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Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cirencester and Tewkesbury): Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Hague: I shall give way one more time and then I must end my remarks.
Mr. Clifton-Brown: Does my right hon. Friend think that the Opposition spokesman on Wales will be able to answer this question: is there a Welsh equivalent to the West Lothian question?
Mr. Hague: There is a direct Welsh equivalent to that question. If we had an assembly, Welsh Members would be able to vote on English public spending, but neither English nor Welsh Members would be able to vote on Welsh public spending. The Labour party needs to deal with that ludicrous position.
Mr. Rhodri Morgan (Cardiff, West): The Secretary of State for Wales is obviously far too young to wear spectacles, but I wish that he would not wear his rose-coloured contact lenses during the debate. When he describes the Welsh economy or the environment, those of us who represent constituencies in Wales just do not recognise the country that he is talking about. We examine the facts and the scoreboard rather than what the commentators are saying and we see that the level of prosperity that the Welsh economy continues to produce for our constituents is 16 per cent. below the United Kingdom average.
Those are the Government's statistics, not ours. We have not invented them. They are on the scoreboard. I am being generous to the Government in saying that Wales's prosperity level is 16 per cent. behind. The last fully accredited figures from the Government Central Statistical Office are for 1993-94. They show that Welsh gross domestic product per head--the ultimate measure of a region's prosperity--is 82.7 per cent. of the UK average. Not fully tested, not entirely complete figures estimate that the figure for 1994-95 is 84.7 per cent. I am willing to accept that that may turn out to be true, but even that shows a level more than 15 per cent. below the UK average, which in itself is nothing special compared with that of other European Union countries. That is the actual picture. That is what our constituents live with.
I welcome, in advance, the announcement that is to be made tomorrow--the Secretary of State made great play of it, although obviously he cannot formally say what it is. We hope that it is in the silicon chip sector, that it is vaguely Celtic and that many jobs are involved. However, we also have to remember the ones that got away. We are living in a unique year. We are coming to the last few months of 1995-96, during which--I do not blame the Secretary of State for this because it was his predecessor who started it--the experiment of ending the bipartisan approach to economic development in Wales, which has gone on since the 1930s, has been running.
The Secretary of State's predecessor, the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood), who had his own agenda about "standing on your own two feet", "getting on your bike" and all the different nostrums of the ideological far right of the Conservative party, set up the budget with which we are still living. He simply broke the mould and decided that it was time for Wales to get away from the begging bowl mentality. That is why I raise the point about the departmental report.
The Secretary of State should look at his departmental report for this time last year. It shows the amount that the Welsh Office has had in its budget for industrial development and gives the figures for 1989 through to 1995. In general, the amount was £150 million-plus; sometimes it was as high as £170 million and sometimes it was £160 million. The figure represents the funds going to the Welsh Development Agency from the Welsh Office and what is in the Secretary of State's kitty for regional selective assistance. The figure was always between£150 million and £173 million.
This year, however, the figure has dropped to half the usual amount; it is just £86 million. That is a dramatic fall. The Secretary of State must admit that the budget
for economic development in Wales has been chopped by almost half. We want to know why that has happened and whether it has anything to do with Wales losing out on the Chunghwa Picture Tube Company factory with its 3,000 jobs--a big development in which we were thought to be in the lead. The factory eventually went to Lanarkshire.
I had better make an apology to the House. My tie says CPT on it, but I assure the House, in case any of Lord Nolan's snoopers are watching the closed-circuit television, that it has nothing to do with Chunghwa Picture Tube. Some other body gave me the tie at a dinner; I think that it was something to do with passenger transport.
Although we in Cardiff especially missed out on the Chunghwa Picture Tube development because we were said to be in the lead, South Wales as a whole suffered from losing a development of that size. I asked the Secretary of State whether the fact that his predecessor had chopped £23 million or £24 million out ofthe regional selective assistance budget and another£43 million out of his grant in aid to the WDA had anything to do with Chunghwa's decision. He said that the fact that the WDA had only half its usual budget available had nothing to do with our losing the development and that assistance was demand led. He said that if Chunghwa had come to Wales, he would have found the money somewhere.
It is true that the regional selective assistance budget is demand led. Through the Department of Trade and Industry budget, England has overspent its RSA and has taken the money necessary out of contingency reserves. The Scottish Office has overspent its RSA budget and has taken money out of its reserves. We have underspent our RSA budget, so we have given money back to the Treasury, as the previous Secretary of State proudly boasted. It was very nice for him to be able to make that boast when he was running for leadership of the Tory party, but it was not very good for us because we had to live with the consequence--less industry coming into Wales.
