Breaking Down Barriers to Opportunity

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Wednesday 8th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

The progress we have made on education is phenomenal. The legislation we have put in place has enabled us to make many of these improvements, but we remain committed to legislating to take forward the “children not in school” measures, and we will progress those at a suitable future legislative opportunity. We continue to work with local authorities to improve the non-statutory registers, and have launched a consultation on revised elective home education guidance. There is a lot of work going on. The consultation is open until 18 January 2024, and we intend to bring forward that legislation.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

This is a King’s Speech for the UK generally. Does the Secretary of State intend to say anything positive at all about Wales today?

[Gillian Keegan]

As somebody who grew up in Liverpool, I have had many a fabulous holiday in north Wales. In terms of the education department, unfortunately Wales suffers from a poor Administration.

Let us move on to schools. Nowhere is the difference between Labour and the Conservatives clearer to see than in our school system. When we came into office, Labour had overseen a decade of decline in our schools. Fortunately, thanks to the tireless work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) and, notably, that of the Minister for Schools, we have reversed that trajectory. Today, 88% of our schools are “good” or “outstanding”—up from just 68% under Labour.

By the end of the Labour era, we had plummeted down the international league tables: our children were ranked 25th for reading and 27th for maths. Now, we are up 10 places in both. Better still, the progress in international reading literacy study shows that when it comes to reading, English primary school children are the best in the west, coming fourth in the world—an amazing, phenomenal achievement, for which I thank our teachers, parents and children.

How have we done this? We have reformed the school system, putting teachers and experts—not politicians—in charge of schools. Through our free schools and academies programmes, we have empowered heads and focused on academic excellence, improving discipline and ensuring that schools are calmer, happier places to learn. We have built on the evidence, not the ideology, over the past decade.

The Education Endowment Foundation has carried out over 200 evaluations to understand which approaches are the most effective in closing the attainment gap. It has engaged 23,000 nurseries, schools and colleges and, as a result, teachers are better trained in the things that make a difference, and children are taught in ways that we can prove work, such as phonics and maths mastery. We have made our exams more rigorous and reliable; and we have changed how we teach for the better. And at every turn we were met with a barrage of opposition from the opportunists on the Labour Benches.

In 2011, the Opposition said that our literacy drive was “dull”. In 2012, they said that phonics would “not improve reading”. In 2013, they called free schools “dangerous”. All three accusations have been categorically proven wrong. Our results simply speak for themselves, and we are not stopping there. Our new advanced British standard will remove the artificial divide between academic and technical education, and place the two on an equal footing, bringing together the very best of A-levels and T-levels to form a single overarching qualification. Right on cue, what did Labour call this? A “gimmick”. Given Labour’s track record, that condemnation is a very good sign that we are on the right track.

The advanced British standard will ensure that every child studies a form of maths and English until they are 18, and equip our children with the skills they need for the future. They will be entering a very different workplace—one where artificial intelligence, and quantum and digital systems, are a big part of every working day—and they will be competing for the top jobs internationally, so we will be increasing the time spent in the classroom, bringing us more in line with other countries, including Denmark, Norway, France and the US.

Safety of School Buildings

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Like him, I remember the transformation that that Labour Government delivered. I will come to that in more detail during the debate.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

The Welsh Labour Government have complained that the briefing they received lacked the technical detail required to take forward the work on schools. Does the hon. Lady agree that the Secretary of State should provide the other Governments with full details from the working group when they become available?

[Bridget Phillipson]

I know that Conservative Members have a keen fascination with all things going on in Wales at the moment, and that Ministers have not always been in full possession of the facts at the Dispatch Box, so I will put a few on the record so that we can all be clear about the situation in Wales. In Wales, school capital funding has increased by around 122% in cash terms, and 23% in real terms, between 2014-15 and 2023-24. Perhaps we can use that as the basis for slightly more informed debate during today’s discussions.

Today, our first priority must be safety—as it must always be. Guaranteeing that safety must ultimately be the responsibility of Ministers and of Government. That is why I repeatedly pressed the Secretary of State to publish a full list of all the schools with concerns about RAAC, which she has at last published today. However, I gently note that there could be omissions on that list, a number of which have already been drawn to my attention. I hope that we can get full clarity about the situation across our schools.

Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete in Education Settings

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Monday 4th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

I think the Welsh Government will be providing the response to RAAC in Wales and also the funding for it.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

As the hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Roberts) has just said, the schools that are suffering from RAAC were built before devolution and the advent of the Welsh Government and have been inspected properly by the local authority. The Secretary of State has said to the Welsh Education Minister,

“I stand ready to support you”,

yet the Chancellor has said that there is no new money. Might not the people of Wales, and the people of Holyhead and Menai Bridge in particular, feel her words as an empty political gesture?

[Gillian Keegan]

I think the hon. Gentleman knows that education is devolved in Wales.

Making Britain the Best Place to Grow Up and Grow Old

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Southport (Damien Moore), who is clearly a passionate supporter of Southport. I congratulate him: I am sure he will do well in today’s Conservative party.

This Queen’s Speech fails to address the immediate cost of living crisis and does little to end the longer-term issues of growing poverty and inequality in Wales as in the rest of the United Kingdom. That is the context of this debate and the cause of the hollow laughter at its title, “Making Britain the Best Place to Grow Up and Grow Old”. In Wales, we have high levels of poverty, and we have done for decades, particularly since the destruction of our heavy industries by the Conservative Governments of the 1980s. That is why we qualified for EU support on a par with the former Soviet bloc countries of the east—that is, until we were blessed with Brexit opportunities, when that support diminished.

Our levels of child poverty in Wales are the highest in the UK, affecting a third of Welsh children, as measured in 2019. As the Children’s Commissioner for Wales said over the weekend, the rate is now likely to be around 40%. This persistent poverty has consequences for children’s development, including damaging their mental health, and those consequences carry on into adulthood. At this point, if the Whips are listening, I would like to congratulate the Government on their intention to bring in a mental health Bill and say that, as a former social worker approved under the Mental Health Act 1983, I would be very glad of the opportunity to contribute to the scrutiny of that Bill.

Poverty carries on down the generations, but not, as some would have it, as something inherently bad or morally reprehensible about working people. It is poverty that damages lives and it is poverty that kills. The cost of living crisis is having a devastating impact on children all over Wales and elsewhere in the UK, and families are being forced to choose between eating and heating. Wales has the highest rate of food bank use in the UK, with over 4,000 food parcels distributed per 100,000 people per annum. People are turning to food banks because they have no other choice.

The cut of £20 per week to universal credit, which took away £286 million from the Welsh economy, was an utter disaster for children in low-income families. As to adults in Wales, one in three people of working age and almost one in five pensioners die in poverty. That is the highest rate in the UK. This disgraceful Victorian value must be banished for good. Smoking is the largest single cause of avoidable early death in Wales, and Plaid Cymru supports the introduction of a “polluter pays” levy on tobacco manufacturers to raise funds for tobacco control, to ensure that our smoke-free ambition for Wales is met.

The real game changer for Wales would be the devolution of social security so that we can build a system of support that meets our particular needs. Control over the administration of benefits would create a more flexible approach at a time when families need it most—for example, paying universal credit weekly to reflect the way that poor people have to budget and changing the current degrading sanctions regime. Welfare support could be delivered to meet the actual needs of people in Wales, with winter fuel payments linked to home energy efficiency. Cold weather payments could be improved to take into account rurality, which has particular effects on people in the uplands of my own constituency of Arfon. Devolution would enable us to create new ways of helping to top up existing benefits. We in Plaid Cymru believe that our Senedd should create a Welsh child payment similar to that in Scotland, and much more.

[Carol Monaghan]

One of the difficulties is that only a very small proportion of benefits—about 15%—have been devolved to the Scottish Government. With the situation that the hon. Gentleman is talking about, all benefits would need to be devolved so that they could be properly administered.

--- Later in debate ---

[Hywel Williams]

I share the ambition of the hon. Lady and her colleagues to have a proper social security system that is tailored to the needs of our communities. The Scottish Government are leading the way, as far as I am concerned, and when we have that power, we will be emulating some of the measures that they have brought in.

Wales comes way down the priority list of this Conservative Government, whose eyes are glued both on their vulnerable red wall seats and their increasingly unhappy homelands in the south and east of England. But Plaid Cymru advocates bold policies for everyone, which will make Wales a good place to grow old and to grow up.

