North Wales Economic Infrastructure

Debate between Chris Ruane and Mark Tami

Wednesday 25th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mark Tami]

All right, then; I will make that point. That example illustrates the fact that no matter how big a company is or how long it has been there, if events turn against it, the impact can be devastating. More recently, UPM paper mill, which I consider to be a benchmark employer—I certainly would not have put it on a list of companies in difficulty—announced that it would be cutting 120 jobs from its 370-strong work force. Why? Because the demand for newsprint worldwide has declined. When the recession hit, people stopped buying newspapers and magazines. Even as we slowly come out of recession, people’s habits have changed and they use the internet more, so demand has not picked up again.

In 2001, Corning Optical Fibre, a high-tech firm on Deeside industrial park with more than 400 employees, closed virtually overnight when world demand for optical fibre suddenly collapsed. So sudden was the collapse that I remember seeing at the factory millions of pounds-worth of equipment that was still in its wrapping and was never fitted. The lesson is that we cannot rest on our laurels.

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend speaks of the collapse of investment at Corning. What assessment has he made of the changes that the Conservatives made to the feed-in tariff when they came back into power in 2010? What impact did that have on Europe’s biggest solar panel factory in Wrexham?

[Mark Tami]

Wrexham is not in my constituency, but people who lived in my area worked at that plant, and I saw that it had a devastating impact. One of the worst aspects of the situation was that the company was, I believe, encouraged to take on a lot of employees because it saw growth, but that was cut from under it by the changes that the Government introduced. We cannot simply assume that everything will be good, and we must make sure that we give existing employers the support and encouragement that they need to invest and grow.

We must also look at what we can do to encourage new employers and companies to come to the area. I am not talking so much about financial assistance, but we can offer a high-quality, highly skilled work force and employers can look to grow their businesses. Large employers such as Airbus—with more than 6,500 employers on site, it is one of the largest manufacturing plants in western Europe—have a role in encouraging their suppliers to site themselves nearby. Airbus has been successful in doing so, and we now have about 2,000 employees who work for Airbus’s supply companies. That makes sense for the supplier and the prime, because it is much easier to sort out problems if people can walk or drive across from one company to another than it is if goods are brought in from a long way away or even from a different country.

[Chris Ruane]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way yet again. He mentioned the fact that some 7,000 people work in the Airbus factory in his constituency. There is another factory in Filton, near Bristol, and 70,000 people are involved in the supply chain. What impact would withdrawal from the EU have on the 70,000 who work in the supply chain of the joint European Airbus?

Employment in Wales

Debate between Chris Ruane and Mark Tami

Tuesday 27th January 2015 Westminster Hall

[Chris Ruane]

The hon. Gentleman may have a point, as the Government have cut back the number of members of the armed forces dramatically; but I see a closure as a closure.

Last Thursday, I met Jane Hutt, the brilliant Welsh Finance Minister who is masterminding much of the investment that I have mentioned. We met at Rhyl high school, which as I said is undergoing a £25 million rebuild. The contractors, Willmott Dixon, said that 60% of the investment will be spent within a 30-mile radius of Rhyl. The jobs, training and growth from that investment will be multiplied many times over because of local procurement. The Labour Welsh Government are playing a vital role in ensuring that my constituency is able to withstand the ravages of Tory cuts.

In Vale of Clwyd and, indeed, in the neighbouring constituency Clwyd West—it is interesting that the right hon. Member for Clwyd West (Mr Jones) is not here today—there is a huge percentage of public sector workers; 37% of the workers in those two constituencies work in the public sector. What will happen when we have these huge cuts? We know what has happened in the past. In the early 1980s, Shotton steelworks closed, and 7,000 jobs were lost in one day—the biggest lay-off in British industrial history—with no help or intervention from the Tories.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

I am sorry to intervene on my hon. Friend when he is making that important point, but may I just correct him? Over 8,000 jobs were lost on that day, and the area still shows the effects of that devastating loss of jobs—still the largest single loss of jobs at a single plant on a single day in the UK.

[Chris Ruane]

I thank my hon. Friend for that, and I accept his correction.

The Government in the 1980s gave no support. There was no compassion and no thought. Areas were almost punished for being Labour. I have repeatedly asked Tory Ministers, from the Chancellor to the Secretary of State for Wales, what measures are in place to help the rebalancing between the public and private sectors in areas with large numbers of public sector workers. In one constituency, which is, I think, in Edinburgh, 78% of the workers are in the public sector, but there is no help from this cold-hearted Conservative Government.

Finally, I turn to Europe. Shotton was rescued by the rise of Airbus. The factory has 7,000 workers and 600 apprentices, and there are 70,000 jobs in the supply chain—it is one of the biggest factories in western Europe. This is a joint European venture, which includes Spain, Germany and France; it is a living example of how co-operation is better than confrontation. However, those jobs will go if we pull out of Europe, as Tory Back Benchers—I am sure there are a few out there now—want us to. There would be massive job losses at not just Airbus, but Toyota and other foreign inward investment businesses, which have said they will leave Britain if it pulls out of the EU.

