Wales

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons am 12:00 am ar 4 Tachwedd 1965.

Danfonwch hysbysiad imi am ddadleuon fel hyn

Photo of Mr Goronwy Roberts Mr Goronwy Roberts , Caernarvon 12:00, 4 Tachwedd 1965

It is still a fact that the tendency has been to hold this annual debate towards the end of the Session. It may well be that through the usual channels we can correct that.

This has been a very good debate. It has ranged very widely indeed. A debate of this kind on the state of the nation is today perhaps more significant and effective because of the new constitutional status and the Ministerial responsibility which have been accorded to Wales by the present Government. In past years general debates of this kind tended to be diffuse and pointless, because there was no real Ministerial reply possible to the speeches made. Today there are responsible Ministers who must listen to the criticisms and reply as fairly as possible. It is their duty to bear the onus of replying.

It is natural and indeed legitimate that in a debate of this kind a number of hon. and right hon. Members have raised constituency points. I will do my best, in the time at my disposal, to answer such points as I can. If, however, through lack of time, it is impossible for me to deal with all of these, I can assure the hon. Members concerned that every point will be followed up by Ministers.

Underlying all these constituency points is our concern and determination that the economy of Wales and its people should be placed on a firm basis. Wide ranging as the debate has been, the common motif of almost every speech which we have heard has been the need to strengthen and modernise Welsh industry and the social infrastructure which sustains it and, indeed, is in turn sustained by it.

The purpose of the debate was to examine what progress we are making in these vital matters, and although we hang the debate on the peg of taking note of the Report of Government action for the previous year, we all know that this is the way in which we examine the performance of the Government of the day. It is quite fair that we on this side of the House should endeavour to explain what we are doing and have done and that the Opposition should criticise present performance as well as attempting to justify past performance on their part.

I think that it is utterly fair to say that on the facts and arguments which we have heard today, the record of the past 12 months is one of great encouragement based on solid achievement. This is generally recognised throughout Wales. In a very difficult year, Wales—with the present arrangements—has made very good progress indeed in the vital sectors of advance which affect its national wellbeing.

The central fact which must govern our thinking and policy is, as my right hon. Friend said when opening the debate, the fact that Wales has been for the better part of a century dependent largely on a few heavy basic industries and that for the past two or three decades those industries have, for a variety of reasons—chief among them automation and market changes—been providing fewer and fewer jobs for our people.

We are faced with a two-fold challenge. Indeed, for the past 20 years or more all Governments have been faced with this challenge. The first is to ensure that the old basic industries—coal, steel, slate, agriculture; not one of them by any means dead or obsolescent and every one of them with a big future—are enabled to find a viable life providing security of employment and proper reward to its workers in the circumstances which are emerging and in the light of the facts of the situation.

That is one side of the Challenge. It deals with the old industries which are with us and which will be with us; industries which are great assets to our life and economy. The second challenge is to plan so that new, modern industries move into those areas which are most likely to be affected by the closure of the old ones.

The right hon. Member for Monmouth (Mr. Thorneycroft) has been talking a lot recently about the need to create confidence among industrialists in Wales to maintain impetus. This is very true. By that test, the achievements of the past 12 months in Wales show that industrial confidence in Wales has substantially increased over that of the past few years and that the impetus has indeed not only been maintained but is quickening. For example, 146 new industrial undertakings have come into the Principality in the last 12 months. That compares with an average of 117 in the previous four years, when the right hon. Member for Monmouth and his party were responsible for inducing confidence and maintaining impetus in Wales. If 117 was good, would the right hon. Gentleman agree that 146 is 25 per cent. better? In terms of new jobs the contrast is even greater; 10,600 new jobs in the last 12 months compared with 6,800 on average during the period to which I have referred.

The right hon. Gentleman also said that the economic health of Wales, like that of other parts of the Kingdom, depended very largely on the policy of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Of course it does. The right hon. Gentleman should know, for he was the Chancellor in 1957—and immediately the unemployment rate in Wales went up by nearly half, from 2·6 per cent. to 3·8 per cent. We indeed agree that the policy of the Chancellor affects Wales very deeply. The policy of the present Chancellor is helping Wales. It is designed not only to bring new industry into Wales but to modernise industry which has already reached the Principality.

I turn from industry to the new towns. The right hon. Gentleman does not like the term "urban centre"—I rather like it. It does not pin one down to any particular traditional type of arrangement. I think that there is a fair measure of agreement in all parts of the House that three things are necessary in mid-Wales. First of all, there is the strengthening of the existing towns, and we are doing that. In the past 12 months we have introduced into mid-Wales seven Government-aided factories compared with eight over the four preceding years. The Opposition's average of two we have capped with a performance of seven in one year. This is precisely what we mean by strengthening existing towns.

May I here pay tribute once more to the Mid-Wales Industrial Development Association, and its most able chairman and officers, for the part it is playing, with the Development Commission, in attracting and establishing these new industries in an area that so sorely needs them.

Secondly, apart from strengthening the existing towns, there is need to do everything we can to strengthen existing industry. From my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen (Lady Megan Lloyd George) we have heard of the importance of tourism; she is one of those Members who has long understood that tourism is a major industry in Wales, and could be an even bigger industry. In Mid-Wales as well as on the coast we would aim to link tourism—which is a seasonal industry with the great weakness that it employs people for only part of the year—with agriculture and, indeed, with forestry.

We shall seek by discussing in an appropriate place at an appropriate time the Government's proposal to set up a Rural Development Board for Wales, whose purpose will be to co-ordinate land use in areas of rural depopulation so that agriculture, forestry and tourism are linked together to form a new viable economy in such areas. This will need thinking out, but a great many people in Wales, in the holiday industry as well as agriculture, find themselves coming to this decision that we must link, shall we say, the smallholding with the tourist industry.

The new town itself forms the third prong of the policy, and I would ask hon. Members not to dismiss this, and regard it as inevitably an overspill of the Midlands. Why should it be? And if it were an overspill of the Midlands, are there not scores of thousands of Welsh families in the Midlands, many of them living in narrow streets, in housing one would wish to improve, and with their children in overcrowded schools. We are having to close schools in rural Wales because there are not enough children, while across the border in the great conurbation of the Midlands there are thousands of Welsh people and their children—children for whom there is really no room in the existing schools, and no teachers for them. If Wales has a surplus of anything apart from water, it is a surplus of teachers. They are our great export.

It is not inevitable that we should set up a new town in Wales to cater entirely for overspill. It should open its doors to people from outside—of course, it should—but it could also be Welsh in character, in spirit, and be a re-creation of the Welsh spirit in an area of Wales which since the time of the drovers has not been as literally Welsh as one would have liked to see it.