Adam Price: Pre 1979, UK regional policy had three elements—grants through the regional employment premia, but also fiscal incentives through the selective employment tax, and cheap loans. In his discussions with the UK Government, in the new ministerial forum that was announced earlier this week, will he ask that all of those levers will be available for us to ensure that Wales can develop its...
Adam Price: Diolch, Lywydd. As the Cabinet Secretary will be aware, I and my party colleagues were roundly condemned for expressing our sincere belief, echoed by many steelworkers, that the current package of proposals on offer from Tata needed to be radically improved to make it fair and acceptable for workers. It was therefore gratifying to see as a headline in the ‘Llanelli Star’ earlier this week...
Adam Price: I gave the Cabinet Secretary the opportunity there to support his own members—members of his own party—who are simply doing their job, actually, and I actually support them in what they’ve said. We’ve said the same—this deal is not good enough, and, really, he should be using his position and that of the Welsh Government to actually get a revised proposal. Now, earlier this week,...
Adam Price: Of course, it’s often all too easy to attack the UK Government, and sometimes they make it too easy for us, but there are some things we can learn here, surely. At least they’ve got a strategy. It’s taken the new administration just six months to produce an industrial strategy. Where is our Welsh Government economic strategy that we were promised in June? Has research been commissioned?...
Adam Price: Will the Cabinet Secretary make a statement on referral to treatment times in Hywel Dda University Health Board?
Adam Price: Welsh income per capita in 2014 was 70.5 per cent of the UK average, the lowest ever recorded since records began in 1954 for Wales—indeed the lowest ever for any UK nation or region. It bounced back to 71 per cent in 2015, but that was one of the lowest figures ever as well. Is the First Minister prepared to commit the Welsh Government that we will not see this income per capita figure...
Adam Price: Can the Cabinet Secretary confirm that he has received correspondence from TG4, which is an Irish television channel, arguing that there will be an economic benefit and a cultural and linguistic benefit accruing from this project, on the basis of their experience in Galway, and that he’s also seen evidence from companies outwith Wales—and, in fact, outwith the United Kingdom—that would...
Adam Price: Will the Cabinet Secretary confirm whether he now intends to support the Circuit of Wales development following reports that the Heads of the Valleys Development Company have secured the private funding required for its construction? EAQ(5)0120(EI)
Adam Price: I’m grateful to the Cabinet Secretary for his response, and also for the written statement that was circulated a few minutes ago. After many years of waiting, I hope that this latest development signals that we are through the last chicane in the final straight. But, if the Cabinet Secretary is able to, could he confirm that the two criteria, the two conditions that he has set, firstly in...
Adam Price: Diolch, Lywydd. I welcome this debate because I think there is a vacuum at the heart of Welsh Government economic strategy at the moment. Unfortunately, and the reason why our amendment is a ‘delete all’ amendment, the motion doesn’t seek to fill that vacuum with anything that is distinctive or new, but seeks to borrow the UK Government policy and apply it to Wales. Now, we are in a...
Adam Price: Of course, there was a revision in 2008. It’s quietly been buried, but, actually, we heard only in the last few days, of course, that’s it’s still on the books; there’s going to be now a new national development framework. But the thinking behind the spatial plan, of having a clear idea about the different roles, the spatial roles, that the different regions and centres of population...
Adam Price: Well, thank you for that injection of positivity and creativity to our economic policy debate. You know, that’s the way we’re going to move things forward, isn’t it? We can—[Interruption.] We can all stand here—. I was only elected a few months ago. We can all stand here—[Interruption.] We can all stand here and jab and point the finger, right; the only way—. [Interruption.] The...
Adam Price: The only way we’re going to prise ourselves out of the rut is if actually we produce some positive ideas, and I noticed that there are none coming from the Member opposite. Finally, if we allow our economic strategy to be written in London then we see an economic policy that is actually not fit to actually address the unique problems in Wales. The obsession with the city regions, with the...
Adam Price: You said that one of the problems with the proposed regional economic map of Wales, by including the more prosperous areas, for instance Cardiff, with the Heads of the Valleys in a single region, is that it artificially masks the level of deprivation in those areas, which means that we could, potentially, under a future regional policy framework, not have the highest level of development aid....
Adam Price: Would you agree that, actually, the importation of a city-region-based economic strategy is particularly curious in the case of Wales, which has among the lowest levels of population—or proportion of the population—living in cities amongst virtually any nation in western Europe?
Adam Price: Isn’t part of the problem that the investment panel that provides advice to Ministers wholly consists of civil servants, who are accountable to the same Minister? And that doesn’t really therefore constitute independent advice, particularly in cases where the Minister may be thought to have a particular view about a project. Now, of course, we have the Welsh Industrial Development...
Adam Price: Will the First Minister make a statement on the future of the Wales Ambulance Service Trust's clinical contact centres?
Adam Price: It’s a real pleasure to follow Hannah Blythyn and to speak in this first opportunity that this Assembly has to celebrate LGBT history in Wales. I, once, at a Pride event in Cardiff, claimed that the Welsh had actually invented homosexuality. I prayed in aid, Emlyn Williams’s 1937 play, ‘He was Born Gay’, and indeed Ivor Novello’s musical—his last musical—’Gay’s the Word’...
Adam Price: Diolch, Lywydd. Banking in Wales since we lost the last of our locally owned banks at the beginning of the twentieth century has been the financial equivalent of the branch plant economy, characterised by local branches of large shareholder-owned companies headquartered in the City of London. Wales has been a victim, in that sense, of the most centralised and highly concentrated banking...
Adam Price: Oh, absolutely, and Mike Hedges raises a very important point, of course. We had aspects, didn’t we, of a mixed economy in banking in decades gone by? We had, before the disastrous policy of demutualisation, which laid waste to our successful building societies in large part—some of those remain, of course, and are very successful indeed, and some of them are also opening branches, but...