Budget Resolutions

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

It is a pleasure to follow my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Virginia Crosbie). Unfortunately, we do not quite see eye to eye on everything, but it was a pleasure to hear her speak.

For Wales there are three particular yawning funding gaps in this Budget. I will only refer to those three, although I could say a great deal more. First, the arrangements for replacing EU structural funds are—to be very kind—a bit unclear. That is a worry for marginalised communities, rural communities, small and medium-sized enterprises, and the third sector. What we do know, however, is that the replacement funds will fall well short of the £375 million that we were receiving every year. In fact, the figure that has been suggested is £120 million, not £375 million. To me, that sounds like not levelling up, but pushing down.

The EU funding has in the past supported skills development, business development, decarbonisation and much else. Skills development, of course, is a particular issue this afternoon. The Education Secretary referred to it, as did many of his colleagues. Those three apparently prime targets for this Government are unfortunately going to be neglected now that the funding will be reduced, not increased. To be clear, Wales won those funds from the EU because of our relative poverty. Our poverty puts us in the same category, unfortunately, as parts of post-1989 eastern Europe. That is where we stand economically. I am afraid that that grinding poverty remains. It has scarcely been relieved, yet this Government are cutting the relief that has been available to us—so much for their golden promises about life after Brexit.

My second point is about HS2. The spending review did not reclassify HS2 as an England-only scheme. Quite apart from the well-made arguments of English MPs against HS2 on environmental and other grounds, I have to point out that HS2 literally comes nowhere near Wales, yet, unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland, we are paying for it. Were we not paying for it and instead getting a Barnett consequential, we would have received about £5 billion, which would have gone some way to redressing the chronic underinvestment in our rail infrastructure.

I have said before in the House that Wales has 11% of the rail network, yet we receive 1% of the investment in that infrastructure—a point that really needs to be addressed. Even if we only received our Barnett consequential of infrastructure investment, it would be 5% rather than 1%. As it is, HS2 is expected to have a negative impact of about £150 million a year on the Welsh economy, even though we are paying for it. This will hit the south and the south-west of Wales particularly hard, while the projected benefits—in particular to the north-east of Wales—compared to the huge spending on HS2 are, to use one of the Prime Minister’s favourite words, piffling.

Let me turn to my third point. Members may have forgotten the legacy of the Welsh coal industry—an industry that powered so much development that benefited others elsewhere and provided some individuals with almost incalculable wealth, which was spent conspicuously on personal follies such as grandiose fantasy castles. Now the coal has long gone, disappearing on railway wagons down to the east or off on ships to all parts of the world. But other legacies remain: the wrecked health, the poverty and, conspicuously, the coal tips.

There are 2,456 coal tips in Wales, which tower over former mining communities. Most are quite stable—at present, at least—but 327 are classified as high risk, and one of those actually slipped earlier this year near Tylorstown, where my own grandfather was a collier in the ’20s. Others may slip, particularly bearing in mind the increased rainfall that is inevitable with climate change. The coal may have gone and the wealth may have gone, but responsibility for the tips is now devolved—we are picking up the mess—and we will try to make them safe. However, the failure to back a long-term solution for Wales’s coal tips could create an additional financial burden on the Welsh Government, and the Welsh budget, of about £60 million per year.

Those three points convince me that the contrast between the Government’s soaring rhetoric about their plans and the reality that we are facing is breathtaking. This is not a Budget that my party can welcome or support.

Children and Social Work Bill [Lords]

Hywel Williams Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Legislative Grand Committee: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 7th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Edward Timpson]

We have made it clear how, through the national transfer scheme, we want to ensure that we help the children we have identified as requiring help the most, including those who fall out of the Dublin scheme. We are trying to understand exactly what the capacity is in the system. I am not in a position to say any more than the Home Secretary has already said about the Government’s commitments, but we have clearly made a strong commitment to utilising any latent capacity in local authority children’s services, so that we do not miss an opportunity to help the children who need it.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

Would the Minister accept that many local authorities in Wales are anxious to play their part in helping refugees, and indeed have been doing so for a number of years? They include Plaid Cymru-led Ceredigion. It is important that the Government are aware of the capacity that exists outside the usually recognised areas.

