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9.53 pm
Mr. A. J. Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed): I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Roxburgh and Berwickshire (Mr. Kirkwood) for seeking this debate and giving us and our hon. Friend the Member for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale (Mr. Moore) an opportunity to represent concerns that go right across the borders.
As my hon. Friend made clear when he spoke about the redundancies at Pringle of Scotland which occurred in both his constituency and Berwick-upon-Tweed, redundancies know no boundaries. Although the firm is called Pringle of Scotland and it did not make much publicly of the fact that so much of its knitwear was assembled in England, it was a significant employer in the town. In years gone by it employed hundreds more even than those who lost their job at that final stage. Textile job losses hit us hard, along with the rest of the borders.
Since then there have been other losses as a couple of firms have gone under, one in computer cataloguing and the other a sandwich business. Both provided vital jobs in the area.
At the same time, we have a desperately difficult situation in agriculture. It is not always realised how many agriculture-related businesses there are in the communities of the borders or how much the small
towns depend on agriculture because they service it.They provide it with supplies, machinery and vehicles. They maintain those vehicles and carry out engineering and other services. Not only Berwick and Kelso, but smaller towns like Wooler, Belford, Chirnside and Coldstream are involved in those businesses and they are all feeling the pinch severely. Further job losses are starting to happen in agriculture-related businesses, all of which trade across the border. It is a cross-border problem which demands cross-border solutions.
In this my brief contribution I want to emphasise to a Scottish Office Minister how he might help us and what he could be doing. I remind him that if 100 jobs are created in Berwick, in all probability 20 or 25 of them will be taken by my hon. Friend's Scottish constituents. If 20 jobs are created in the Cornhill area, a number of people from Coldstream will take those jobs. Conversely, the success of businesses on the Scottish side of the border, such as Dexters papermill in Chirnside and others, is crucial to my constituents.
I should first like to see the Minister ensure full co-operation from Scottish agencies with the Berwick area task force. It was set up to co-ordinate all the work of all the Government-related and relevant private bodies that can contribute to economic regeneration in and around Berwick. It started life as Pringles task force in response to the redundancies there, but it has had to change its name because of so many other redundancies elsewhere and the widening problem. We have had some co-operation from the Scottish Borders Council and from the Scottish Development Agency, and we should like that to continue and to be strengthened.
In recognising that jobs in Berwick are relevant to the other side of the border, I hope that the door will not be shut on any suggestion of some financial help in putting together a joint bid for some industrial regeneration project or other. It would be sound investment for the Scottish agencies. The problem is often assembling a bid which puts together enough matching funds to draw out the European funds which are available for many of these projects, such as those for textile areas under the Retex scheme. The other day a Minister assured me that there are £2.5 million in funds directly accessible for various regeneration work in the Berwick area, but that depends on assembling matching funds.
In the context of European funds I echo my hon. Friend's plea in so far as it relates to north Northumberland, too. I hope that he recognises how important it is that north Northumberland continues to have some access to European and United Kingdom regional funds. We have patchy involvement now partly because in times past the Berwick area has not been one of high unemployment. We are suddenly faced with these problems. The southern end of my constituency, which is more related to the Tyneside economy, has had high unemployment for a long time. Unemployment has hit the borders severely in relatively recent times and since most of the old maps of assisted area status and so on were created.
I hope that the Minister recognises the importance of infrastructure spending on jobs in the area. All of this is of cross-border significance. Hon. Members have worked together on the A1 campaign because it is crucial to the communities on both sides of the border that we have a safe and effective A1. We have all been bitterly disappointed--indeed, the hon. Member for East Lothian
(Mr. Home Robertson) has said so--that so manyA1 dualling projects have been abandoned on the Scottish side and that progress on the English side is so limited.
There are other transport plans and proposals, for example for a rail freight centre in Berwick and for opening up rail links in the borders. I hope that they will be looked on with favour because they will bring jobs as they are created and will strengthen the infrastructure for the businesses that could prosper in the area.
My last point concerns joined-up Government, in the phrase that Ministers have popularised. When an area has a crisis such as this, every Department should be put on notice that it has special problems so that all decisions are checked for whether they will make the problems worse. It is happening even now. Several Ministers have said how concerned they are by the situation in the borders but harmful decisions are still being taken.
We have a classic coming up on Monday. If the Government announce that we are to lose the Territorial Army centre in Berwick, we will lose some full-time jobs, and the input into the training and development of the relatively young men and women who have the opportunity to serve in the TA. They would have to travel to continue serving. Closure would have an impact on the area.
It being Ten o'clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. Allen.]
Mr. Beith:
Education expenditure, to give only one more example, is crucial. My hon. Friend the Member for Roxburgh and Berwickshire mentioned further education, of which there is little in the eastern borders. For most people, there is almost nothing within 30 or 40 miles or any sort of travelling distance. Berwick-upon-Tweed has only a tiny annex of Northumberland college with a useful but limited range of facilities. The only other readily accessible facility is the part of the Borders college at Duns. Again, that is only a small part of the college's activities. Without further education facilities in the area, we cannot re-equip our young people to follow different careers. I hope that as part of joined-up Government, Ministers realise that every Department must deliver its policies as they affect areas with special problems. I hope that the three of us will have made the case that the area has special problems.
Mr. Michael Moore (Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale):
I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Roxburgh and Berwickshire (Mr. Kirkwood) for encouraging me to participate in this debate, and to the Minister for his willingness to hear from the three Members who represent south-east Scotland and Northumberland, which have been badly affected by economic developments over the past 12 or 18 months.
