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Welsh Affairs

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies), if only because it means that he has finished ranting. I enjoyed the Secretary of State’s opening remarks and especially appreciated his emphasis on the need to tackle climate change. I agree with that priority, so I take this opportunity to recommend to the Wales Office team my private Member’s Bill, which would enable local planning authorities to set higher standards for energy efficiency and low carbon energy sources in their development plans than those in building regulations. The Bill is supported by the Welsh Local Government Association and 270 Members. I am sure that when my right hon. and hon. Friends in the Wales Office have studied it they, too, will be enthusiastic supporters. Perhaps they could have a word with their colleagues at the Department for Communities and Local Government and persuade them to give the Bill a fair wind from now on. On St. David’s day, 2007, it is appropriate to look back over the decade since the Labour Government came to power. It is absolutely true, as the Secretary of State said, that an enormous amount has been achieved that has markedly improved the lives of the people of Wales, especially the least well off. Today, my constituency of Gower is a different place from what it was in 1997, when it suffered the scourge of high unemployment, especially among the young, scandalously low rates of pay and acute poverty for a fair proportion of older constituents, and when there was a sense, especially in the old mining and steel villages, of being in an irreversible downward spiral. That has all changed. People’s lives have improved, thanks in no small part to the actions of the Labour Government and the Welsh Assembly Government. However, I do not want simply to trumpet those successes.