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 also want to refer to the medium to longer term. It is not just a matter of our communities being knocked back as they are being at the moment. No matter what Government are in power, there are cycles in the economy. There are periods when economic activity goes up and down. In my community, I have noticed that, when we bounce back, we do not bounce back to where we were. The revival in any upswing does not undo all the damage. There seems to be long-term, nearly permanent damage to the manufacturing and industrial base of our communities.

I had intended to elaborate on that problem in our communities, but my right hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Mr. Davies) said it all. I was going to say that, if Llanelli was deleted from my right hon. Friend's speech and Merthyr Tydfil was inserted, the same points were true; what my right hon. Friend said about Llanelli is true of Merthyr. However, I am sure that deleting Llanelli would be the last thing that my right hon. Friend or, indeed, my wife would want. We are worried about our manufacturing base which made our communities so distinctive. They have not been rebuilt or regenerated.

We know a lot about washing machines in Merthyr. Sixty per cent. of Hoover's washing machine parts are imported. That happens not because there are companies in France or Germany that are more competitive in providing component parts than companies in the Principality or in Britain, but because there are no companies in Britain or in the Principality making those parts.

I approve of the efforts of Dr. Gwyn Jones and of the Secretary of State to attract inward investment. Welsh Development International is very important. However, we need a WIIDD—a Welsh indigenous industrial development department—which tries to fill that gap in the washing machine industry with 60 per cent. of products from indigenous Welsh production. That is an interesting illustration of the decline in manufacturing capacity and the abilities of our nation.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gower made a passionate speech. Our local economies have been guinea pigs, but hopefully the experiment is nearly over. We were guinea pigs for the Thatcherite economics and the notion that supply economics was all about cutting taxes. The idea was that enterprise would burst out all over the place and create jobs. That has not worked. The supply of goods and of component parts, for example for Hoover washing machines, has been pushed aside. Unless we return to supplying goods, we will not re-establish and rebuild the economies in our communities.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gower also referred to education and training. It was very disappointing that the Secretary of State treated education as though it were just another item to be ticked off as he was passing through on his grand tour of the Principality. He said that he was not going to embark on such a grand tour, but he did. Education did not figure prominently in his speech.

I do not want to repeat the speech that I made in the Welsh Grand Committee in which I advocated strongly that we should fundamentally change our attitudes towards the national curriculum for 15 and 16-year-olds and create new incentives for school leavers and 15 and 16-year-olds through decent early vocational education in schools. I am glad to say that I see distinct signs of conversion on that point from the Secretary of State for Education and Science. There was no mention of it in the speech of the Secretary of State for Wales today, but I hope that he supports the principle. I hope that there will be a fundamental change in attitudes in education for our 15 and 16-year-olds.

We must recognise that such a conversion might cause disruption. I am a trained historian and I have received letters from members of the history working party in Wales which has produced a working party report. However, that report was based on the assumption that history would be a subject compulsory until the age of 16. The curriculum needs to be revised.

As the hon. Member for Cardiff, Central (Mr. Grist) said, we must raise the vision and the dreams of our young people. There are signs that people's dreams have not been as powerful as they might be, but the emerging changes and conversions are welcome.

With de-industrialisation over the past decade has come deskilling. The reskilling of our communities, not just of our young people, is vital. I do not know how TECs are going to deliver. A very successful training consortium in my constituency is now turning away young people because it does not have sufficient places. People are having to travel great distances to acquire training which they could acquire on their own doorsteps, perhaps from the local technical college. The consortia and training schemes have received 100 per cent. approval from the training and enterprise council, but young people are being turned away because there are not enough places. That is nonsense.

The TEC in mid-Glamorgan, like me, is very worried about this. My intelligence about my community is pretty good. If it is not, my wife's certainly is. Between us we know most of what happens. Not enough young people in my community are training in engineering. They are not acquiring the skills that we will need to create the new manufacturing sector and manufacturing base that we hope to see.

Like my colleagues, I do not want to defend employment training. It has been pretty disastrous. Most of it looked like workfare. Much of it involved a pretence and a cruel deception. It was really a revamp of the community programmes.

There is virtue in community programmes. Some groups of young people in our communities will not need or be able to respond to high-tech training. There was a good case for community project work carried out by young people and the young unemployed.

We then pretended that there would be real employment training, but it turned out to be false. That is why people who have been on employment training schemes have expressed such cynicism to me. Employment training must be completely rethought. I do not think that the Government have got it right even now.

One sector of the work force has been totally ignored. I have spent the last few months reading surveys about the labour and training market. The main conclusion of them all is that we do not have enough youngsters to fill all the posts. However, we do have a large group of 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds who are currently in employment but who are either ill-skilled or have no skills whasoever. As far as I can see, there is no training and enterprise council for them. I do not know whether the mid-Glamorgan 'TEC provides such training, but I have not seen any evidence of it in my constituency.

We should concentrate on trying to attract into training the middle-aged, unskilled people in our community who, in the days of relatively high and good employment of the 1950s and 1960s, went into unskilled jobs where there were employment opportunities. How are we going to reach out to that middle-aged, low-skilled or unskilled section of our community? We need such people to be reskilled and to improve their skills if we are to meet the future economic needs of our community.

I must advise the Secretary of State that we talk our communities up, not down. We believe passionately in them. However, I am worried because I can see another recession hitting us. I believe that we shall see a semi-rerun of what happened in 1980 and 1981. Incidentally, I notice with interest that all the figures for comparison now start in 1986. The period 1979–1986 does not exist. It has been eliminated because, if one starts from 1986, the figures look better and one can show that the number of people involved in manufacturing has increased in the period 1986 to 1991. If one goes back to 1979, however, the figures do not look so good. But whether we start in 1986 or go back to 1979, we are worried because we might have another rerun or a semi-rerun of what happened in the period 1979 to 1981. We have been through all that once, and we must not go through it again.

It is not only a question of jobs and wages, or money and prosperity, although all are important. The thing that makes the communities that I represent Welsh is not so much something linguistic or cultural; it is an economic dimension. The economic basis of the communities that I represent created the distinctive identity that all generations of Welsh people who have become Members of the House have sought to express.

Of course we all recognise that change happens. The coal industry closes and restructuring occurs. However, my real worry is that the sum total of all the changes, and especially of the so-called restructuring of communities such as mine in the past decade will be that, one of these days—I hope that it will not be in my lifetime—our communities will not look any different from those in suburban England or anywhere else. We shall have a DIY economy. Everything will look the same, whether one is in Bath or Bristol, Pentrebach or Perth. That would be one of the saddest indictments of and epitaphs to the past decade of Conservative Government. Let us hope that it is coming to a quick end.