Welsh Affairs

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 8:24 pm on 28 February 1991.

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Photo of Mr Ted Rowlands Mr Ted Rowlands , Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney 8:24, 28 February 1991

I could not hope to follow a better speech. My hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Mr. Wardell) spoke for us all, with great compassion and commitment to the future training needs of our communities. I hope that he will not be treated to one of the Minister's waffly, weaselly replies. The Minister will have to answer the speech in detail. My hon. Friend made his case on behalf of the young people and unemployed not only of Gower but of Merthyr Tydfil, Llanelli and elsewhere. We are baffled by some of the changes in the training programme. I shall give one or two examples, and I hope that the Minister will not respond in general terms but instead will get down to the detail arid explain to the House why iniquities such as those described by my hon. Friend take place.

First, I want to address a few personal remarks to the Secretary of State. At Welsh Question Time two Mondays ago, I was sad to see the right hon. Gentleman putting the old Peter Walker record on again. When Opposition Members come to the House to express the worries, concerns and fears of our constituents as the recession worsens, as unemployment increases and as more people are made redundant—trying to convince the Government that what is happening is not myth but reality—we are told that we are running down our communities.

We resent that allegation, because it is monstrously untrue. I have not run down Hoover and reduced the number of jobs from 5,400 to 1,300. I did not run down the washing machine market—a development that has led to another 450 redundancies being announced last Friday. I have not run down three pits in my constituency in the space of 18 months. That running down is largely the result of Government policy. I hope that the Secretary of State will reconsider his return to the Walker whine that we are in some way demeaning or denigrating our communities.

There is another reason why I resent that line. As the Secretary of State will know from the stream of correspondence that he receives from hon. Members on both sides of the House, whichever Government are in power, Welsh Members are privileged to be party to the painstaking process of rebuilding our local economies. I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman has that job to do in Wirral, West but for most Opposition Members it has been a lifelong job.

We spend an enormous amount of our time trying to obtain extra infrastructure programmes for our communities and attract industry and drawing to Ministers' attention the fact that this or that company may be looking for a factory or a site. We work with the Secretary of State and his officials, the Welsh Development Agency and our local authorities to do just that—painfully to put our local economies back together.

I have taken some knocks in the past 20 years, but the closure of Hymac in Rhymney was a devastating and heartbreaking blow. I feel it personally, because I know people who have been hit by it and because it hits the whole community. The Hoover situation has really got to me. I have not felt so bad for a long time, as the Secretary of State will know from my correspondence. Yet the right hon. Gentleman says that we are running down our communities. It is blatantly untrue. We are only saying, "Look—as a result of some aspects of Government policy, all the painstaking good work that we have done together has been knocked aside and destroyed overnight." We have lost 600 jobs at Hoover, plus 385 at the Deep Navigation pit. The loss of 1,000 jobs in my patch inside a month has wiped out about two years of work that we have put in with the support of the Secretary of State and the WDA. I hope that he does not repeat that Walker whine.