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UK Manufacturing

I am glad that we have the opportunity to discuss such an important subject. I welcome, as well as the Minister, his new colleague from Wales, the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas). I know that he will be very helpful in providing additional assistance to manufacturing. It is easy, when faced with the press, to focus only the negative. I should like briefly to make a couple of positive points about my constituency. We are pleased to welcome the company Thales, which will provide approximately 80 jobs by the autumn in manufacturing an impressive vehicle, for which is there is much demand nationally. That is a great story. We also have the Proact scheme, which is working well with our local college, Coleg Sir Gâr, and helping 12 local companies to use time productively. If those companies cannot sell as many products, and therefore cannot do as much manufacturing, they can at least upskill the workers. We should not only improve workers' skills for an upturn in the economy, but invest in infrastructure. As the Minister explained, and as my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich, West (Mr. Bailey) said, programmes for schools and hospitals help steel and other manufacturing industries, which are supplying all the good construction work, but we must also examine the infrastructure that we need for our industry. We are lucky in my constituency to have rail and the M4, which means that we have excellent manufacturing sites within a few minutes of road and rail. We should look at manufacturing throughout the UK, especially in areas such as south-west Wales where every job is valued. We should not simply focus on one or two areas, where perhaps there is a greater concentration. We need the investment as much as anywhere else. I want to consider the more complex issue of investment in our sewerage infrastructure. It is easy to understand how money for schools and hospitals is channelled—it goes via the Welsh Assembly and county councils; we know what we are doing. However, we have recently had a consultation about water pricing, which arose because of the need for water companies throughout the UK to examine investment in the infrastructure. That has affected manufacturing industry in my area because the lack of investment in sewerage means that we have a planning restriction on expanding our factories. The water companies have to raise the money from individual domestic users and there is great variation throughout the country. For example, in south-west England, a huge effort is made to keep the beaches clean and that has a knock-on effect on the domestic price. We need to consider how we right that infrastructure to ensure that no area is disadvantaged and in a position whereby it cannot build factories because the necessary investment has not been made in bringing sewerage up to the required standard. That burden should not fall only on the domestic consumer. I should also like to bring to the Minister's attention the matter of energy prices. We know that worldwide oil prices have been on the G8 agenda. The high-energy industries are represented in my area by Corus, and I should like to remind the Minister that the town of Llanelli is nicknamed "Tinopolis", because Corus produces tinplate there. That product is very much in demand at the moment, and we are "lucky" that there is still a strong market for tins and cans for food and drink. However, we feel that we are perched perilously on a knife-edge, and that every cost increase makes an enormous difference to our ability to compete across the world. We need to provide companies with certainty and stability and to help them to plan for their energy costs. That is undoubtedly a great worry for them when they are trying to do their long-term planning. I stress to the Minister the absolute urgency involved in getting that right, and in getting guarantees not only on immediate pricing but in relation to our investment in providing for future energy supplies so that we can become less reliant on imports. In that context, I reiterate that we cannot discount the importance of coal. Much as we might like to reach a point at which we did not have to use a single carbon product, that is not the reality, given that about 70 per cent. of our electricity currently comes from carbon products. We need to think carefully about whether we would not be better off making a considerable investment in coal rather than importing oil. Clean coal technology is a key part of that question. If we could get ahead in that game and produce the necessary materials and technology, we could sell them to the world rather than allowing others to overtake us. We have an ideal opportunity to lead the world in that area.