GDP per Capita

Lord Wigley Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2019 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Wigley]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what are the latest figures for the gross domestic product per capita for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; and what is the percentage increase for each such figure since 1999.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, the latest figures published by the Office for National Statistics show that in 2017 gross value added per head was £28,096 in England, £19,899 in Wales, £25,485 in Scotland and £21,172 in Northern Ireland, with nominal growth since 1999 of 75% in both England and Wales, 84% in Scotland and 70% in Northern Ireland.

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, those figures speak for themselves. They reflect the failure over 20 years of successive Governments, in both London and Cardiff, to close the yawning income gap between Wales and England. Does the Minister accept that they would have been significantly worse were it not for the EU structural funds, of which Wales gets 22% of the UK allocation, compared to only 6% of UK-originated regional funding? As the Government are committed to replacing EU funding with a UK shared prosperity fund, will the Minister give a cast-iron guarantee that Wales will get a needs-based share of that new fund and not a Barnett-type, population-based share, which would see Wales lose £2 billion over the next six years compared to the funding we would have expected were we to remain in the EU?