Welsh Affairs

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 7:03 pm on 28 February 1991.

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Photo of Mr Richard Livsey Mr Richard Livsey , Brecon and Radnor 7:03, 28 February 1991

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. It is extremely important for the guarantee to continue for another five years. If the Secretary of State looks at current open market wool prices, he will see that they are at rock bottom. They have been as low as 20p recently. Such a regime next year would spell disaster for another source of income for upland farmers. My hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion and Pembroke, North (Mr. Howells) is right to draw that point to the attention of the House.

I congratulate the Secretary of State on his rural initiative, which he announced last week in the Welsh Grand Committee. It is a useful initiative. However, I am slightly disappointed that it was not more, at a time of such crisis in agriculture. The Secretary of State has done well to secure what I calculate to be—I hope that he will correct me if I am wrong—approximately £35 million to add to the £1 million a day that goes from the Welsh Office into the rural areas of Wales. However, by my calculations, that is roughly a 10 per cent. increase, which is on a par with the current rate of inflation. If one compares that with the drop in farm incomes of 41 per cent. in two years, we see that there is a long way to go to catch up with the loss of income in rural Wales.

I have made that point to underline how serious the problem is. The Secretary of State is right to point to initiatives in urban Wales, where he is helping in many ways, but the crisis in rural Wales is extreme and needs further attention. We welcome the allocation in that announcement, with £6 million support from Tai Cymru for rural housing. Unfortunately, that does not equate with the average price of affordable housing, which is about £35,000. The allocation will build only 180 houses in rural Wales. It is a help, but it is a drop in the ocean compared with need. We have already heard speeches about that. There is a great need for local people to be housed in affordable housing in rural Wales. The present situation is a tragedy. The lack of affordable housing erodes the Welsh language in some areas. Some people in rural Wales are on low incomes and cannot afford a roof over their heads.

We welcome the report of the Welsh Language Board and urge the Secretary of State to introduce a Welsh language Bill. As the board says, the language needs equal status with English. In the heartlands of the Welsh-speaking areas of Wales—I speak as an English-speaking Welshman—we must not let fear and ignorance of the Welsh language stop us supporting it. The Secretary of State should grasp the initiative and introduce a new Welsh language Act. He will certainly receive support from the Liberal Democrats and, probably, from throughout the House. He must do something to save the Welsh language and to develop it for future generations to use.

There have been cuts in the road programme, and I am sure that the Secretary of State regrets them. Perhaps it is wrong to talk about cuts. It may be better to say that there has been a reallocation of resources into different projects in different parts of Wales. That affects two parts of my constituency. I especially regret that the reallocation has affected the Builth bypass. As the Secretary of State will have noticed, Builth is very busy at the time of the Royal Welsh show.

I bitterly regret—I hope that the Secretary of State is listening—his dropping of the Talgarth bypass. I am a native of Talgarth and I can assure the right hon. Gentleman that Talgarth is being knocked down by articulated lorries. I invite him to come with me to Talgarth to see the seriousness of the problem. We cannot delay the Talgarth bypass any longer. It is a major route from mid-Wales to south-east Wales, and, especially, to the Severn bridge. Windows are being smashed, and bricks are being removed from houses. The citizens of Talgarth walk along the pavements with great fear. We need to put that matter right urgently.

I thank the Secretary of State for receiving yesterday our delegation on the reform of the poll tax and on local government reform. The Welsh Liberal Democrats led the delegation to put forward our proposals. We believe that the poll tax must be abolished as soon as possible and replaced with a method based on people's ability to pay. We advocate a local income tax, which is fair and easy to administer. It is ideally suited and would be cheap to introduce.

The Secretary of State should introduce proposals to create single-tier authorities in Wales. I hope that that will be the conclusion of his wide-ranging review of local government reform. We believe that there should be about 25 authorities based on the old counties in mid Wales, in north-west Wales and in south-west Wales. In the south Wales valleys and north-east Wales, the authorities should be based on the new districts so that they reflect natural communities.

Unemployment in Wales is now well over 100,000 again, which is extremely regrettable. The recession is biting deep. I am one of 10 hon. Members who are ex-employees of ICI. We met the chairman of ICI at Christmas, as we do each year. He told us that the recession was probably deeper than that of 1981, and that fire brigade action was required to put matters right. He was worried that the basis of ICI would be cut away by the depth of the recession. Leaders of industry are very worried about the economy.

I hope that the Secretary of State will urge his Cabinet colleagues to cut interest rates by at least 2 per cent. to save the day. Wales needs an action programme, with lower interest rates, to build 7,000 to 10,000 houses a year to accommodate the 70,000 who are on the waiting list and to invest in the infrastructure, including roads. British Rail must be told to do a better job of running a non-existent railway system. As the right hon. Member for Llanelli said, we must produce more indigenous industry and businesses. We must encourage more young entrepreneurs, who are more highly educated, and more technocrats who can meet the challenge of the year 2000 and beyond.

We want a new Wales. We want investment and we want our young people to live in a country with a good environment where they can speak their own language and live in their own communities. We want them to produce a country of which we can all be proud. When we come here on future St. David's days, we want to be able to say that we are proud of Wales and that we are proud of being Welshmen and people associated with Wales for its own good.