Income Equality and Sustainability

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

Wednesday 6th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, there is a business phrase: “Never waste a crisis”. We must not waste this crisis. We must not accept a return to the status quo. Our two priorities have to be climate change and a fairer, more equal society.

I will talk for a moment about Wales, my home country, which for decades has been the poorest part of the UK. Some 730,000 people, a quarter of the population, live in poverty, and income in Wales is about 90% of the UK average. This is a product of different things. Wales is a heavily rural area, and rural incomes tend to be lower. Tourism is very important, but the hotels are shut and the festivals cancelled. Farming faces an uncertain future because of Brexit.

Wales has also never fully recovered from the collapse of the heavy industries and the closure of the mines, but there have been very bright spots of investment—Tata Steel and Airbus, for example. But in the last weeks, both those companies have warned of their perilous financial position. We now face the danger of well-paid, skilled jobs being lost. So poverty in Wales is highly likely to increase after the Covid crisis.

My call is for long-term investment as a priority, first of all in education, from nursery schools through to universities, and secondly in infrastructure, from 5G to rail electrification. These investments must serve to develop our priorities.