In St Asaph, in my constituency, work is being done on the Extremely Large Telescope—a £2 billion project to put the biggest telescope the world has ever seen in the Atacama desert in Chile. The lenses alone will be £200 million. I hope they will be made in my constituency, but there is no chance that that will happen, with the high-tech, highly skilled jobs that the project would bring, if we pull out of the EU.

[Mark Tami]

My hon. Friend is correct about Airbus. Does he agree that such companies have choices? They do not have to invest in the UK. Airbus is an example of a good partnership, but, equally, the factories in Germany, France and Spain want the wing work we have in this country, and further investment in the Broughton plant would be in doubt if we were outside Europe.

[Chris Ruane]

Absolutely. The Conservative element of the Government thinks we can pull out of Europe, where we do about 40% of our trade, and stick two fingers up to it, and that everything will be the same afterwards—that that trade and co-operation will carry on. That will not be the case. Europe will punish us. It does not want us to pull out; it wants us to be included. We are 60 million people out of 6 billion—1% of the world’s population. If we pull away from Europe, our voice will be miniscule. We are part of the biggest trading bloc in the world’s history.

Government Policies (Wales)

Debate between Chris Ruane and Mark Tami

Wednesday 26th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mark Tami]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that for a lot of us in north Wales our children’s hospital is on the English side of the border? [Interruption.] Our heart hospital.

[Chris Ruane]

And Gobowen.

[Mark Tami]

And Gobowen, as my hon. Friend says. Will the hon. Gentleman accept that these people are not flying across the border to get better health care—it is our health service, and that is why we should have the right to vote on it?

Cross-border Rail Services in Wales

Debate between Chris Ruane and Mark Tami

Wednesday 2nd July 2014 Westminster Hall

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

At the risk of sounding like Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen”, the first job I ever had, at the age of seven, was casing on Rhyl railway station with my older cousins. We would take a pram, and the trains would roll in, 10 to 14 carriages long, and disgorge their passengers. People did not have cars back in the 1960s—or not many working class people did—so they would place their cases on our prams and we would take them to the guesthouses, hotels and caravan parks in Rhyl and round about.

The train has been good to Rhyl and Prestatyn. The train arrived in Rhyl, my hometown, in 1849. I was recently talking to a 94-year-old local historian from Prestatyn, Fred Hobbs, who has researched the topic. He told me that when the train came to Prestatyn, it opened up the Welsh seaside towns to the industrialists and merchants of Manchester and Liverpool, who came and lived in Rhyl and Prestatyn and commuted to Liverpool and Manchester. They brought with them their wealth and investment, and our local towns prospered.

Rhyl was just a fishing village back in the 1840s, but it grew and grew: between 1849 and 1900, there were 900 hotels and guesthouses. The train brought great wealth to the town. The west ward of Rhyl was one of the richest wards in Wales because of the investment in hotels and guesthouses. Unfortunately, those ex-hotels and ex-guesthouses are responsible for the deprivation of seaside towns, as they have now been turned into houses of multiple occupation, but that is a discussion for another day.

The train has been good to the coastal towns of north Wales, and especially to Holyhead. The route planned in the 1840s went from London to Dublin, which was still part of the British empire in those days. It was a very important route. We want to ensure that the primacy of that route in the 19th century is re-established in the 21st century. The trains and transport links to north Wales brought wealth and investment right through the 20th century, up until the 1960s when I was casing to make a few bob on a Saturday morning. The downturn came to the north Wales coast in the 1970s, when people stopped coming to coastal towns for their traditional two-week bucket-and-spade holidays in a coastal town and chose to go elsewhere—to Spain and France. That left a big hole in the north Wales economy for a 40-year period, and we are only just beginning to put that right.

The challenge for the 21st century in north Wales is better connectivity between north Wales and the north-west of England. There are 650,000 people living in north Wales, and 6.5 million people live in the north-west—it is a huge population centre, and if a bit more of the area across the Pennines is included, it becomes even bigger. That was an opportunity in the past, it is an opportunity in the present and it is an opportunity for the future. We must improve train and transport connectivity.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that we must think about that now for the future? One problem is that rail has been something of an afterthought. Industry and a lot of other things have come, but the rail system is not up to the standard required to serve industry and the people of our area.

[Chris Ruane]

I agree with my hon. Friend to a certain degree, but he is no great user of the train, unlike me and my north Wales colleagues. I have witnessed a vast transformation from when I became an MP in 1997 and it took me four hours to arrive in London from Rhyl in my constituency. The trains then were grubby and had not been cleaned; there was chewing gum on the old and faded seats. Now, we have Pendolino and Voyager trains. There has been massive investment, for which I am grateful to Virgin and Arriva. There has been improvement, but I agree with my hon. Friend that we must not rest on our laurels.

