Lord Wigley
Main Page: Lord Wigley (Plaid Cymru - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Wigley's debates with the Cabinet Office
(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Wigley (PC) [V]
My Lords, I congratulate all maiden speakers. The Chancellor has implicitly recognised that the impact of Covid cannot be resolved by the free market economy. His actions were necessary, though they sometimes delivered rough justice. For some groups—the newly self-employed, the hospitality sector and the performing arts—it has been very rough indeed, and to plough ahead with the Brexit timetable regardless of Covid was surely crass stupidity. Exporters, including fishermen, are paying the price.
Over the past year, the impact of Covid has varied geographically, and Covid rates in Wales today are half those in England. Our ability to fine-tune policy to reflect local conditions has boosted the Welsh Government’s credibility. This is because of three factors: devolution has enabled us to take decisions more closely aligned to local circumstances; our sense of community is greater; and the need to prioritise the social agenda was more widely accepted. We needed, from this Budget, a resource allocation free of strings, both to empower local communities and to enable us to address key devolved issues, such as nurses’ pay, school resources, small enterprises, the cultural sector and the tourist economy, in ways which reflect local circumstances.
We must trust our local communities and that can happen only by empowering them, so the Budget should also have urged Wales to maximise capital expenditure using, where necessary, our own borrowing and tax-varying powers to respond to local needs. The Budget decision to sprinkle capital projects like confetti around these islands, through the centralised, micro-managed shared prosperity fund, not only reeks of pork-barrel politics but reflects a scattergun approach which cannot deliver sustainable economic solutions in a co-ordinated manner. The shared prosperity fund has just £220 million for the whole UK this year, compared to the annual £375 million that Wales received from EU structural funds. Brexit pledges to Wales turned to dust. I fear that this Budget may do likewise.