Mid-Wales Connection Project

Mark Williams Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Glyn Davies (Montgomeryshire) (Con)]

I look forward to speaking once more under your always sympathetic chairmanship, Mrs Riordan.

I will make a few initial comments about how I want to approach today’s debate. I could have tackled this issue, the effective industrialisation of the uplands of central Wales, from several different directions, but I want to focus completely on the direct implications of the mid-Wales connection project—the 400 kV line that will run from north Shropshire to the middle of my constituency. I assure the Minister that I have no intention of making any reference to the public inquiry currently taking place at the Royal Oak hotel, Welshpool, into the six proposals that have been refused and are to go to appeal. I know that he would not be able to comment on that, and I intend to refer to it only tangentially.

Normally when my thoughts turn to the appalling consequences of this project for the people of mid-Wales, I find it difficult not to become over-emotional—I become pretty angry and tend to lose my grip completely. That is fine when I am speaking to 2,000 people in Welshpool livestock market who all share my view and are protesting, or to the 1,800 people who have come with me on a three-and-a-half-hour bus journey to Cardiff to make their views known outside the National Assembly. Today I want to be calm, cool and rational, and to speak with understanding for the position of the Minister, who of course has to make his response in the context of Government policy.

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. Before he leaves his point about the passion with which he has directed this campaign—or crusade, as I guess he might regard it—I remind him that the concerns that he has voiced are felt very much to the immediate east of his constituency, across the border in England, but also to the west in Ceredigion. Mercifully, we have seen a project abandoned, temporarily at least, in Nant-y-Moch, but does he agree that the natural environment that he is keen to defend and protect is under threat in my constituency as well?

[Glyn Davies]

Indeed I do. I am glad that my hon. Friend intervened, in part because he is a Liberal Democrat, which shows that the feeling in mid-Wales is cross-party. If my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams), another Liberal Member, were here, he would take exactly the same view. The people of mid-Wales as a whole, along with all their representatives, share the view that I intend to express today.