Huge investment—something like £45 billion—is coming from HS2. I want to ensure that my area, the north Wales coast, gets its fair share of that investment—that we are electrified and our stations are improved. Big progress has been made: Chester, Flint and Prestatyn stations have been improved—a huge investment of £7 million was spent on Prestatyn. Last week Arriva, Network Rail and Denbighshire county council started a £2.5 million improvement programme for Rhyl railway station. Improvements have been made, but we must not rest on our laurels. We must push for further investment in our stations along the north Wales coast.

The big cities of Liverpool and Manchester were totally transformed under a Labour Government, and we did not make enough of that. Those cities were derelict and riot-strewn in the 1980s, and they are now vibrant communities. Manchester has one of the biggest student population bases in Europe, with 45,000 students. Liverpool is the same. Two principal airports serve north Wales, Liverpool and Manchester, and they have both grown exponentially over the past 10 years. They are the local airports for north Wales, and we need connectivity to them. It is difficult to get directly to those airports by train, so we need to consider a dedicated transport link from the north Wales coast to Liverpool and Manchester airports.

Liverpool and Manchester have huge population bases and huge research capacity at Manchester and Liverpool universities. We need to connect those universities with businesses in north Wales such as Airbus, the OpTIC incubation and research centre in St Asaph in my constituency and Bangor university. We need more co-operation, which would increase and improve if we had proper transport links. Connecting the science base of the north-west with the science base of north Wales would be helped tremendously by a proper transport system.

North Wales not only needs to be better connected with England; we need better connections inside Wales, including with the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) in north-east Wales. In 1998, the Labour Government made a £0.5 billion launch aid investment in Airbus, with the Welsh Government investing £25 million. That was a public-private partnership that produced one of the most expansive factories in western Europe. There are 6,000 engineering jobs at Airbus making the biggest wings in the whole world. We have to ensure that our population base in north Wales, especially in the bigger coastal towns that have large numbers of unemployed people, is better connected to the job opportunities at Airbus and the Deeside industrial estate in my hon. Friend’s constituency. Tens of thousands of jobs have been created and will be created, and they need to be made available to unemployed and underemployed people along the north Wales coast.

Ten years ago, the Department for Work and Pensions provided transport grants that helped people get to work. We should be drawing down grant money, European funding, DWP funding or Welsh Government funding to ensure that we have dedicated pull-in stations and dedicated trains early in the morning to take those workers to the huge factories in north-east Wales.

I will conclude on modal points, where trains connect with airports and hovercraft. I am probably one of only two MPs who can claim to have a constituency that has been, or will be, served by a hovercraft. The first passenger hovercraft service in the whole world was between Rhyl in my constituency and Wallasey. I mentioned that fact in a debate in this Chamber in December, and within three days, three hovercraft companies contacted me about restarting the service. The time taken to travel from Rhyl to Liverpool by train is one-and-a-half hours, possibly involving two changes. The time taken for a hovercraft connection to Liverpool would be 34 minutes. I would like to see people coming along the north Wales coast by rail, stopping at Rhyl railway station and getting on the hovercraft for a direct passage to Liverpool. The proposal is for a hover link that takes people from north Wales, through Rhyl, to Liverpool airport. That is a fantastic opportunity, but we need to ensure that we have the facilities to take people by rail, by car or by bus from Rhyl to Liverpool.

We are also blessed in Wales with a fine coastal path. We are the only country in the UK that has committed to, and delivered, a path along the whole coast. Walkers are coming to Wales, and in my constituency we are blessed with being at the northern end of the Offa’s Dyke footpath. We need to ensure that walkers can come to Rhyl or Prestatyn by train to do their rambling—I hope I am not rambling, but I intend to finish soon.

[Mark Tami]

You are hovering.

[Chris Ruane]

Yes, I am hovering about rambling. Thanks very much.

In Wales we are also blessed with fine cycleways, most of which are along the coast. The Sustrans bid for Big Lottery funding delivered a £4.5 million dedicated cycle bridge at Rhyl harbour. We need to make the most of the investments that have come to my town and north Wales by connecting them to rail users, which is a challenge for all of us. We have two well performing train companies. Virgin has massively improved the service over the past 14 or 15 years, and we north Wales Labour MPs campaigned to ensure that Virgin did not lose the franchise. We were highly concerned when it looked as if a second-rate company was going to take over the franchise, and I hope that Virgin continues to invest. Arriva Trains Wales is also investing heavily in north Wales, but we need to put pressure on the train companies to ensure that they deliver not for the past or for the present but for the future.