It has been a dreadful year. We face the loss of about 2,000 or 2,500 jobs. There is not a community that has not been affected. My right hon. and hon. Friends have been most eloquent in explaining how the different communities north and south of the border have been affected, and how much they depend on one another. It is only as we approach Christmas that the personal tragedy of lost jobs and lack of income, and the desperation
of families, will come home to roost, not least in textiles, but also in electronics, with the first major redundancies from Viasystems expected in the next few weeks.
Our part of the country welcomes the fact that Ministers have visited and seen our problems at first hand. It is fair to say that, over the summer, we have had many meetings with Ministers in Glasgow or in the borders, and we are most grateful for that. If the Minister will accept a small reminder, many initiatives have come from the communities of the borders and local agencies. All the people of the borders recognise the need to come up with good, positive ideas. The various rescue plans put to the Scottish Office over the past few months pay tribute to the creativity and far-sightedness of many local people in understanding the nature of the problems that affect our area, and possible solutions to help get us out of the current difficulties.
There is no lack of community spirit. We hear so often about the borders rivalries. This shows the flip side: towns and villages coming together, recognising the common purpose of the borders and the north of England. We know that we need a variety of responses in the short, medium and long term.
For the short term, I have already mentioned that so many families are horribly affected by the sudden loss of jobs and thus of income. We have had some high-profile task forces from the Department of Social Security and the Employment Service in our area in recent weeks. We are anxious to have an assurance from the Minister that those task forces will remain in the borders, properly staffed and resourced, for many weeks and months to come, to ensure that the proper advice and support is available to those families in their hour of need.
In the medium term, to provide some solutions for our part of Scotland and the north of England, we must tackle our disadvantages. Reference has already been made to the need for assisted area status. I commend to the Minister the publication by Scottish Borders council entitled "The Scottish borders case for assisted area status" only recently produced, and now submitted to the Scottish Office.
We have suffered often in the borders from an apparent wealth and an apparent lack of the headline figures such as high unemployment that might make us eligible for support. The thoughtful proposal by the local council in partnership with the enterprise company and others highlights the fact that the problem with unemployment figures is that they do not take any account of the many people who leave the area. Indeed, too many people may be forced to leave our part of the country.
Just a short trip--the Minister may have made it this week--into the top end of Galashiels from Edinburgh reveals that almost every third house is for sale. People do not hang around to be unemployed in the borders. Other factors, such as our very low income per head and our very low numbers of young people, should be taken into account when the assessment for assisted area status is made.
The Minister will be familiar with our view from deputations that my hon. Friend the Member for Roxburgh and Berwickshire and I have brought to him about the future of European Union structural funds. When we met recently at Dover house, he encouraged us
to go away and pull together the different parties involved in the bid for objective 2 status. I can happily report to the Minister that, only this week, we had a meeting at the Scottish Borders tourist board headquarters in the borders of all the main parties. We shall meet on a monthly basis from now until the announcement is made about the future.
We are committed to ensuring that we produce a co-ordinated response which will demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the borders deserve to be considered properly within the objective 2 category, and at the very least are eligible for the safety net proposed by the European Commission.
When we get beyond medium-term initiatives, we have to look at the long-term problems. Too often in the past, people in the borders have identified many of our problems, be it poor roads or the lack of a railway, yet previous Administrations have chosen to ignore them, and have never prioritised them. We hope that the Government will not repeat their mistakes.
We welcome the fact that, over the summer and the past few months, a high-level working party sponsored by the Scottish Office and led by a senior Scottish Office civil servant has been looking at the various problems in the borders. We hope that the Minister will be able to tell us, if not this evening then soon, when we might expect an interim announcement from that working party as it draws together its first conclusions and reports to the Secretary of State.
We hope that it will not finish quickly, meaning that the problems of the borders are quietly shelved, and Government initiatives move on to other areas. We hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that there will be a continuing focus for that group, and that there will be evidence of the joined-up thinking to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) referred in Government Departments for some time to come.
I want to pay particular attention to the case of Viasystems, the electronics company that recently announced it would close with the loss of 1,000 jobs. As my hon. Friend the Member for Roxburgh and Berwickshire pointed out, although those jobs are primarily situated in my constituency, in Selkirk and Galashiels, the effect of their loss will be felt across the borders. There is a real sense of shock that something as horrific as that is to hit the local area. In many cases, people have put 30 hard years of their life into the company, which was highly profitable and had a committed and productive work force, yet their commitment, productivity and hard work have been betrayed by the management in St. Louis.
During the summer, my hon. Friend the Member for Roxburgh and Berwickshire and I visited St. Louis, and put the case to the management for continuing with the Viasystems plants in the borders, but our appeal fell on deaf ears. It was not that we made an emotional case; our case was based on hard financial realities. In the first six months of this year, Viasystems' plants in the borders made a profit, by the company's own definition, of £2 million. The company makes an estimate of earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation; as an accountant, I could get very excited about all that, but suffice it to say that the company chooses in all its corporate releases to concentrate on that operational measure.
As I said, in the first six months of this year, the profit made by the company's own measure was £2 million, so it is a disgrace that the company has argued publicly that it was losing money in the borders. The only way in which the company could begin to portray the borders facilities as losing money is by allocating some interest charges from an Italian subsidiary, Zincocelere, that has absolutely nothing to do with the borders; by attributing tothe operational performance of the facility£200,000 associated with early redundancies this year; and--something which sticks in the throats of many in the borders--by allocating nearly £100,000 of fees paid to the financiers Hicks, Muse, Tate and Furst, who put up the money that backs the Viasystems shareholders.
10.1 pm
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