish and expand their businesses.

But while St Asaph and the surrounding area is competing with many other parts of the United Kingdom and, indeed, Europe, and Welsh institutions like Glyndŵr are literally reaching for the stars, the same, sadly, cannot be said for most of the rest of Wales.

The hard fact is that Wales is becoming progressively poorer, not only in relation to other parts of the United Kingdom, but to many other, less advantaged, parts of the EU.

Everybody remembers Peter Hain’s classic slip-up, when he boasted that, no matter how bad it got, Wales was, at least, richer than Rwanda; but that gaffe was not so very far from the truth.

The latest Eurostat figures, published a couple of weeks ago, show that two-thirds of Wales is now poorer than some parts of Romania.

Think about that: a country that spent most of the post-war period struggling under communism, and under the heel of  one of the world’s most repressive dictators, is now richer than most of Wales.

And, unbelievably, despite the hundreds of millions of pounds poured in, through European Objective One funding, over the last twelve years, most of Wales has got poorer rather than richer.

As Dylan Jones-Evans has pointed out, back in 2000, when it first received European funding, West Wales and the Valleys was the sixth most prosperous Objective One region in Europe.

By 2009, it had had fallen to forty-second out of fifty regions across Europe.

West Wales and the Valleys is now not only the poorest region of the UK, but is poorer than parts of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Oh yes, and Greece.

And at least they have the sunshine.

Who is to blame for all this?

Well, it doesn’t take a political anorak to realise that Wales’s continued economic decline has coincided with long periods of Labour Government in both London and Cardiff.

And, sadly, although we have now turfed Labour out at Westminster level, they are still the governing administration in Cardiff Bay.

Responsible, under the devolution settlement, for economic development.

So, given that responsibility, it is entirely fair to say that Labour are squarely responsible for messing up the Welsh economy.

Do you remember the Welsh Development Agency?

The WDA was established by the last Conservative Government and was astonishingly successful at attracting foreign companies to establish themselves in Wales.

World-renowned companies, such as Sharp, Toyota, Brother and Hoya were persuaded by the WDA that Wales was the right place to set up in business.

Thanks to the WDA, Wales was regularly the most successful region of the United Kingdom in terms of attracting inward investment. 

The WDA was a world-renowned brand recognised everywhere you went.

It was run by businesspeople, who understood how other businesspeople thought.

And it was an invaluable Welsh asset.

So what did Labour decide to do with it?

They decided to scrap it.

Economic development was taken “in-house”.

And economic development, despite the Objective One millions, came to a standstill.

Meanwhile, Labour in London stood by and did little to help.

Which was also a shame.

Because the fortunes of the Welsh economy don’t depend exclusively on the actions of the Welsh Assembly Government.

Decisions taken at United Kingdom level are crucial to economic growth in every part of the country, Wales included.

That is why it is essential that there should be close working between governments in London and Cardiff, irrespective of the political hue of the parties in power at either end of the M4.

That is a fact that was recognised by the Commons Welsh Affairs Committee in its report, published last month, on inward investment into Wales.

And it urged the Government to work closely with the Welsh Assembly Government to help attract inward investment.

The committee was right.

The Welsh Government simply cannot grow the Welsh economy on its own.

It needs the close co-operation of the British Government, which has worldwide reach, through its chain of embassies, high commissions and consulates in almost every country on earth.

UK Trade and Investment, the Government’s international business agency, is there for the benefit of every business in every part of the UK, Wales included.

Its role is to promote British trade with the rest of the world; and the Welsh Government should be taking advantage of its global presence to work closely with it in seeking to attract business into Wales.

That is also something that was urged by the Select Committee.

Let me say this clearly: Cheryl and I, with the rest of the Wales Office, are anxious to work with the Welsh Government to help improve the Welsh economy.

We want to see Wales emerging from the doldrums of the last decade plus, and on the road to realising its fullest potential.

We are prepared to work very closely with the Welsh Government to help achieve this, despite our political differences.

In return, we expect a positive, mature response from the Welsh Government.

And I think that is something that the people of Wales expect, too.

There have, as everyone knows, been problems.

One of them, frankly, has been the reluctance of the Welsh Business Minister to engage with the British Government and the British Parliament.

When requested by the Welsh Select Committee to give evidence to it on its inquiry into inward investment, she refused to do so.

More recently, she even refused to allow her officials to attend a joint session of the Select Committee and its Assembly counterpart.

That, to be blunt, is plain childish; and it won’t impress the people of Wales.

She has also shown a distinct aversion to taking up any ideas for economic development that were not conceived in Wales.

Enterprise Zones being a prime example; she took six months to announce the first Welsh Zones, while almost two dozen Zones were forging ahead across England, many of them directly competitive with Wales.

That’s not good enough.

A “not invented here” mentality is unacceptable.

The fact is that Wales has two Governments, and unless they both work closely together, it will only be Wales that suffers.

Carwyn Jones and his colleagues in Cardiff Bay must recognise that, in the best interests of Wales, they need to co-operate – and co-operate closely – with the United Kingdom Government.

We at Westminster are very anxious to do all we can to help the Welsh economy grow.

We are willing to put the investment in.

But Cardiff must play its part, too.

We recognise that our national infrastructure urgently needs upgrading after many years of neglect.

So we are taking steps to do that.

Take railways, for instance.

Last year we announced the electrification of the Great Western line to Cardiff – something that Labour could have done in its thirteen years of office, but didn’t.

Electrification is crucial to Cardiff, but we want to go further.

We also recognise the importance of electrifying the line to Wales’s second city, Swansea, provided a sufficiently strong business case can be produced.

And we in the Wales Office are also working closely with the Department for Transport and the Treasury on plans to electrify the South Wales Valleys lines, which would be of immense benefit to some of the most depressed parts of Wales.

Upgrading the M4 around Newport is a priority too.

We are listening carefully to the business case and are prepared to see what we can do to help.

And efficient, fast broadband is also of vital importance to every modern economy.

But in Wales, there are too many areas with slow speeds, too many not-spots.

So we have made £59 million available to the Welsh Assembly Government to roll out superfast broadband across Wales.

The Welsh Government now needs to put its delivery plan into action.

And we are quite prepared – indeed, anxious – to work with them on that.

But there are some areas where delivery is firmly the Welsh Government’s sole responsibility.

It should, frankly, be doing more to upgrade Wales’s road network.

Take the A494 road at Ewloe.

The upgrading of that stretch of road is a matter of top priority to the economy of the United Kingdom as a whole, given that it is part of the main European transport route to Holyhead.

It has been neglected for far too long.

So we are looking to the Welsh Government to see what proposals it has for the urgent upgrade of that stretch of road.

Peroration

Ladies and gentlemen, there is much to do.

Wales has languished in the economic slow lane for far too long.

The Eurostats figures I referred to earlier should be a wake-up call to all of us.

The regeneration of the Welsh economy is too important to allow petty issues of personality or territoriality to get in the way of a business-like and efficient relationship between the Wales’s two governments.

Let me now state quite clearly: we in Westminster are prepared to do our part.

But in return, we expect a positive and grown-up response from Cardiff.

Wales is a proud and ancient nation.

As a Welshman, I consider it nothing short of a national disgrace that it continues to need bail-outs from Europe alongside impoverished Balkan nations.

Cheryl and I have high ambitions for Wales.

We want all of Wales to show the dynamism that is displayed here at Glyndŵr OpTIC.

We want Wales to reach for the stars, too.

And we want the Welsh Government to work closely with us to that end. 

ENDS