Flooding

Debate between Chris Ruane and Mark Tami

Wednesday 26th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Ruane]

I will come on to that in a moment when I describe the visits that I have made to my constituents in the Vale of Clwyd, in St Asaph, Rhyl and Prestatyn.

Progress has been made on flood defences in my constituency. Some £7 million has been spent on a harbour wall in Rhyl, £3 million on raising the banks of the River Clwyd and £4 million will be spent on extending the harbour wall. Having reviewed the two floods, my local authority has a list three pages long of the work that needs to be done in the Vale of Clwyd, and it can only be done if we get help from central Government. I spoke first hand to residents in St Asaph and in Rhyl when I visited them in December 2013.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend will have heard the Prime Minister say that money was no object, but when it came to Wales, he was not quite so sure, nor so sure about where the money would come from.

[Chris Ruane]

I agree. The Prime Minister came to a constituency in west Wales to announce the UK––or rather English-only––increase in funding. Again, it was an insult to the people of Wales to treat them in such cavalier fashion.

I have visited the people of St Asaph and Rhyl whose homes were flooded, and I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) that flooding has a massive impact on individuals. It is not just the flooding, or the six months after when their houses are drying out and being rebuilt, but the fact that it leads to stresses and strains. There was one direct death in St Asaph in the floods of 2012, but I believe that many more indirect deaths resulted from the stress caused to elderly people. I visited the people of the Rhyl East ward whose homes were up to 3 feet deep in murky brown water. They have been through hell and high water.

I congratulate the volunteers and residents of those towns and of Prestatyn, which was nearly flooded. I congratulate the charities that raised funds, materials and gifts in kind for the victims. I congratulate the statutory authorities on their response, and I congratulate the voluntary organisations. The floods have left a legacy in my constituency. Some of the homes in St Asaph are now uninsurable and valueless. A £340,000 home, representing a lifetime’s commitment, is now valueless because it is uninsurable and the work that needs to be done to prevent future flooding cannot be undertaken given the lack of funding. People are living in fear. They watch the news every night to see the latest weather forecast and they do not sleep easy if it is going to be a bad night.

The big issue is funding. I mentioned it in a question the other week to the Secretary of State, when he called me a lady. According to the Environment Agency, for every pound invested in flood defence, there is an £8 return. Which of us would not bet on a horse if we were getting £8 back for a pound down? The Government are not doing that. They are not putting the investment in place. I have tabled questions on this. The answer to parliamentary question 132249 revealed that in Labour’s last budget, the amount spent on flood defences overall was £664 million. The following year, it was cut to £573 million, then £560 million, then £574 million and then £612 million by 2015. Whichever way we look at it, those are cuts compared with the Labour years.

I believe that those figures have been manipulated. They do not include inflation, but they do include not just central Government funding, which was what was in place in 2010-11, but private funding and funding from other agencies. We are not comparing apples with apples. In the Vale of Clwyd, we are pleased with the flood defence work, but it is does not matter if we build £7 million of defences here, £4 million there and £3 million over there, it only takes a gap as tiny as a little boy’s finger in the dyke to spoil the whole investment and environment and to wreck thousands of homes. If the proper flood defences are not put in place, these are wasted investments.

The Pitt report made 94 recommendations, but many of them have not been taken up. I shall give examples. I have tabled 12 parliamentary questions on this. I tabled another 30 today, and there will be another 50 tomorrow, covering each of the recommendations. The answer to question 186940 stated:

“I have made no assessment of local authority leaders’ or chief executives’ effectiveness”.—[Official Report, 13 February 2014; Vol. 575, c. 800W.]

Why not? The answer to question 186945 stated:

“There have been no discussions with the Association of British Insurers or other relevant organisations on this matter.” —[Official Report, 12 February 2014; Vol. 575, c. 661W.]

Why not?

Transport Infrastructure (North Wales)

Debate between Chris Ruane and Mark Tami

Tuesday 26th November 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Caton. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.

I am pleased to have secured this debate on an important issue. I will mainly concentrate on north-east Wales, particularly its economic importance, the history of the area and why the transport links that we have now and that we hope to have in future are so important.

The area, whether people want to call it the Deeside hub or Mersey-Dee, covers Flintshire, Wrexham, Denbighshire, Cheshire west, Chester and Wirral, with a population of about 1 million and gross value added of some £17 billion a year. Some 83% of the area’s journeys start and finish in the area. More than 17,000 people commute across the border to England, and some 10,000 go the other way. There are also students who go to Chester, and students going the other way to Glyndwr university.

I am pleased to say that the area contains many modern and very successful manufacturers, with Airbus, Toyota, Shotton paper, Tata Steel Colors, ConvaTec and many more on the Deeside industrial park. On the other side of the border, we have Vauxhall at Ellesmere Port, Bank of America and, again, many more. Indeed, north Wales accounts for more than 30% of the manufacturing output of Wales as a whole. I know that colleagues both in England and in Wales are surprised at the size and skill levels of some of those factories and at the number of jobs involved. My hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) will no doubt talk about the Technium in St Asaph, and my hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen) will talk about Wylfa in Anglesey.