[Edward Timpson]

My understanding is that Wales took part in the consultation and, as I said a few moments ago, I have written to the Children’s Commissioner for Wales to update her on the progress we are making. Of course we want to work with local authorities to ensure that as many children as possible can benefit, through our combined efforts.

Student Maintenance Grants

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Tuesday 19th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Carol Monaghan]

Once again, we hear that myth here in this House. There is work to be done on the numbers of young people going directly from school to university; none of us would deny that. However, in Scotland young people have many more pathways to access university. If we look at children coming through further education colleges, we see that the number of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds is significantly higher in Scotland than in the rest of the UK.

May I return to those young people and their parents? Eventually the chat turns to logistics and how they will be able to afford higher education. We have to go into the detail. Parents are usually full of pride—often the child is the first in the family even to think about going to university. Explaining that in Scotland tuition is free makes a huge difference, but the parents still have to weigh things up. They have been expecting a new breadwinner, contributing to the household. They have been expecting their daughter or son’s Saturday job to become their full-time career. Instead, the financial burden on the family stretches on.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

My constituent Nathan Haley is an English student studying in Wales. He already faces debts of £36,000 in tuition fees and expects that to rise to £65,000 if the proposal goes through. Does the hon. Lady think that will encourage him to pursue a career path into teaching?

[Carol Monaghan]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. The barrier becomes insurmountable for such young people. I was one of five who all managed to go to university and got grants throughout that time. For my family it would have been impossible for us to access a university education.

Being able to say to worried parents, “Yes, there is some support available. Yes, you will be able to apply for financial help” makes a massive difference to the decisions the family will make. When there is less family support, the financial support offered by a grant becomes a lifeline. Students can of course apply for loans to support them through their course, and many do, but we have to understand that loans are not viewed the same by children from different backgrounds. For families living under the constant threat of debt, for whom life is a continual battle to survive between meagre wage packets, the decision to take out a loan, incurring further debt, is extremely difficult, and often it is one that they just cannot take.

Careers Advice (14 to 19-Year-Olds)

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Wednesday 25th February 2015 Westminster Hall

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Hywel Williams (in the Chair)]

Order. I hope to start the wind-ups at 10.40 am. There are four Members seeking to catch my eye, so I appeal to hon. Members to limit their remarks to about seven or eight minutes. I am not imposing a time limit, as such, but if we all discipline ourselves, everyone will be able to get in.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Wright]

The hon. Gentleman will understand that we want a universal and properly resourced careers service that is staffed by committed and professional people with the necessary breadth of knowledge and experience to be able to say, “This is what the future looks like. The potential for you, as a young person, is huge. This is what’s on offer. Let me guide you through it.” That is not happening at the moment. I have six specific, brief points.

[Hywel Williams (in the Chair)]

Brief.

[Mr Wright]

I will be brief, I promise. First, this debate is about 14-to-19 careers advice, but providing appropriate careers advice and information about the future world of work needs to come at an even younger age. We have a pressing need to encourage more women into engineering, but all the evidence suggests that girls are put off or are pushed into gender stereotypes or pigeonholes at primary school. Encouraging and motivating eight, nine and 10-year-olds is a vital prerequisite to good engagement and effective careers guidance for 14 to 19-year-olds. What is the Minister doing on that?

Secondly, work experience is not given the importance that it deserves, and young people from families who do not have connections at the golf club, or whatever, will miss out. I was lucky, because I had two weeks at a firm of solicitors when I was 16. Those two weeks were invaluable in convincing me that there was no way on God’s holy earth that I was going to have a career in law, but being able to dip a toe in the water and being able to try different things is important. The Government need to recognise that and ensure that work experience is given more priority.

Thirdly, as the hon. Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) mentioned, destination data and employment and training routes for young people should be considered a key part of school reporting and evaluation, and they should even form part of the remuneration packages of the head teacher and senior school management. We should ensure that a wide and impartial range of advice is given, rather than pushing pupils towards a certain end, but that is not happening at the moment.

Fourthly, face-to-face guidance is effective and wanted by young people. Online research is valuable, but it should not be seen as a substitute for face-to-face discussions, particularly with professionals. The Government need to address that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

rose—

[Hywel Williams (in the Chair)]

Order. We have two further speakers wishing to catch my eye, and we have seven minutes, so please do the maths yourselves.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

Thank you for fitting me in, Mr Williams. I am afraid I was not originally down to speak because I was chairing the Education Committee this morning.

