Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 5:09 pm on 28 February 1991.
I hope that my intervention will not be quite as long as the point that the Secretary of State was making. Does he agree that the acid test of regional policy is whether we are closing the gap with the rest of the United Kingdom? The best measure is not the statistics that the Secretary of State gave but those on gross domestic product per head. He said that we are closing the gap and spoke of the rebirth of the economy. Gross domestic product in Wales used to be 86 per cent. of the United Kingdom average, but it is now 84 per cent. Does he accept that the gap has widened, not narrowed?