Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 2:10 pm on 23 November 2022.
Well, I have been leading an exercise looking at what we can do to help town centres; what are the barriers to improving them? We all know, from our own areas, of the sorry state of many town centres and the huge pressures that are on them—pressures that are only going to get worse with rising energy prices. And I am very concerned about the lack of an offer from the UK Government for businesses, for very significant increases in their energy bills. I was simply talking to a chip shop owner in Burry Port the other week, who tells me that their energy bills have gone up by 300 per cent. It's very hard to see how businesses like that can sustain those sorts of rises for very long.
So, I fear that we will have an even sorrier state of town centres over the coming months as businesses close down because they are not able to meet unsustainable increases in energy bills. I would urge the UK Government to put a package together to help with that.
We'll be publishing the results of the town centre action group recommendations soon. But, one of the things that we did look at was the experience of Morriston, as part of that work—the study done by Professor Karel Williams into the value of that very long high street, and actually, what local people value. Far from being infrastructure, of the sort that he mentions, what they found is that they valued social infrastructure. So, the state of the park, the state of the toilets—things that have been hit by austerity cuts significantly in the last 10 years, and will be hit even further by the austerity cuts that we are expecting as a result of the budget.
So, it's very hard to improve things when public services are being hammered, as they have been under this Conservative Government. But we have come up with a series of practical recommendations of things that we can do, working with local authorities, to help town centres rebuild.