5. 4. Plaid Cymru Debate: The High Street and Town Centres

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:11 pm on 5 October 2016.

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Photo of Neil McEvoy Neil McEvoy Plaid Cymru 4:11, 5 October 2016

Put pressure on the Government. It’s your Government. You have group meetings with them, surely. God.

Anyway, empty units: clearly a problem in towns. It’s also a problem in this capital city. If you go down high streets, there’s empty unit after empty unit. It’s a huge problem. We need a strategy; we need local economic development zones, for example, and help with marketing; we need upgraded shop fronts, upgraded buildings, and free parking as well, as the motion states. Maybe help with public transport as well. Reducing business rates would be good, and really dealing with extortionate rents that local businesspeople simply cannot afford. These kinds of initiatives are totally, totally affordable, unless you have a Government that wastes £1 million on selling two units that they could have used as business incubator centres for that particular town, and they didn’t. They threw away £1 million. They threw away £40 million, as we said earlier, with the Lisvane land deal, and another £7.25 million in Rhoose. When you add all these figures up, a lot of this money could be used to regenerate our town centres economically. But we haven’t got a Government that is able to do that. Wales deserves a lot better.