Part of 2. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Communities and Children – in the Senedd at 2:34 pm on 14 December 2016.
I’m very grateful for the Member’s very aggressive tone that he has brought to the questioning. I also remember the times through the 1980s when the Member worked in the local building society, taking the redundancy cheques from the steelworkers that were made redundant by the UK Government at that very time—a very difficult time, and a community that was broken at that time. So, again, in lecturing about what happened in our communities, you can ask many Members on these benches what happened to their communities under the Conservative administration.
Can I say that rebuilding communities, as I said earlier on, doesn’t go on a switch? You have to work at this, and we’ve been working very hard. And places like Flintshire, which was devastated with the highest redundancy notice ever served in Europe in one day by the UK Government, have now been transformed to have one of the lowest unemployment levels. And that’s not by chance—that’s by a Labour authority, with a Labour administration here. So, I don’t take any lectures from the Member opposite; he wants to take a reality check.