It is also true that one can always find a few extra million if one gets industry in, but one cannot get industry in unless the WDA has the money to put the package together. That is the problem. The pincer movement of cutting the regional selective assistance budget and cutting the Welsh Office grant to the WDA means that if the WDA cannot get the firm in by offering the package that it could be offered in Lanarkshire, the Secretary of State does not need to spend his regional selective assistance budget because the firm is not coming to Wales. The massive cut--as a result of last year's experiment carried out by his predecessor for which I do not blame the present Secretary of State--is another reason why the Secretary of State should put away the rose-coloured contact lenses that he was wearing during his speech.
Lord Crickhowell, Lord Walker and the right hon. Member for Wirral, West (Mr. Hunt) all believed in a bipartisan approach, with economic and industrial development being the top priority for the Secretary of State for Wales, so that new jobs could replace jobs in the old industries. I am afraid that the right hon. Member for Wokingham did not believe in that approach. He believed in "on your bike", the cold shower and the need to get away from the begging bowl mentality, so he broke that consensus. We have to live with the consequences, and I would have liked the Secretary of State to have said what
he intended to do to establish in the job description of the Secretary of State for Wales an agreement about the primacy of economic development. We might then have been able to work out what next year's budget for industrial development would look like, and that would have given us some assurances.
The Secretary of State mentioned tomorrow's development, which has not yet been announced. However, he did not say that the development was new in the sense that it was a project by a firm that was new to Wales. Much of the industrial development that is announced, re-announced and then announced to the House for a third or fourth time, forming part of the Secretary of State's hype offensive against the people of Wales, involves firms, such as Ford and Sony, which have been in Wales for 20 years or more. Some firms came in during the previous Labour Government's tenure and some came in during the early years of the present Administration. Those firms may reinvest and expand, but they are not new names.
In the past 10 years, Wales has missed out on all the big new investment providing 2,000 jobs and more. Firms such as Siemens, Fujitsu, Toyota, Nissan and Chunghwa have not come to Wales. We would have liked to have won one of those firms and we might then have felt satisfied that Wales remained at the forefront of the Government's regional economic development effort. Of the six big investments providing 2,000 and 3,000 jobs during the past eight or nine years, none has come to Wales.
Chunghwa was probably our best bet because of its natural connection with Ocean Technical Glass in Cardiff, but we missed out on that one. It is an extremely sad story, for which the Secretary of State should apologise on behalf of his predecessor who gave him a budget, set this time last year, which was far too small, in terms both of the departmental budget and the WDA budget.
I understand that Chunghwa made the point that one of the advantages of Lanarkshire was that it had a Eurofreight terminal. In Wales, unfortunately, we do not have a Eurofreight terminal and there has been a battle royal over where the Eurofreight terminal should go.It must be said that the Secretary of State has not been fighting hard for Wales on the issue. I understand that he has been telling people, "Well, I cannot approve the Eurofreight terminal because it may screw up the process of the privatisation of Railfreight. It may involve closing the Pengam rail freight terminal", which belongs to Freightliners Ltd. and is in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth(Mr. Michael).
The Secretary of State for Wales is under instructions from the Secretary of State for Transport not to make any decisions on the Eurofreight terminal until Railfreight has been sold. That is not good enough. The Eurofreight terminal is a major generator of new jobs, both directly and indirectly, because it is an attraction to firms such as Chunghwa.
We do not have a Eurofreight terminal and, to be honest, the amount of attention that the Secretary of State has given to the issue is a disgrace to the Welsh Office and to his post. He has an out tray, a pending tray, a manana tray and, for things that are even less urgent, he has the Eurofreight terminal tray. He has no excuses; the development has planning permission and it has funding.
All it wants is a go-ahead and a bit of decision making by the Secretary of State. Tolstoy could have written "War and Peace" in the time that it has taken the Secretary of State to make up his mind. I do not know whether he can give us an undertaking about when he will make a decision on the Eurofreight terminal.
We are very pleased by the long-overdue decision, announced by the Secretary of State this afternoon, to take control of European structural funds out of the clammy hands of the Welsh Office and to give it to the infrastructure-providing partners. That decision has been taken about two years after the Scottish Office took a similar decision--not a sign of great dynamism on the part of the Secretary of State. I think that I am right about that; if I am wrong, I shall be interested to hear the Secretary of State's views. That long-overdue change is part of the idea that the Secretary of State should empower people to take more decisions for themselves and that he should remove some of the control over decisions from the Welsh Office.
We notice that, all the time, the Secretary of State makes great play of visiting the four European motor regions with which Wales is connected. I remember that the previous Minister, the right hon. Member for Conwy (Sir W. Roberts), visited Catalonia. I understand that the Secretary of State has been to Catalonia and met its Prime Minister, Mr. Pujol. The Chief Minister of Lombardy was recently over in Cardiff. I do not whether the Secretary of State met him. I see that he is nodding.
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