Airbus employs more than 6,500 people, 60% of whom live in Wales, coming from as far afield as Anglesey. The other 40% live in England, coming from as far afield as Derby, or so I am advised—that seems a fairly long commute to me, but apparently it is the case. There is substantial spend in the local economy, but those people need to get to and from their place of work. The supply chain is beginning to site in the local area, which, again, is creating more jobs. The big danger is that we take all that for granted, as if it will be there for ever and a day.

I have told this story before, but I will tell it again because I think it is worth telling. When I entered Parliament in 2001, before giving my maiden speech—I am sure other colleagues did the same—I looked at what my predecessor did. My predecessor, who is now Lord Jones, talked about the two great powerhouses of the area, which were Courtaulds Textiles and British Steel. One of those companies has gone altogether, and the other is still important but employs only a fraction of the numbers it did back then. It still holds the record for the most job losses on a single day at a single plant, when more than 8,000 people lost their job. We cannot assume that, just because companies are big and employ a lot of people, they will be there for ever and a day.

Many other areas that suffered in the 1980s have still not recovered, but because of the efforts of Flintshire county council and others, including my predecessor Lord Jones, new investment was attracted to the area, and we have managed to build on that. Importantly, we want to attract companies that will stay, not just companies that come because they want grant assistance and that will then up stumps and move somewhere else. We want long-term investment not only in buildings but in the work force. Even in good times, we have seen that successful companies can still fail. I remember when we thought that the optical fibre market was doing extremely well, but it crashed overnight and the high-tech factory closed. We lost quality jobs in a relative boom period.

We are getting by okay at the moment, so why do we need to improve and update our transport network? To be honest, we are barely getting by. If we get the level of growth in the local area for which we hope, we will need to improve things, because our transport system is creaking at the seams in places. The Mersey Dee Alliance carried out research, which is included in both the Haywood and the north-east Wales integrated transport taskforce reports to the Assembly, showing that we can expect to get between 40,000 and 50,000 jobs in the next 20 years. That figure comprises Mersey waters enterprise zone, with 20,000 jobs; Deeside enterprise zone, with 5,000 to 7,000 jobs; 4,500 jobs at Ellesmere Port; Ince resource recovery park, with 3,200 jobs; the university of Chester’s Thornton site, with 2,000 to 4,000 jobs; central Chester business district, with more than 1,000 jobs; the Northgate project, Chester, with 1,600 jobs; Wrexham industrial estate and western gateway, with 2,500 jobs; 7,500 jobs in Denbighshire; Vauxhall Motors, with 700 jobs; and Bank of America, with 1,000 jobs. So we hope that a substantial number of jobs will come to the area during the next 20 years, which is positive stuff, but we need a modern transport system that works to ensure that that happens.

We are already over-dependent on car usage. In Flintshire, more than 80% of people use their car to travel to work, which is a very high figure—Flintshire had the highest car usage in the country, but I do not know whether it still does—and I am sure the figure is not much different in other parts of Wales. I do not think that is just because people like using their car; it is because there is a problem getting anywhere using any other system of transport.

The north-east Wales integrated transport taskforce report of June 2013 clearly highlights some of the problems that we are facing. I will illustrate them by referring to a few journeys to the Deeside industrial park. From Flint by car it would take an estimated 16usb minutes, and by public transport 43 minutes, which is not too bad. Rhyl is 39 minutes by car, or one hour and 25 minutes via a bus and a train with one change. Denbigh is 44 minutes by car, or two hours and 17 minutes by public transport—a bus and a train, two changes. Wrexham is 32 minutes by car, or one hour and 25 minutes by public transport—it is a bus and two changes, even from Wrexham. Frodsham is 24 minutes by car, or one hour and 14 minutes by bus and train, again involving two changes.

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate. Two of the big centres that he mentioned, the Airbus factory and the Deeside industrial park, are on the north Wales line. Is there a case for building dedicated stations on the Deeside industrial park and at Airbus itself?

[Mark Tami]

I think there is, and I will talk about why we need a dedicated station. It is important that we make it easy for people to move about, because there is a lot of anecdotal evidence showing that some people are not taking up jobs that are perhaps not well paid because the difficulty and cost of getting to that job outweigh the benefits of taking it. We need to address that.

What do we need to do? On road improvements, we have a pretty good system, but there are pinch points. Considerable work has been done on the M56 to sort out problems on the English side of the border, but there is a pinch point on the A494 and the A55 around Queensferry and Aston Hill. With the creation of the Deeside enterprise zone, that will probably get worse, rather than better. In saying that, I am certainly not arguing for the original proposal, which was totally out of proportion to what was required. At one point, it included 13 lanes—I think it could have been seen from space. It failed to take account of local issues, and there were serious local concerns about that.