Careers advice and guidance is such an important topic. The Select Committee produced a report. People are listening to thoughtful speeches from many colleagues, but the heart of the problem is a simple one. It does not come out in myriad reports that have been produced on the subject, or indeed in enough speeches given by colleagues in the Chamber. The problem is that there are insufficient incentives for schools to take the matter seriously. That is why 80% of them do not. It is simple: they do not have to take it seriously. No one loses their job and no one gets fired or publicly humiliated for failing to do it properly, but they do if five good GCSEs are not achieved. We therefore have to change the accountability regime and have a high-stakes environment in which someone very easily gets publicly humiliated or sacked. That is the central problem.

We need a better balance—perhaps a nudge that does not simply add further burdens on leaders within schools and colleges, but addresses the central problem. The Committee did not have any perfect solutions, but we said—I will say this to the Minister—that schools should at least be made to publish their careers plan, so that parents and employers can have a look at it. Ofsted could check in advance. Hard-working Ministers could sit in Whitehall, as I know my right hon. Friend the Minister for Schools often does late at night, and look at it on the website.

The Government helped to fund a quality in careers standard for schools. It exists, so we can make schools work towards it and keep to it. I know it is bureaucratic—a bit input-esque—but we have not got great destinations data yet and we do not have another solution, so we have to give it a nudge. Let us not have any more reports from the alphabet soup of organisations. Teach First has done one this week that has some good stuff in it, but the central issue is that schools are not incentivised to take the matter seriously, and they have perverse incentives such as filling their sixth-form places, which means they will not even let colleges in.

Let us address the incentives, get the framework right, stop faffing around with all the other talk, and we could make a real difference to the lives of children. It is worth looking at what happened under the previous Secretary of State, who, it is fair to say, was pretty dismissive of this agenda, but he was not dismissive of the need to raise standards in schools, to challenge the low standards that prevailed for too long, and to put in place a pressure on the system to get people to sit for qualifications and do a curriculum and syllabuses for exams that matter to people and were of some value. That is already starting to pay off. Combined with an economic plan that focuses on enterprise and growth, we see transformations.

I am sad to say that for those who are trying to be fair-minded, those transformations do not get properly reflected in speeches by Opposition Members. I admire enormously the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), as I do all the Opposition Members in the Chamber, but he does not mention that youth unemployment in his constituency has gone from more than 1,000 when the Labour party left office—there were more than 1,000 young people in his constituency who were scarred for life by unemployment, because we know that youth unemployment scars people for life—to 425 today. Similarly, in Hartlepool, about 600 young people’s lives have been transformed by a Government who are delivering and not just talking. The youth unemployment figure there has gone from 1,200 to 600, so another 600 young people have had their lives turned round. In south Hackney, the youth unemployment figure is down from 750 when Labour left office—750 young people just sitting there—to 250 today. That is all great news.

[Hywel Williams (in the Chair)]

Order. This debate is about careers advice and not about unemployment among young people.

Living Wage

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Thursday 6th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

Thank you for calling me, Madam Deputy Speaker; I will be quick.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman), and I agree with a great deal of what he said. I congratulate the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White) on securing this debate. It is right that we should be debating this matter in living wage week. I launched my party’s policy on raising the minimum wage in line with the living wage in September, and Plaid Cymru was recently awarded living wage employer status.

The scale of the problem of low wages is, of course, enormous. The number of people on incomes below the living wage in Wales is 261,000, which is 24% of the population, as compared with 22% for the UK in general. Wales is just a little behind Northern Ireland, at 27%, the north-east of England, at 25%, and Yorkshire and the Humber, at 25%, and we are equal to the east midlands, at 24%. By contrast, 17% of the population in London live below the living wage, while in the south-east the figure is 18%. That means that the percentage in Wales is a third higher than in the most prosperous part of the UK. Among local authorities in Wales—I am sure the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen) will be interested in this—32% of the population of Conwy and Powys live below the living wage, which is nearly a third of the population, while the figure is 30% in Monmouthshire and 29% for Gwynedd, my local authority. That contrasts with Cardiff, where it is 18%, which is equal to the proportion in London and the south-east.

