Community Renewal Fund and Levelling Up Fund in Wales

Craig Williams Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Craig Williams (Montgomeryshire) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Rees for the first time, I believe.

Like others, I welcome this debate and congratulate the hon. Member for Newport West (Ruth Jones) on securing it. However, I think that there is some important context to it. I was won over by the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock)—although I think we are all hon. Friends today in talking up Wales—on the importance of outcomes rather than governance.

The hon. Gentleman convinced me not to talk at length about this issue, but I will touch lightly on the setting up of Welsh European Funding Office, or WEFO. If we look at the comments from decades ago when that was funded, we see similar points to those being made in this debate today. There were similar criticisms of how WEFO was set up and how EU structural funds were being spent.

There are teething issues with new funds. I hope that the Minister will touch on them, go further with the dates and will explain exactly how the new arrangements will work. But there are some cheap political points being thrown around here, which do not do justice to what the hon. Member for Aberavon was talking about, namely focusing on the outcomes that this money is meant to achieve.

I will make one last point about WEFO. It is the fact that Wales qualified three times for the highest EU structural funds. Areas of eastern Europe that were just recovering from serious Communist rule recovered at a quicker pace than the Welsh Government and WEFO enabled many areas of Wales to do.

So the hon. Gentleman will forgive me and my constituents if we want to try something different this time; I hope that he will forgive me and my constituents if we look to the UK Government to get money directly into projects in our constituencies. We will be judged on the outcomes: I very much welcome that and I will give the Minister a hard time on outcomes and any commitments made about funding. If this was Barnettised, we would be getting less money now. That minimum 5% promise—I hope it is much more than that—is more than the Barnett consequential, so there are some cheap political shots.

I have been working and talking with my local authority, which has hugely welcomed the fund, the fact that it can engage directly with the UK Government and the breadth of funding that that will release over the longer term. It hugely welcomes the new funding pots to which it can go directly. Of course, it wants collaboration with the Welsh Government, and so do I, but that works both ways.

When the Welsh Government put money into broadband, I welcomed that. It is a reserved area, but we need to work together. When the Welsh Government opened foreign embassies and employed people around the world working on trade and investment—a reserved area—I welcomed that; we need to work together. However, the second the UK Government dare to send a Minister over the border or dare to create new funding pots for our constituents and businesses, there are outcries. That is not collaboration. The Welsh Government cannot have it both ways. They cannot invest in any area of policy they want and then cry the second the UK Government do so.

While my hon. Friend the Minister may be an English MP, I implore him to reflect on the invite from the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) to go and visit his constituency: he can also visit my constituency, because he is a UK Government Minister. That involves Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England—I would prefer to see investment given in that order—and he is really a Minister who represents all four corners.

I will finish with just a hint of what this means to Montgomeryshire and the excitement felt on the high streets of Welshpool, Machynlleth, Newtown and especially any community that looks at the Montgomery canal. The Minister will be getting a bid—a fabulous, spectacular bid; one that stacks up, I am sure, and one that I hope he okays—to open the Montgomery canal back to the UK network. It is a great Union story, but it is also a huge opportunity for mid-Wales and for Montgomeryshire tourism, but one that I fear would not ever have happened if we did not have these funding pots and these new UK Government initiatives.

We will be judged on outcomes, and I have no doubt that at the next general election the outcomes of these pots will be absolutely central to votes in Wales. So, no pressure, Minister, but we will be watching. I seriously ask Opposition Members to examine their rhetoric and think about what they are asking for. They are not English MPs. We are all Members of the United Kingdom Parliament and they should expect both Governments —UK and Welsh—to invest in their constituencies.