I think we can do things relatively cheaply—we are in difficult financial times. As someone who uses the road a lot, I know that most of the problems are caused by lorries and, in the summer, caravans slowing down. A crawler lane could deal with a lot of those problems.

Whatever we do, we need noise protection measures. We also need to involve local people. The Assembly is looking at the issue, and I have written to the Transport Minister about it. The problem is that there is a lot of uncertainty, which makes it difficult for people to sell their houses or to know the size of the project they will face. I recognise that £70 million has been earmarked for improvements further into Wales. I read the other day that another crossing to Anglesey was being considered, depending on what borrowing powers deliver.

A further pinch point is between the A483 and the A55. As someone who has sat in traffic there on many occasions, I know that it causes a bit of a problem. Again, it could be sorted out relatively easily. I am always struck—this perhaps demonstrates that we need more joined-up government—by the fact that the A483 has tarmac on it on the Welsh side of the border. I actually know when I am entering England, because I drop off the tarmac and on to concrete slabs. I do not know why the two Administrations could not just have spoken to each other and sorted the whole thing out in one go, but clearly that did not happen.

As I said, we do not have a bad road network; it needs improving, but it does not need major surgery. The same cannot be said for our rail network, which is particularly poor—especially for people in the Mersey-Dee area who use it to commute to work. The Wrexham-Bidston line goes through the whole area, and it is an ideal solution to many of the transport issues I have talked about. There is great potential, but the service’s frequency and reliability are, unfortunately, not what the average commuter expects.

Living Standards (North Wales)

Debate between Chris Ruane and Mark Tami

Wednesday 16th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

I rise today to discuss the living standards in north Wales—the dropping living standards in north Wales.

The TUC reckons that Wales has the lowest levels of disposable income in the UK and has experienced the highest falls in living standards in the UK. There has been a drop in living standards for 38 of the 39 months that this Tory-Lib Dem coalition has been in power. In constituencies in north Wales, the impact has been severe. Between 2007 and 2012, in Flintshire the average pay packet for a 40-hour week dropped by nearly £3,000 and in my own county of Denbighshire it dropped by more than £2,000.

The outward sign of the drop in living standards is, of course, the food banks—the food banks that many Conservative Ministers and MPs refuse to go to when they are repeatedly asked to do so in the main Chamber. I have been to food banks in my constituency and I praise the work of people who volunteer at them; they do a sterling job. I have visited the Wellspring centre in my constituency and shared soup with the people it provided food for. The citizens advice bureau in Denbigh set up a food bank; in fact, it is an award-winning food bank and I congratulate the CAB in Denbigh on it.

The Conservatives say, “Oh, food banks increased by tenfold under Labour.” They did, from 3,000 to about 34,000. Under the Conservatives, however, they have increased from about 40,000 to nearly 400,000—another tenfold increase. The food banks under Labour were peripheral; as I say, there were 34,000 of them, at most. Under the Conservatives, food banks are central. Since 2011, the Government have given instructions to jobcentres to refer people who have no money to food banks. Food banks are part of official Government policy—dare I say official Government philosophy? It is charity versus the state; charity taking the place of the state. It is the big society, or, as I call it, the “beg society”, where soup kitchens are here in the 21st century, having last been seen in the 1930s. As I say, I have shared soup with the people using them.

Will there be a return to the workhouse, the alms house, the deserving poor and the undeserving poor? The language coming from certain sections and certain MPs on the right—I do not include the Minister here today in that group—is disgraceful. I will give a case in point. The Education Secretary said that the people who visit these food banks

“are not…able to manage their finances.”—[Official Report, 9 September 2013; Vol. 567, c. 681.]

Could the Education Secretary himself “manage” his finances on £56 a week, if he was a young person, or on £71 a week, if he was over 25? I think not—that money would hardly cover the price of a bottle of Moët. The Government have the wrong priorities—while they are forcing people to use food banks, they are giving a £44,000 handout to people earning £1 million a year.

Of particular interest to people in my constituency and the other constituencies in north Wales is the issue of public sector workers, who are another group vilified by the Conservatives. There are huge numbers of public sector workers in certain constituencies in north Wales. The number of people who reside in my constituency, the Vale of Clwyd, and work in the public sector is 10,200—35% of the work force. In Ynys Môn, the figure is 10,100; in Clwyd West, where the Secretary of State for Wales resides, the figure is 9,000. Those public sector workers are not only vilified by the Conservatives but have had their wages frozen until 2015-16. There is no help to rebalance the economies that have been reliant on public sector jobs; there is no specific help or guidance from the UK Government for those constituencies.

