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Mr. Allan Rogers (Rhondda): And Cardiff bay.
Mr. Rowlands: As my hon. Friend says, that also applies to Cardiff bay. We spent many months making that case.
Along with chasing great international inward investments, and the excitement and adrenaline that doubtless runs in the veins of those who go in search of it, let us have some energy, innovation and imagination put in to support community enterprise and local regeneration. We need to ensure that the planning is right.
The closure of sub-post offices and chemists is the deadly sign of the loss of community in our mining villages. With it comes the boarding up of properties. Let us have local joint ventures of the sort that we have seen on the grander scale; let us have assisted development of the sort from which Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney has benefited in recent years. Alongside the bigger, wider programme, let us have community enterprise development and an agency that can combine with local authorities and the Welsh Office to regenerate our communities at local level.
Mr. Roy Hughes:
Does my hon. Friend appreciate that the LG investment in Newport is not negative from the point of view of the valleys? I come from the valleys, but I have found that people from there flock in their hundreds and thousands to work in Newport and Cardiff. That will happen again.
Mr. Rowlands:
I hope that I have not suggested that I in any way oppose LG. The opposite is true. I am not so parochial that I do not realise the major role that LG will play in employment opportunities throughout the communities that surround the site near Newport, but let us also have some imagination and effort put into community development through joint venture schemes. The WDA has undertaken big, urban, commercial renewals, but it has not carried the same principles, efforts, energy and imagination down into our local communities. The partnerships and joint venture schemes that exist at one level should be delivered at another.
I have pleaded for more public money. I will be accused by the Government, and perhaps by my Front Bench, of breaking the Government-Brown diktats on public expenditure. We are talking about small sums of money. The Secretary of State was suddenly able to find £25 million to increase the WDA's budget. I did not notice taxes go up or public borrowing explode as a result. For the life of me, I cannot understand why, in the Welsh Office's £6.8 billion budget, we cannot find an additional £25 million. It should not be beyond the ingenuity of my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly to go through the budget after the general election and find such a sum.
A Welsh Office budget of £6.7 billion was forecast for 1995-96, yet the previous Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood), forecast a budget of £6.890 billion--£190 million more. Such changes between forecasts and outturn must be noted. The right hon. Member for Wokingham, whom I never took to be a great lover of public expenditure, forecast a budget for the Welsh Office for 1996-97 of £7 billion. That was his forecast.
Mr. Barry Jones (Alyn and Deeside):
This debate has latched on to the central issues as they affect our country, Wales. I thought that the Secretary of State made an emollient and typically courteous speech. I thought that my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State gave the speech of a man savouring the prospect of office within weeks.
Two essential points have been made in the debate. First, right hon. and hon. Members very much hope to see more investment from indigenous companies, notwithstanding their welcome for overseas investment. Secondly, we would like to emphasise our wish that the WDA should offer even-handed treatment across Wales. Right hon. and hon. Members have expressed some anxiety that that may not be happening. I do not wish to be controversial, but that is an important point to bear in mind in the years ahead.
Hon. Members have tried to emphasise the context in which the WDA is being debated. There is a historical context that can be understood by consideration of Ben Pimlott's biography of Hugh Dalton and the autobiography of the late Douglas Jay. Those books offer a history of the germ of regional policy. They reveal how those two great figures of the Labour movement, who worked as civil servants in the second world war, were responsible for the first conscious acts to prepare regional policy. From memory, I believe that Douglas Jay recounts how he encouraged, with the help of some Welshmen, the development of the first planned industrial estate, which was located in Bridgend. It was followed by others in central Scotland.
Mr. Roy Hughes:
The first was Nylon Spinners.
Mr. Jones:
Yes, my hon. Friend is right.
I see this debate as an anniversary of the debate on the creation of the WDA. I should like to emphasise the major role that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Aberavon (Mr. Morris) played in its creation. I remember the day when he opened the Second Reading of the Bill in which the agency was proposed to this honourable House. I had the honour of winding up for the Government. I recollect how the then Nicholas Edwards, who represented Her Majesty's Opposition, gave an unwelcoming, carping and grudging response to Labour Ministers' proposals in the middle of the 1970s. At the conclusion of the debate, the right hon. Member for Conwy (Sir W. Roberts) wound up for the Opposition and he, too, offered the same regretful, unwelcoming and carping response to my right hon. and learned Friend's creation of the WDA. That approach continued in the Standing Committee, in which I piloted the Bill alongside my late colleague, Alec Jones.
I also remember from that Second Reading that Peter Walker, now Lord Walker, made a grudging intervention in which he claimed the credit that he seemed to think he should be given for the idea of the WDA.
Nicholas Edwards, who later became Secretary of State and who is now in another place, would not have been able to survive as a Cabinet Minister without the instruments of economic power that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Aberavon had bequeathed him. There was a time, in the early 1980s, when unemployment in Wales according to the official figures exceeded 180,000--indeed, the number of unemployed people in Wales edged close to 200,000. Having said that, under successive Secretaries of State, the agency has been a great success. It had to be, because, in the early 1980s, there were major disasters in manufacturing industry in Wales, not least the colossal losses in man-made fibre jobs, brickmaking jobs and steelmaking jobs, as at Shotton steelworks in my constituency. In this debate, however, we must acknowledge the agency's successes throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
I have an agenda concerning my own constituency that I want to put to the Secretary of State. I shall first mention townships such as Connah's Quay, Shotton, Queensferry, and Buckley: to some extent, the agency has invested in Deeside and in those communities, but it is the wish of Flintshire county council and of my constituents that there be more investment. I give as an example the township of Queensferry where many of the shop fronts are now boarded up and are not operating in the interests of the citizens of that locality. To some extent, the same may be said of the township of Shotton. We have suffered considerably from man-made fibre plant closures, from steelmaking job losses and from cyclical redundancies in the aerospace industry, in addition to redundancies in the cement industry and in brickmaking. In all this, we have instanced the need for the agency to back us fully and to give us every possible help.
Mention has been made of Mr. Rowe-Beddoe and his chairmanship of the agency. Through my observation of the agency's leadership over many years, I know that he has been a success of a particular kind. His discipline over his executives and employees is severe--some of his detractors say that he is something of an Attila the Hun, but if he is and if he has made the agency more leak-proof and disciplined, so be it. In all my remarks, my hope has been to see the agency as being the means and the instrument by which my constituency might suffer less unemployment.
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