Clause 54 - Wales Spatial Plan
Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill
2:51 pm
Mr Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold, Conservative)
The hon. Member for Monmouth (Mr. Edwards) makes a good point.
I was adducing an argument by giving the population statistics for different regions of the United Kingdom. I shall not go through them all again, but will recap for the benefit of the Committee. The largest region in England is the south-east with 8.077 million people, some 13 per cent. of the United Kingdom population, compared with Wales with a population of 2.946 million. Those are the latest available figures, which are up-to-date for 2000. The Minister may argue that it is precisely because Wales has a lower population than most regions of England,
although not all—the north-east has a population of 2.58 million—