Who are the losers from the drop in living standards? It is the young long-term unemployed. There are more than a million of them in the country. In an 18-month period from early 2009 to 2010, in my home town of Rhyl in my constituency we put 450 young people back to work through the future jobs fund, under a Labour Government. That scheme was abolished almost as soon as the Conservative Government entered office.

Children are big sufferers from the drop in living standards. An excellent Daily Post article from 18 July calculates that 24,400 children in north Wales are living in poverty and that the state will pay an extra £265 million a year in additional school costs, benefits and NHS costs. We are even seeing the disease of rickets creep back into the UK, for the first time since the 1950s. I have tabled questions about this—[Interruption.] I see the Minister huffing and puffing.

The disabled have also suffered because of a drop in living standards. This group has been vilified, as well. Disability is the only one of the five or six hate crime categories, which include sexual orientation, religion and ethnic origin, that has increased in the past year. The elderly are the other group to have suffered because of the drop in living standards. They are on fixed incomes. When their fuel bills increase by 8% or 7%, they have no way of paying them, except by cutting back on food or other necessities.

In north Wales, 8,178 people will suffer because of the bedroom tax, but there are not 8,178 single-person units in the whole of north Wales to look after them.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

Last week I heard about a case of a man, in a couple, who was disabled and on whom the council spent a small fortune creating a wet room downstairs. This couple is to be moved to a one-bedroom place. The council will, no doubt, have to spend money converting that and ripping out the stuff from the previous place. It makes no sense.

[Chris Ruane]

It does not make social sense or economic sense. The state will be paying £60 a week rent for many people living in council houses. If such people are moved into houses of multiple occupation in my constituency, the state will be paying £85 a week. The conditions in HMOs are far worse than on council estates.

Some 420,000 households in Wales are living in fuel poverty, 84,000 of them in north Wales alone. Household fuel bills have increased by £300 since the Government have been in power. Those who suffer most are on pre-payment meters. I was brought up in a household with pre-payment meters; we put a pound in the “leccy” if the lights went out. Those people will be paying an extra £50 a year, because they are not on direct debit. Every which way, the poorest are hit the most.

Fuel bills went up by 7% last year. In this current season, the first energy company out of the blocks is going to increase its prices by 8%, at the same time as chief executive officers in energy companies are having golden handshakes of £15 million or £13.5 million.

Under Labour’s home energy efficiency scheme, the energy efficiency of 127,000 households in Wales was improved, cutting down people’s bills and their carbon footprint. The great green hope from the parties in Government was the green deal, What a failure that has been! At the top of the green deal figures for the whole of Wales is Alyn and Deeside, where 19 households have been checked; at number two is Delyn, with 16 households; third is Wrexham, with 13; and at number four is Clwyd West, with 13. In the Prime Minister’s constituency of Witney, six households were assessed for the green deal. This policy was going to rescue those living in fuel poverty, but it has done nothing for them.

Aerospace Industry

Debate between Chris Ruane and Mark Tami

Wednesday 12th September 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mark Tami]

That is a good point. One of our problems is from the days of privatisation. Whatever faults people may have found in state-run companies, they trained a lot of people to a high standard. After privatisation, one of the first things to change was that many people were not trained any more. I am thinking of electricity supply companies. Many people trained in the public sector ended up going into the private sector. Complaints are made to me about Airbus or other bigger companies poaching people from the supplier chains to feed their needs. That can only happen for a while before the supplier chain—and quality—suffers. Then Airbus or whichever company is involved will look elsewhere for support.

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend will be aware of the Government’s trumpeting 800,000 extra apprenticeships. I think the figures were given to Parliament yesterday. Are those the type of apprenticeships that could help the automobile and aircraft industries, or are they mini-apprenticeships? What sort of apprenticeships are necessary?

[Mark Tami]

We are still somewhat unclear. We hear large figures, but do not know. Some jobs that are, I think, dressed up as apprenticeships, may be very low-skilled. Clearly, we need all the jobs we can get in this country. However, aerospace is a high-tech industry and we need people to fill gaps in it; otherwise companies—and today they are all global—will go elsewhere. We must be extremely careful about that, but it is a great industry and can have a strong future if the Government take it seriously. However, we must support it and invest in it.

Children's Subjective Well-Being

Debate between Chris Ruane and Mark Tami

Tuesday 24th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

Our children are under threat like never before. In the past, threats to children were mainly physical. Many died in infancy, when working or of diseases. The modern threat to our children and young people is more to their mental and psychological well-being.

There are many reasons why, and one is child poverty. After the war, whichever party was in government, child poverty hovered between 12% and 15%, but it went from 13% in 1979 to 29% in 1992. With the huge investment that Labour made over 14 years, we managed to get it down only to 20%—a big reduction, but not enough.

