Freeports: Wales

Alex Norris Excerpts

Tuesday 21st February 2023 Westminster Hall

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Vickers, and to speak on behalf of the Opposition. I congratulate the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Virginia Crosbie) on securing this debate, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting it. She started the debate with characteristic vigour and passion, which set the tone for a series of excellent contributions from colleagues.

On the hon. Lady’s point about Holyhead, we are all aware of its totemic role in north Wales, Wales more generally and the whole of the UK, and we all have concerns about the challenges it faces in relation to trade. She made the case for its exciting future, and that is where we need to move the conversation. She and her colleagues have clearly built a strong coalition at home. Whether through this process or others, they ought to have the power and resources to shape Holyhead’s future so it can continue to be a crucial part of the UK.

The hon Lady’s point about this being a levelling-up issue was pertinent. Perhaps I would say that as shadow levelling-up Minister; I see levelling up everywhere. However, the test will be whether young people in her community and her part of Wales feel they do not have to move to Cardiff, London or the rest of England. That will show us whether we have delivered for them through this process and through levelling-up more generally.

The debate became a de facto freeport hustings, and Port Talbot and Milford Haven were also well represented. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) that this is not about single project interventions here and there to add a bit of lost GDP or gross value added in different parts of our nations and regions. It has to be much more fundamental. We need to re-gear our nation’s economy around the things that we do well and where we can compete globally, and it is clear that he and his colleagues are using the Celtic freeport bid to do that. I agree with his point that the green industrial revolution is where we need to focus. His community is clearly a long way down the road when it comes to floating offshore wind, and there is real potential in that.

Renewables, including floating offshore wind, are a way to tackle our three domestic crises: the cost of living, regional inequalities and reaching net zero. They will help us to add skilled jobs to our economy so that people have long, viable careers; to spread opportunities more fairly around our nations and regions; and to protect our planet. My hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon and his colleagues have clearly put a lot of thought into doing that with the Celtic freeport bid. As the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) mentioned, the plans change will that community, which we may associate with energy generation methods from the past, into a place of energy generation for the future.

The exchange between the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire and the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) on the Crown Estate was important. Having had similar conversations with the right hon. Gentleman, I know that it has levelling up at the forefront of its mind. It is important that we write that into the way in which future transactions are done. Perhaps that is a debate for another day; but I know they will have listened to our debate with interest. That test really must be passed.

The right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire alluded to a point raised in the Welsh Affairs Committee about not doing things for “optical or political purposes”. That is important, too; it is a challenge to us all. One of the most dangerous arguments in politics is that something must be done. Doing anything is something, but what our constituents want and need is for us to do meaningful things, based on a sober look at the reality and the evidence. In relation to the levelling-up fund, we have had plenty of conversations in the last two weeks about bids and single interventions, where we almost compete with each other. In such situations, some will go away happy because they have won, in the broadest sense, but others will go home disappointed because they have not got anything. I want to move away from that, because levelling up, and our nation’s economic future more generally, is for me about the devolution of power and resources to local communities to shape their own places. It is not about feast-or-famine, cup-final individual interventions, which can become a bit optical or a bit political. We need to move beyond that.

I want to make a few points of my own. It is important to state that freeports and the freeports programme are not, in and of themselves, a panacea for tackling the challenging picture of economic growth across all our nations and regions. Sometimes I wince when I hear freeports mentioned as an example of how communities have been levelled up, as if the mere existence of a freeport has done that. Freeports do not automatically lead to more jobs, better skills and wider prosperity unless—this is what we have heard in both the cases that we have discussed today—they are seen as part of a broader national, regional or sub-regional economic strategy for the area in question. Otherwise, they are just more single interventions.

It will be important and constructive for all of us in this place to have a tight eye on the evidence of the impact of freeports. We know that the risk is that they do not bring additionality but instead result in displacement, as the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd has said. We need to have an honest conversation about that. Nevertheless, such decisions are fundamentally for local communities to make. As has been set out in “Prosperity for All” and by colleagues today, Wales has outstanding economic potential, whether that is in foundation sectors such as food and tourism, or in harnessing our location for import and export, and, in particular, in clean energy. That is a promising economic outlook.

The Welsh Government need to work in concert with local authorities and communities, which are clearly ready, able and waiting to deliver. The question for us in this place is how we get the right powers and resources out of here to them, to allow them to do so. I do not want to dwell too much on the history, but the initial knockings of this debate between the UK and the Welsh Governments did not offer a particularly solid demonstration of the devolution settlement. I think we would all have struggled with the idea that the UK Government could impose a freeport without putting the backing in; that would not have been a good thing. Happily, cooler heads have prevailed, and the two Governments have negotiated two important things: the non-repayable starter funding for the freeports established in Wales on a similar footing to deals in England; and the agreement that both Governments will act as a partnership of equals, and, as the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd said, in a manner that works with the Welsh Government’s policies on fair work and environmental sustainability, including the commitment to net zero. That provides a bedrock of certainty for the people of Wales and their business leaders to allow them to plan for the future.

The Minister has an unenviable job of arbitrating between the multiple bids on offer, or perhaps choosing them all. I suspect that today might not be the day to make that decision. However, I hope to hear from him a commitment that, fundamentally, yes, this is about the UK Government taking a view, but it is also about giving the people of Wales—whether it is north Wales, south Wales or anywhere else—the tools and the resources to decide their economic future, take a hard look at what they are good at and where they are going to be good in the future, and build out from that. We see our role here as enablers of that, rather than deciders. That is hugely important, and I look forward to the Minister’s contribution.