Around a quarter of people in Wales, and more in my constituency, are in low-paid work. Establishing the living wage would be a great benefit to them. [Interruption.] Pardon me for coughing. The UK rate of low pay, at 22%, is a scandal in one of the world’s wealthiest countries and points to the inequality of distribution of income across the UK. [Interruption.] Pardon me. The UK is one of the most unequal countries in the world, and certainly in the European Union. Gross value added per head in inner-London west is 12 times what it is in west Wales and the valleys. That is the scale of the contrast, but that unenviable pattern is also repeated within Wales. Rates of low pay in Cardiff are less than two thirds what they are in adjacent areas. There are areas close to Cardiff to which one can easily travel within less than an hour where a large proportion of people are on low pay.

[Albert Owen]

I am being helpful by intervening on the hon. Gentleman, who may want a drink of water. He is quite right about periphery areas in the United Kingdom suffering from this problem. Does he agree that there should be a concentration of effort on the low-paid areas? One way for the Government to do that—I make an appeal that I have made regularly—is to move quality Government jobs to periphery areas to help to boost those economies.

[Hywel Williams]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman, but we also need to support small businesses, particularly in rural Wales, which are after all the engine of economic prosperity in such areas.

Some calculations—they are not mine, but those of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission—have shown that the current proposals will not have a huge effect on the percentage of people on very low pay. I note that the Labour party has said that the minimum wage should be £8 by 2020, which is unambitious to say the least.

Raising the minimum wage so that it is in line with the living wage makes economic sense. The Treasury currently subsidises businesses for paying poverty wages by topping up wages with tax credits. The model of having very low wages topped up the Government is unsustainable in the long term, and we should try to move away from it. After all, if the minimum wage was raised to the level of the living wage, the Treasury would be better off by not having to pay tax credits. Landman Economics calculates that that amount would be £1.5 billion per annum. That money should be reinvested in support for further employment. On the basis of some of the figures I have seen, reinvesting that amount would—using a multiplier of 0.9—provide 2,475 new jobs in Wales. Paying the living wage would therefore save the Government money, and investing that money would create more jobs and higher tax receipts.

I said earlier that businesses, particularly small businesses, have concerns about the living wage, as they did before the introduction of the minimum wage. They are concerned that business costs will go up, and that employment will go down. In the worst-case scenarios in analyses that I have seen, 160,000 jobs might be lost across the UK, including 8,000 in Wales. However, we must see that in the context of the growth in private sector jobs during the past three and a half years of fairly sluggish growth. In Wales, we have had 100,000 extra jobs. We might lose 8,000 jobs, but that has to be seen in the context of the large growth in private sector jobs.

There are other answers, of which the most obvious is economic growth. The UK Government say that the UK economy is growing—in difficult circumstances, I concede—and I think that it is fair, in times of growth, for the working poor to be among the first to benefit. I strongly believe that the concerns of businesses need to be addressed. My party’s policy includes support for small businesses, including through business rate relief, and an increase in local public procurement. We reckon it would create about 50,000 jobs if local authorities bought more cleverly and more locally. We also want a business bank for Wales to ensure that lending is more effective, and a private sector-led industrial development authority.

I want to refer in passing to a policy that has been available for a long time. In 2008, ECOFIN decided it was permissible to reduce VAT in certain labour-intensive sectors. Small businesses such as tourism and the building industry in my constituency would certainly benefit from a reduction in VAT to the 5% level that is allowed. I will not pursue that point now, but it is clearly one answer to the problems that small businesses face.

Lastly, increasing the purchasing power of lower-paid workers would be very good for local businesses. If people have an increase in their wages, they tend to spend the money locally, and there is a multiplier effect when such money circulates and multiplies. Plaid’s focus is on a Welsh economic recovery driven by investment and the creation of jobs that pay enough for people to live on. We will certainly be fighting for that between now and May.

Voter Registration

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd October 2014 Westminster Hall

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Hywel Williams (in the Chair)]

Order. I remind the two remaining Back-Bench Members who wish to speak that we will start the wind-ups at 10.30 am. It would be a kindness if the time could be shared evenly. I call Jim Shannon.

--- Later in debate ---

[Hywel Williams (in the Chair)]

I call Chris Evans.