There are other factors. We face an obesity epidemic, with costs to the individual child’s health and self-image. The most recent figures, for 2010-11, show that obesity among children in reception class, at five years old, is at 9.4%, and that by the time they reach year 6, at 10 years old, it doubles to 19%.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that we are storing up problems for the future, both in terms of cost and from a psychological point of view, as many such children unfortunately become very disturbed adults?

[Chris Ruane]

The cost will be huge in terms of the individual, society and the economy.

When we look at mental illness, we find that certain groups are affected more than others: 45% of looked-after children and 72% of those in residential care suffer with mental illness. Some 1.5% of children are hyperactive; 0.3% have eating disorders; 5.8% have conduct disorders; and 3.7% have emotional disorders. Those figures might sound low, but at any one time 10% of children between the ages of five and 15 are suffering with a mental health disease. That is 850,000—almost 1 million—children.

We have to look at the reasons why that has come about. As I suggested earlier, something happened in the 1980s. The Government often talk about the broken society and broken Britain, but I honestly believe that the problem started to ramp up in the “loadsamoney” era, when there was no such thing as society and atomisation and isolation were rampant.

We have also seen the decline of those institutions that did believe in a big society and in social cohesion, such as the Church and the trade unions. Stable minds equal a stable society, but even Labour used the terms “producer” and “consumer”. We did not use “citizen”, and that is what we need to get back to—to viewing individuals as citizens and as part of society.

The Government can take many kinds of action, and many programmes have been tried, tested and proven. The roots of empathy classroom programme in New Zealand is a big success; the Swedish Government banned advertisements to children under 12, and that, too, has been a big success; and the Welsh Assembly Government introduced the foundation phase, with children learning through play until the age of seven.

My local authority of Denbighshire has had quite a few initiatives, including one by Sara Hammond-Rowley, involving simply sending out information sheets to parents, teachers and social workers, and giving out books, readily understood by parents and teachers, that can help with emotional disorder. We have had volunteering days in the local school in Prestatyn. Thirty-eight local volunteering groups aimed at children were there. The children were let off, one year at a time, to join them in friendship groups. It is about increasing volunteering and getting children away from the TV and computer and into socially interactive and physical activity. That is all to the benefit of those individuals and society.

The curriculum needs to be rebalanced. The national curriculum was introduced by the Conservatives. I was a teacher for 15 years and we followed the curriculum religiously, but we need a review. Have we thrown the baby out with the bathwater? We need to go back to stuff such as gratitude, empathy, discernment, reflection, silence, mindfulness, resilience, centring—the softer, gentler, more emotional approach to the curriculum, heavily present in the Catholic school in which I taught and in many religious schools. That would be a means of countering the advertising, media, peer pressure, consumerism, materialism and individualism.

A number of key statistics are not being monitored by the Government. I have tabled parliamentary questions asking what monitoring there is of advertising’s impact on children; there was no assessment. I have tabled questions about the number of fictional acts of murder that a child will watch, but there is no assessment and no figures are kept.

A young child will see tens of thousands of fictional acts of murder and violence, which do not correlate to their own, natural world. What is most disturbing is that the Government do not collect statistics on self-harm, eating disorders, mental illness, hyperactivity, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or transient children. The statistics are out there; they are often compiled by research departments or voluntary organisations.

I pay tribute to two reports in the past week, one of which—“Promoting Positive Wellbeing for Children”, came out last Thursday and is jam-packed full of practical steps that local and central Government can take to promote positive well-being for children. This afternoon, the Action for Children campaign on neglect was launched; the Minister was there and spoke well. Those reports are excellent documents, but what use do the Government make of them? When the guiding association found out about the speech that I was making today, it sent me a briefing about its research on volunteering.

The Prime Minister talks about the big society and volunteering and I back that 100%. But we need to make sure that his words are backed up with action. This is a quote from the Prime Minister in 2006:

“It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money, and it’s time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB—general well-being. Well-being can’t be measured by money or traded in markets. It’s about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture and, above all, the strength of our relationships. Improving our society’s sense of well-being is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times.”

I share every single one of those sentiments.

High-speed Rail

Debate between Chris Ruane and Mark Tami

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

rose—

[Chris Ruane]

On the issue of crowding on the north Wales line, unlike my hon. Friend the Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami), I am a weekly user of the line. It is already at capacity. Everybody has to stand up on the Arriva trains between 4 pm and 5 pm. We need that investment and we need it soon.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Chris Ruane and Mark Tami

Monday 25th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Ruane]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the way in which the current Administration have dealt with the devolved Administrations in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales—

[Mark Tami]

What about the respect agenda?

[Chris Ruane]

This is my intervention, if my hon. Friend does not mind!

Are not the Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales behaving more like governors-general than Secretaries of State?

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Chris Ruane and Mark Tami

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mark Tami]

The Parliamentary Secretary was asked a straightforward question earlier. If he believes in equalisation, why will two seats in Scotland be treated differently?

[Chris Ruane]

Answer that.