Labour leadership race — By Daran Hill on October 27, 2009 4:01 pm
WITH all three candidates heading to North Wales today for the hustings this evening, Carwyn Jones has taken the opportunity to set out more clearly his vision for economic development in Wales.
Once more using the “It’s time to get real” mantra, he is currently visiting Glyndwr University in Wrexham where he has just said: “I want to help create a dynamic economy, growing well-paid jobs and providing apprenticeships with meaningful training, with a renewed focus on modernising Welsh manufacturing. Unlike the Tories, I don’t want Wales to have an inward investment strategy based on cheap labour. I know Wales needs to do better in terms of business activity. I want to build a stronger private sector and that needs to happen by increasing the private sector, not decreasing the public sector.”
On his specific economic proposals, Carwyn has pledge to build on the strength of what he describes Wales’ ‘anchor companies’ to attract new investment. He defines anchor companies as larger businesses like Corus, British Gas, Airbus, BT, General Dynamics and the utilities. The proposals he set out today included:
Utilising anchor companies as a basis for attracting more business and more investment;
Helping them cooperate with higher education on research and development, and with further education colleges on skills and training;
Helping smaller Welsh companies become part of their supply chains, as Airbus is doing throughout North Wales and EADS is doing in Newport and across Wales;
Using anchor companies as the basis for targeting inward investment in their sectors, creating more and stronger clusters in Wales, building on successes such as the optoelectronics sector around St Asaph;
Defending high-end aerospace and defence investments that are already present in Wales or are due to come to Wales, such as the Defence Training Academy, “threatened by the Liberal Democrats, the Tories and by some in Plaid Cymru”;
Providing a greater emphasis on the digital economy in Wales, with a proper dialogue with the private sector to encourage them to see Wales as a basis for the development of advanced telecommunications to attract more companies here from the M25 area;
Growing new indigenous businesses by harnessing creativity and enterprise;
Encouraging universities to share commercial experience;
Winning more business for Welsh businesses and Welsh workers through specifying community benefits in Welsh public sector contracts;
Promoting socially responsible enterprise, business responsibility and ethics;
Building on mutuals and not-for-profit social enterprises like the Principality and Glas Cymru;
Continuing to support and encourage the co-operative model for doing business;
Repatriating the Bank of Wales brand and using it to set up a new form of citizen’s bank, not for profit, working with credit unions to unlock sensible lending and saving in Wales;
Increasing the number of apprenticeships, with better employer engagement on the way that such programmes are devised;
Offering action to address unnecessary competition between FE colleges and schools, freeing resources to tackle those most likely to become individuals not in education, employment or training;
Providing action to address take-up and provision of key school subjects such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics and modern languages; and
Working with the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) on collaborative measures to bring those economically inactive back into work.
This list is matched and complimented by the ideas and proposals of the other two candidates too, when it comes to issues of the economy and skills.
In her manifesto, Edwina Hart sets out her vision for the economy and jobs in the first section. She believes that “As the British economy begins to come out of recession, Wales is well placed to take advantage of the up-turn.” She specifically pledges her government would:
Take a long, hard look at resources devoted to economic development; to make sure that they are ready to be deployed to meet the future needs of our economy. That means being willing to make a radical reappraisal of some of the ways in which government has organised itself in this field, to make sure that we get the best possible return on the investment we make;
Ensuring the ‘Team Wales’ or social partnership model is the basis of future policy and that firms supported by WAG should be full members of the Welsh social partnership approach – including committing themselves to good employment practices, ensuring that staff have opportunities to keep skills up-to-date and investing in ways which meet Welsh principles of environmental sustainability and corporate responsibility;
Moving away from a grant culture, in which companies were persuaded to come to Wales simply because they were offered a greater subsidy than elsewhere, and instead Wales should “mobilise a much more rounded sense of what Wales has to put on the table” so that “in future financial assistance will be only one strand in the package we offer”;
Ramping up the help we already provide to develop indigenous enterprises, especially those which wish to work alongside our public services through co-operative and not-for-profit governance models;
Developing a more varied and innovative approach to economic development through encouraging more co-operatives, social enterprises and not-for-profit models;
Setting up a new Citizens’ Bank for Wales, possibly working on a not-for-profit basis, alongside credit unions and other community-based programmes;
Developing a new alignment between economic development in Wales and our institutions of higher education;
Taking a sectoral approach to economic development, especially in manufacturing and technology, where Wales already has both industrial and R&D strengths;
Setting up a new, permanent Social Partnership, to bring together all the organisations which can make a difference, and help us overcome the problems which the recession will leave behind;
Supporting young people, which “will be the first item on the agenda of the first Social Summit which will happen when I am First Minister”; and
Ensuring that economic development benefit is derived from new digital media.
Huw Lewis matches many of these specific pledges in his policy programme for the economy too, which is also placed in the context of an economy emerging from recession with a new confidence. He pledges to:
Build on the success of schemes like ProAct and ReAct;
Construct a codified, binding Social Partnership which brings unions, government and business together and builds on the Welsh Economic Summits;
Transform local economies into regional powerhouses, by developing networks around connected universities, bringing together business, social enterprise and the voluntary sector;
Develop a modern manufacturing strategy, which recognises the importance of research and development, allowing us to truly capitalise on the shift to a low-carbon global economy through targeted investment in science and technology;
Establish a new Welsh Career Ladder Scheme that allows us to re-connect aspiration with realisation and is based on the principle of what you know, not who you know;
Work with employers and trade unions to develop a “good work guarantee” for the Welsh workforce – this should be seen as a hard-nosed economic imperative that will marry the twin aims of greater efficiency and equality; and
Ensure no adult is left behind by guaranteeing equal access to meaningful training for those already of working age, who are struggling to re-enter the labour market.
So no shortage of ideas from any of them.
Tags: Carwyn Jones, Economy, Edwina Hart, Huw Lewis, Labour leadership race
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