Wales: Cost of Living

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Monday 2nd December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, appreciate the opportunity to speak in this debate, and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for providing it.

We have heard many statistics, and I shall not add to them, only to say that of the four countries of the UK, Wales is the poorest. We have 73% of the average wage of the rest of the United Kingdom; for instance, when the average income in London was £27,000, in Wales it was £17,000. This has been the case over the centuries; it is not something new. I particularly enjoyed the book written by the noble Lord, Lord Rowlands, Something Must Be Done, about the valleys of south Wales during the depression before the Second World War. We were struggling in poverty in those terrible years. It is a historical insight into the poverty of south Wales that goes on from generation to generation.

There has been a chance to turn this round. We have objective 1 funding for the valleys and west Wales, which brought some hope. I am not sure it was always spent in the best way, but at least it was some European income for Wales. Anybody who says that we should withdraw from Europe and that Wales would be better off is doing Wales a tremendous disservice. We have heard before that the money we pay into Europe could be directed to the poorest. It did not happen in the past and it would not happen now. I am sure the noble Baroness will agree that the link with Europe is absolutely essential.

Not only do we need to keep the link with Europe, we need to keep the link with our partners across the border in England. Wales has 166 miles of border with England; Scotland has 96. Our border is a very busy one, and the links between north Wales and Merseyside prove that. There was a time when Lerpwl—Liverpool—was regarded as the capital of north Wales. There were so many Welsh people in Liverpool that the streets were named after them. The biggest chapels with the largest congregations were not those in Wales but the ones in Liverpool. You go to Liverpool and what are the names of the stores? TJ Hughes, Owen Owen and Lewis’s were founded by Welsh families. That link has been there for many, many years.

In Wales, we depend on hospitals such as Broadgreen, the David Lewis Northern Hospital, the Royal Liverpool University Hospital and Clatterbridge. When there was talk of removing the link between Wales and the Walton Neurological Centre, there was an outcry in north Wales because that is where we were, over the years, sending patients in need of that sort of treatment.

We have depended on Liverpool and the north-west, but so have they depended on us. Where would the workforce of the Wirral be without Airbus, which is over the border in Wales? There would be 7,000 jobs lost there if we decided to dig Offa’s Dyke again. Where would my town of Llandudno be without the hundreds of thousands of visitors who pour in from the rest of the UK? We need one another; it is a mirage to say that we do not. My noble friend Lady Humphreys was a teacher in Liverpool, as were many thousands of other Welsh women and men. We sent our teachers there; we belong to one another.

Not only must we keep links with Europe and with our friends across the border but we must take care of our communities, which are now deprived of essential facilities. Try to find a post office in some of our villages: you cannot buy a postage stamp there, or a loaf. The school has closed; the teacher lives miles away; the ministers and doctors are no longer in our villages. Try getting petrol between Betws-y-Coed and Tremadoc. Unless you have to go through Penrhyndeudraeth you are lost. We have got to keep these communities alive because the 73% of people on low incomes have to spend such a large proportion of their income or pension going to places that are now farther away. The links, and the need to keep our communities, are essential.